Gallatin County is asking voters to approve a $20 million bond issue to build a new jail. Supporters argue that the present jail is overcrowded, and all too often we read of an nth-offense drunk driver cited and released because the jail is full.

Will a larger jail solve our problems? Here are some points to consider. Any penitentiary we have should be Spartan, sanitary, secure, and safe -- and not a place to which you’d want to return.

Of course a jail should be secure. If it can’t contain criminals it’s just a hotel. It should also prevent the infiltration of forbidden items or the conduct of illegal activity by those inside.

Prison should not be comfortable; it should provide only the bare minimum. Luxuries like television time could be earned through good behavior -- not a “right” granted to all.

Our soldiers in Iraq live under far worse conditions than felons in our local jail. They’re there voluntarily, in service to our country. An acquaintance pointed out that the existing jail provides nicer facilities than he experienced in Viet Nam as an airplane mechanic (not even on the front lines) -- and there’s still standing room in ours.

Another acquaintance suggests replacing the current facilities with two 40-bed bull pens. Prisoners would sleep in shifts. They’d strip the bed when they get up and take the sheets to the laundry, staffed by prisoners. Those going to bed would pick up clean sheets on the way. The experience would be so bad that word would quickly spread among the criminal class that Gallatin County is not a place to break the law.

Neither of these men are mere cranks. Both are very successful, well-functioning contributors to society. They have earned their success through hard work manipulating and increasing the value of real-world stuff (iron and agriculture).

The Federal Bureau of Prisons put the annual cost of imprisonment in a federal prison at $23,206 in 2004. Until the 1930s and ’40s, when labor unions raised a fuss, prisons were virtually self-supporting thanks to convict labor. Putting prisoners to work would help offset the cost of incarceration as well as extract some productive contribution, however modest, in return for their destructive actions. Plus, long days of hard work would likely lower the level of violence behind bars.

Granted, we’d no doubt hear from the concerned folks at the ACLU, upset over the violation of criminals’ human rights. But in violating the social contract and the rights of others, criminals forfeit some of their own rights -- most obviously their freedom.

A prison should be clean. With a large population living in close quarters, illness spreads easily. Disease should not be a mode of punishment. Nor do we want to release sick prisoners who’ve served their time into the general population.

Finally, a penitentiary should be safe for employees and for inmates. We don’t want to breed gangs and rapists. In principle, only those with death sentences should be killed in prison.

One intention of punishment is to raise the cost of breaking the law. The lower the cost, the more illegal activity we’ll likely see. There are several ways to increase this cost, but generally speaking the more rapid, certain, and severe the punishment for a crime (is perceived to be), the lower the rate at which such crimes occur.

Researchers David Boyum and Mark Kleiman argue that “certainty ... is more important than severity.... Long-term and probabilistic threats, even if the penalties involved are severe, may be less effective than short-term and virtually certain threats of much less drastic sanctions.”

The Department of Justice reports the percent of offenses “cleared by arrest”; that is, the offender was arrested, charged, and turned over to the courts for prosecution. In 2003, law enforcement agencies cleared 46.5 percent of violent crimes and only 16.4 percent of property crimes. These are the crimes that were reported, perhaps half of all those committed. Once a criminal gets to court, many get off on technicalities; for those who don’t, most plea bargain to reduce their sentences.

In any case, we are not adequately punishing law breakers. Gallatin County’s de facto “catch-and-release” policy sends drunk drivers and other criminals the wrong message: that the consequences for their socially exploitative actions are minimal.