Here’s a new twist on outsourcing: housing U.S. inmates in Mexican prisons.

This week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested that the state might outsource incarceration by opening prisons in Mexico in order to house jailed undocumented immigrants.

Sfgate.com reports the governor saying, “We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. … And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons.”

Of the state’s 171,000 prisoners, approximately 19,000 are illegal immigrants. The state spends more than $8 billion a year on the prison system. Schwarzenegger predicted housing prisoners in Mexico instead of California would save the state $1 billion that could be spent on higher education.

The idea has a certain logic: Under the terms of the 1977 Prisoner Transfer Treaty between the United States and Mexico, United States prisoners in Mexican jails and Mexican prisoners in United States jails may choose to serve their sentences in their home countries.

But there’s a definite taint of “let’s send the illegals back where they came from” anti-immigrant sentiment in the governor’s comment. Beyond that, it’s just a very odd idea. When one breaks the law within a given set of borders, it makes sense to be punished within the limits of that same country. Each country has its own philosophy of crime and punishment. Mexico tends to have longer waits for sentencing, for instance, but shorter prison terms.

And though there’s no yelp.com for prisons around the world, it’s pretty clear that Mexican prisons aren’t known to be models of modern and humane incarceration.

An analysis of Mexican prison conditions (drawing from The Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Factbook) concludes that “overcrowding of prisons is chronic. Mistreatment of prisoners, the lack of trained guards, and inadequate sanitary facilities compound the problem. The United States Department of State’s country reports on human rights practices for 1992 and 1993 state that an entrenched system of corruption undermines prison authority and contributes to abuses. Authority frequently is exercised by prisoners, displacing prison officials. Violent confrontations, often linked to drug trafficking, are common between rival prison groups.

In fact, just this week, a prison riot in the Mexican state of Durango left 23 inmates dead.

Female inmates in Mexican prisons are allowed to have their children under 5 live with them in prison. Photo: Caroline Bennett

Not that Mexico suffers in every prison-related comparison. The U.S. enjoys the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. And Mexico has some prison policies that are more humane than those in the U.S. For example, women inmates are allowed to have their children under 5 live with them in prison. The Huffington Post recently published a photo essay on Mexican Prison Life: Babies Behind Bars.

Even if the prisons in Mexico were built and run by the U.S., Schwarzenegger ‘s idea would still be problematic. Donald Specter, director of the Prison Law Office, said it “would be like the state of California having a separate island of its own government in Mexico. It just seems like that would be impossible.”

The not-so-sweet spot where privatization meets outsourcing

Schwarzenegger’s suggestion sits at the intersection of privatization and outsourcing. Earlier this month, our my-governor-can-beat-up-your-governor called for allowing private companies to compete with state-run prisons, which he claims would save billions of dollars.

And beyond privatization, it seems that in this era of free trade in a global economy, everything’s on the table for possible outsourcing: manufacturing, telephone help centers, retirement, medical care, and now, imprisonment.

What’s next—the outsourcing of education? Maybe public school would be more viable if you only had to pay teachers a few dollars an hour. And how about outsourcing funeral services? We could send our loved ones abroad for cut-rate embalming, Fed Ex them back to the local cemetery, then hire illegal immigrants to help us mourn.

Here’s what we know for sure: the number of U.S. citizens moving abroad has exploded in the last 50 years. Seems that people want to bust out of provinciality in the same way prisoners want to bust out of jail.

• Between 1966 – 1996 the number of Americans living abroad quadrupled, from 70,000 in 1966 to between 3 and 4 million in 1996 (Source: U.S. State Dept.).
• Ten years later, in 2006, estimates were closer to 6 million.

But the word estimate is key here.

When I wrote Living Abroad on Costa Rica, I had the devil of time finding a reliable number for how many Americans made that very livable Central American country their home.

Estimates ranged from 200,000 to almost four times that, but there didn’t seem to be any credible sources with accurate numbers.

It’s just as hard, if not more so, to nail down the number of Americans living abroad in general.

