Not going to work due to how we set up society. Remember we consider the experience of hard labor building and/or joining the army to be a highly desirable reward. Getting the sign off on a penal legion won't change anything there other than making sure the criminals have weapons and know how to use them.
Particularly when Half Exiles do an important, reviled job that nobody wants to. Alternative punishments are not the solution here. Nor is the existence of half-exiles in itself a problem.
The specific problems are:
-Unreasonable lengths of sentencing. Most of these cases should be short, fixed terms, not indefinite terms with a review they cannot pass.
--Causes:
---Lack of central oversight.
---Cultural divergence
---Deliberate or ignorant misinterpretation of vague laws.
---Priests either in collusion with legal system or taking it upon themselves to excessively punish sinners.
---Elite evasion of system provokes excessive sentencing
--Solutions
---More roads and governor palaces
---Additional checks and balances for legal authority, including the practice of recusing for personal entanglement
---Push Influence into subordinates
---Further formalization of the Law
---Evolution of Justice value to keep up with Communalism, Elitism and Environmentalism values
-High recidivism. Those with proper sentence lengths tend to keep winding back in the same spot.
--Causes
---Long sentences eliminate non-criminal avenues of social climbing and success. While legal reform had closed off the deadly Catch 22 that used to be a major factor had died down with reform, this remains an issue.
---Corrective labor sentences not effective at rehabilitating offenders.
---System places deviant individuals in close concentration, reinforcing undesirable values.
---System disfavors maladapted refugees.
--Solutions
---Fix sentencing issues.
---Increase spiritual oversight and purification efforts
----Which requires further development of justice value to actually work rather than the priests screaming at them for being sinners.
---Tell me when the modern prison system figures this out
---Tell me when modern immigration systems figures this out
Obviously most of these can't really be implemented any time soon.
Some of these aren't really implemented even today.
We got a few:
-Clerks are an even split at the grassroots. We devour so much clerkpower that it doesn't matter whats in your underwear so much as whether you can math. Can't affect this.
-Hospitality services are female dominant. Traditionally feminine work in cooking, cleaning, and such means that on top of the prostitutes, women run the hotels, inns and restaurants most of the time. Building Baths and Gymnasiums may help as they fall under the same umbrella.
-Feminine crafts reinforce the stereotypes, in the weavers and the priesthood tied alchemists, possibly painters once we actually develop those. But any investment into Art Patronage just as likely promotes the potters and such.
-Priesthood has a slight bias towards women. But this doesn't really help because joining the priesthood for most people is a statement of forsaking your biological sex, i.e. they're female but not considered women.
Not as far as you might think. Once we integrate our subordinates we'd be nearing the province strain limits again, and we're facing SERIOUS transport strain.
China also organized their civilization along the courses of their great rivers, while Rome leaned upon the easy access to maritime traffic of the Mediterranean to ease things.
Grab a spade and a quill.
