If prison conditions are bad enough for someone to even consider that, that's a damning indictment of the prison system.

really? a cage is still a cage, no matter how nice. i'm not thirty yet; to live out more than half of my life in confinement, with no hope of release, sounds like a fate worse than death to me. if i were near the end of my life already and had a family, it might be a different calculation.