[ WP ] Prison overcrowding has become a serious , world-wide problem . A solution must arise .

It was called “ The Ark Project ”. 
 
 At least, that was the name that the news and social media had come up with, once they ’ d stuck their collective noses into the affairs of the World Government. 
 
 The World Government—an evolution of the now defunct U.N.—wasn ’ t really the world government, of course. Everyone knew that. While there were some countries that weren ’ t around anymore—and almost all of them because they ’ d been either absorbed by larger countries, or had merged to become newer countries—there were still more than a dozen ’ s dozen still around, and they were all still independent, sovereign nations. 
 
 What the World Government was, was something akin to the world equivalent of what had once been the Congress in the United States, before its citizens, finally fed up with the political corruption that had run so rampant that it was openly talked about, even in the news media, had all but revolted, refusing to support their congressional appointees, and calling for its abolishment. 
 
 Not that the media had cared at all about that tidbit of history. They were much more interested in the particulars of the Ark Project, and in trying to figure out just why it was that the World Government had been so secretive about it. To the media, secrets were meant to be exposed, especially if they were government secrets, and since they were World Government secrets, the media believed that there shouldn ’ t be any secrets they weren ’ t privy to. 
 
 It didn ’ t take too long before the major outlines of the Ark Project were brought to light; it wasn ’ t a huge secret that prison over-crowding was becoming a problem the world ‘ round, that many of the prisons—even the low security ones—were seriously overcrowded, in some cases so much so that the prisoners slept in shifts, so that it could be said that each prisoner had a bed to sleep in. 
 
 The Ark Project, the media managed to uncover, was an idea conceived during a number of meetings of the World Government, in order to discuss, and then come up with a solution, to the world ’ s prison overcrowding situation. The solution, the outline identified, was two-fold: the first was to find a way to make productive assets of the prisoners, rather than keep them contained in prisons in almost inhumane conditions, and the second was to use the volunteer prisoners in a colonization project. There had been a few manned trips to Mars already, and there were still few moons orbiting Saturn and Jupiter that were candidates for remote stations to be put together, and so it was decided that the volunteer prisoners would be the ‘ test subjects ’ to build those stations. 
 
 The news was met with a considerable amount of positive fanfare. 
 
 Once the news of the Ark Project was leaked, the project—now unfettered—seemed to proceed at an almost frenetic pace, and inside of a year the last of the first wave of volunteer prisoners—totaling nearly a hundred thousand from just about every corner of the world—had been put into cryogenic sleep and shuttled up into high earth orbit to wait for the space engines, as they were known, to fire up and take the cargo pods on their way to their destinations. Briefly, it was wondered, ‘ why so many prisoner volunteers? ’, but the matter had been explained away that the building of the remote space stations would take a considerable amount of time and there was no way to replace someone who was accidentally injured or killed. 
 
 The truth of the matter—that the prisoners weren ’ t really going to Jupiter- or Saturn- to build remote space stations—and that they were actually simply being fired off into the sun—wouldn ’ t be discovered for nearly another century… 

