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Bukele Forces Criminals to Work and Pay Their Own WayEl Salvador's President Nayib Bukele is done letting thugs sit idle on the taxpayers' dime. In a bold new push, thousands of inmates are now sewing uniforms and producing goods for public use, repaying society for the chaos they caused.This is real accountability. No more free meals, free beds, and free time behind bars while law-abiding citizens foot the bill. Bukele's program, part of the "Zero Idleness" plan, has already put around 40 percent of the prison population to work. Eligible inmates stitch clothes for police, soldiers, schools, and hospitals. A day of honest labor knocks two days off their sentence, but the worst offenders like murderers and rapists stay locked down without the perks.The results speak for themselves. Bukele's crackdown on gangs turned El Salvador from one of the world's murder capitals into a far safer place. Homicides plummeted over 90 percent. Now he's making prisons pull their weight instead of draining the economy.Contrast that with soft-on-crime systems elsewhere, where inmates lounge around, victims get ignored, and working families pay through the nose. Bukele gets it: criminals owe a debt, and sitting on their hands doesn't settle it. Productive labor teaches discipline, cuts costs, and gives something back to the people they hurt.