The high-profile "hate crime" case involving Rutgers roommates, one of whom was meek, bespectacled, and gay, the other rich, rakish, and reputedly arrogant is about to reach a climax. Here are the broad outlines of the story.

The two young freshly minted freshman co-existed without open rancor but rarely spoke a word to each other. Tyler Clementi would invite a gay lover to the room on occasion and ask his roommate to leave them alone. Dharun Ravi obliged. But Ravi's webcam captured one of these trysts and, upon discovering the video, he foolishly tweeted about it.

In all probability, had Clementi not jumped off the George Washington Bridge one day nothing more would ever have come of it. Had Ravi not made a video of his roommate's gay sexual encounter and put it out on the Internet, there would be alleged crime and no trial.

But both things happened. The result is that Clementi is dead and Ravi is facing the possibility of a ten-year prison sentence. Or he could be deported: both Ravi's parents were born in India. Ravi's younger brother is the only American citizen in the family.

America's prisons are bulging at the seams. Adam Gopnik ("The Caging of America," The New Yorker, January 30, 2012) writes, "One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades.."

In fact, there are currently more individuals incarcerated or under "correctional supervision" in the US prison system than there were in Stalin's gulags, more per capita than in any other country in the world. Few prison inmates have ever committed a violent crime. Many become victims of violence while in prison (more than 70,000 prisoners are raped each year in the U.S.).

Texas alone has sentenced over 400 teenagers to life in prison. Using comparative data from high income OECD countries, the natural rate of incarceration for affluent societies with a per capita GDP similar to ours is around 100 per 100,000. In the United States, it is now more than 7 times that rate. It all happened in the span of 30 years: between 1980 and 2010, the number tripled to 731 per 100,000.

Most Americans are unaware that prisons are big business. Most of know very little about the quarantined, walled-off, violent world that is the U.S. prison system. Most of us don't want to know. Few have any idea that we are in the advanced stages of privatizing prisons and prison services and that it's become a major growth industry in this country.

Writes Gopnik: "…a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men…".

Will Dharun Ravi be one of the condemned who gets flushed into the teeming prison system? We'll soon know. Should he be? No, but...

Assuming the evidence for convicting Dharun Ravi of "bias intimidation" (a limpid and ambiguous euphemism if ever there was one) is overwhelming, Ravi still didn't kill Clementi (or will his death) and in the absence of anything (not even a suicide note) linking Ravi's dickish behavior to Clementi's final act there's no way to connect the two. But there IS - or ought to be - an alternative to prison or letting Ravi off scot-free.

How about some serious, extended community service (in lieu of prison time)? I'm talking about an actual job doing things that most privileged kids at Ivy Colleges never dream of doing? What if Ravi were given a choice: enlist in the Army or work in some low-level city job (parks, streets, water and sewer, whatever) for minimum wage for, say, five years? What if Ravi were sentenced to live in low-rent housing, pay his own room and board, and deprived of all parental subsidy during the time he was serving his "sentence"?

Most criminals are not students at Dartmouth. Most have a less auspicious start in life. What about them? Just turn the other cheek? No, but...

What if we looked for better, smarter, cheaper ways of making crime not pay? What if we made non-violent criminals (the vast majority) pay for the damage they've done without making taxpayers pay for housing and feeding bad actors who could and should be doing an honest day's work? What if we gave them a choice? Work at a court-ordered job while staying out of trouble long enough to repay your debt to society or face the drudgery and danger of incarceration.

Case closed.