God knows the U.S. government has tried. In 2004 the Census Department did what they called an Overseas Enumeration Test, attempting to count the number of Americans living in Kuwait, Mexico, and France. The program was a dismal failure. In Mexico, for example—where the estimates of American expats ranges from 300,000 (according the the US State Dept.) to over a million (according to groups representing Americans overseas) — only 250 people completed a census form! The response was also weak in France, where 2,600 people filled out a form of an estimated American population of 112,000.

Census official Louis Kincannon admitted that issues of confidentiality and taxation might be at play here. “There are people who have a disinclination to be identified to any government,” Kincannon said.

In other words: Those who want to lose themselves often don’t want to be found.

U.S. senior citizens living in Mexico should have their medical care covered by Medicare, says Paul Crist, a former senator’s aid who now lives in Puerto Vallarta. In the current debate over health care, Crist’s idea seems to be gaining ground.

Right now, retired U.S. citizens cannot claim Medicare benefits for treatment received in Mexico—or Costa Rica, or France, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter–even though they paid into the Medicare system throughout their working lives.

Crist, a former aid to Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., recently founded the non-profit Americans For Medicare In Mexico, which has lobbied 85 members in the U.S. Congress to get Medicare accepted south of the border.

Estimates of how many Americans live in Mexico (and abroad in general) vary, but the influential Association of Americans Resident Overseas puts the figure at 1,036,300. Crist says perhaps 200,000 of the Americans living in Mexico are eligible for Medicare, with about two-thirds of those seniors returning to the U.S. for medical treatment.

Not only would extending Medicare to Mexico be the right thing to do—if you pay into the system, you should receive the benefits—but Crist maintains in a Forbes article that such a program would also save the U.S. government a lot of money. Studies show that health care services are up to 70% less expensive in Mexico than in the U.S.

In Mexico, a visit to a doctor’s office often runs between $30 and $40, according to MedToGo, while a hospital room costs $90 to $100 a night. Besides private health care insurance, the Mexican Institute of Social Security (which goes by the Spanish initials IMSS) provides affordable, if basic, health insurance for all Mexican residents, regardless of nationality.

If Medicare were accepted in Mexico, says Crist, many of the American retirees currently flying back to the U.S. for expensive care would instead opt for treatment nearer their homes, cutting Medicare’s overall costs.

Program would need controls

An article in the Guadalajara Reporter notes that if Medicare is extended to Mexico, the program would only work with health care providers with Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation . The JCI provides a certification process for health care facilities throughout the world.

Crist says ten hospitals in Mexico already have JCI accreditation and another 23 are seeking approval. Among those already approved are the American British Padre Hospital and the Santa Fe Hospital in Mexico City and the Christus Muguerza Hospital and the Hospital Tec de Monterrey in Monterrey.

Mexico would no doubt welcome Medicare funding, just as they welcome the increase in medical tourism to their country.

Research done by the Association for Private Hospitals in Jalisco reveals that of the 21.5 million tourists who visited Mexico in 2006, about 160,000 – mostly Americans – came for medical attention.

Response from Congress

Crist say that response to his plan to bring Medicare to Mexico has been  “quite positive, especially on the House side.”

But Forbes reports that the offices of Reps. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and other sympathetic legislators have also told Crist that this year they have too much on their plate, and that it would be politically wiser to introduce a stand-alone Mexico-Medicare bill next year, separate from the complex health care reform package currently working its way through Capitol Hill.

There are also calls for an in-depth three-year Mexico-Medicare pilot project to determine whether Mexican health care meets Medicare’s quality standards and determine if the payment system is sufficiently free of fraud.

Photo by Linda Parker.

Moving abroad is better when it’s a choice, not a last resort. On May 19, the day this 32-year-old Republican wunderkind was to be sworn in for his fourth term, J.W. Lown resigned. The outgoing mayor of San Angelo, a sheep ranching town in West Texas, explained that he was in love with a man who was an illegal immigrant and that they were both heading for Mexico.

They moved abroad because there’s no legal way for them to remain together in the U.S. Unlike heterosexual couples, they can’t marry and then apply for a green card for the foreign spouse. An estimated 36,000 Americans are in the same boat, says Immigration Equality, an advocacy group.

“I left a home,” said Lown. “I left a ranch. I left a promising political career.” Lown, whose mother was Mexican, holds dual citizenship allowing him to live legally in Mexico.