Well, speaking of public service and jail populations.

Where are some of our strongest young men? In jail, doing pushups. We have catastrophe after catastrophe and we frankly need them. I think they should be trained, after screening out violent ones, sex offenders, various others..well, that probably leaves out quite a few..in disaster response...everything from filling sandbags to setting up cooking units, to digging latrines, to using generators, extracting people from earthquake rubble (and shouldn't we have some good machinery other than bulldozers for that..something smaller like jaws of life as a robot).

This should be voluntary and they should be given a healthy amount of time reduced from their sentences. Particularly combined with the medical career training, they would be a very valuable and mobile source of help for all sorts of disasters, and it would turn public perception of ex-criminals around.

And many of course are male, and we don't know how to raise male teens for the most part I would say. Some of the violence and plain stupid behavior that gets someone arrested at 18 goes away at 30 but they are still serving a sentence...I am sure there are ways to break this cycle..again taking serious precautions, to me it would include the death penalty for some, to protect society against violence. mg