Gaming Your Time Away

was watching Conan wed night and am still chuckling over the discussion between him and Ice-T...pretty funny interview from start to finish...covered lots of ground, going from style to beverages to sales technique to running a marathon to prison policy...evidently Ice-T is a hard core gamer, and floated the suggestion that they provide game consoles in prison as a method of reducing inmate conflict...after i stopped laughing, i started thinking it wasn't such a bad idea...he raised some good points:
help ease the tedium of serving your time
if you're busy gaming you aren't fighting or causing trouble

i thought about it some, and came up with several other upsides to this concept:
provides a safe outlet for anger
could use threat of bad games for punishment
prevent jailhouse apprenticing - if you are busy gaming or thinking about gaming, then you are too busy to learn new criminal skills

i'm sure with a little thought there are more reasons why this might be the solution to all the problems plaguing the penal system.