California has contracted out to ship 2,000 prisoners from its stuffed-to-the-gills system to privately operated out-of-state prisons. (My favorite detail: prisoners will still be expected to follow all California prison rules, so they won't be able to smoke, for instance.)

While the program is supposed to be voluntary, it's not very attractive (prisoners can't choose which facility to transfer to, and if they have to return to California while incarcerated, say for a funeral, they have to pay their own way), and thus far only 150 have volunteered. That hasn't stopped Scott Kernan, deputy director of the prison agency's division of adult institutions, from declaring that, "I'm firmly set in my belief that it's going to catch fire, and we're going to have more inmates wanting to go than we're going to select."

Expect that 1) the program will not catch fire, 2) the state will then begin to ship inmates out involuntarily, and 3) the whole affair will end up in court.

More surreal details here, including California Corrections Secretary Jim Tilton's warning that the state will have to stop accepting inmates by next summer if it can't find more bed space.