"Hey, This Prison Has A Really Nice Chapel"

It is fairly common, these days, to assign community service instead of jail time, and people often find it easy to serve their community by serving a church.  A few years back, we had a nice young man paint our church fence rather than spend a few days in the slammer after what we gather was a drunken brawl.  Well, okay, he painted half our fence and then disappeared, but we still appreciated the effort.

The Republic of Georgia has taken this a step further.  They are letting criminals serve out part of their sentence in monasteries.

By way of background, it helps to know that incarceration rates have been surging in Georgia, and jails are overcrowded.  So monasteries are handling the overflow.

Well, that just shows how backward those Georgians are.  In the US, we have figured out that prisons are a boon to the economy, which is why we build so many of them.