Making money while saving money!

So, here's a little idea for dealing with a few of our social ills at one time. Just let me know what you think of it.

Prisons are overcrowded, and most people are starting to learn that the "reform" method really isn't doing much to keep people from being repeat offenders. Furthermore, keeping prisoners for prolonged periods of time isn't particularly cost effective.

So, here's my solution.

Each prison rounds up their 16 most violent offenders. (Murderers, rapists, child molestors, drug dealers, armed robbers, etc.) They put them in an arena, with 1 machete, 1 net, one shield, and one chainsaw. The prisoners are not allowed out of the arena until there is only one guy left alive, and are encouraged to attack one another by the fact that there's a 60-minute clock, counting down to when the guards will shoot everyone if a clear winner has not been defined. That winner is returned to his cell, until the next week. The next week, the 15 next-meanest criminals, plus the winner from last week, return to the arena. Of course, this is on pay-per-view, but advertisers are free to get banner and commercial space for a good-sized fee. Considering that this would probably garner more viewers than UFC, you can imagine they'd pay quite a bit.

If a prisoner survives three weeks, he's headed to the playoffs.

We divide the country into regions, each containing sixteen prisons. (There may be many regions, I do not know how many prisons, exactly, there are.) During the playoffs (every 6 months), the prisons send their playoff contenders to a larger arena (since, feasibly, each prison could be sending as many as 8 prisoners to the playoffs every six months, although that's unlikely), where there's more weapons, and, presumably, a larger audience.

The winners of the regionals go to divisionals, etc. Finally, there will be one prisoner left alive at the end of the playoffs across all the prison systems. He gets a full presidential pardon, and deported to some country where psychos like that are revered, like Iran or Indonesia. (Or we just quietly kill them, but make them think they're working toward a pardon.)

So, we will generate millions of dollars in pay-per-view revenue.
We will save billions of dollars on the care and feeding of prisoners.
We will demonstrate to the world that we're not too keen on violent criminals. ('cept the alpha psycho who survives all this combat.)
We will demonstrate to people who are contemplating committing a crime that their survival chances are very, very low.
We will drop the recidivism rate to zero.

This will, of course, leave a lot of prison space open.
Remove the bars, make the cells into fairly comfortable little apartments, with some privacy. House the homeless there, while they look for jobs.

Show me where the problem with this is. Is it cruel and unsual punishment? No. Prisoners shiv each other all the time, this just makes it easier. Is it morally wrong? No. The possibility of a presidential pardon gives them hope that they would not have had otherwise. It may also give them fame, and, possibly, money, depending on how it works out. You have to believe that donations to their prison accounts will increase due to their popularity as they progress through the weeks, which would, in turn, allow them to buy all sorts of luxuries in there.

Would it be wrong to use that space to give comfortable, dry housing to the homeless (and give them a little food, too, I guess), while they look for jobs?

It's a brilliant plan. Let's see if our leaders have the balls to enact it.