WI: Alaska as a Penal Colony?

What if in the years following the purchase of Alaska, the US decided to use the massive territory as penal colony?
Is this plausible, and if so, what sort've social effects might this have on post-civil war US?
 
I joked about that last year in a thread about "imagine the most Radical Reconstruction possible":

***

Andrew Johnson is convicted in the Senate, Ben Wade becomes Acting POTUS, and the Radicals in Congress, emboldened, pass the "Thaddeus Stevens Memorial Land Reform Act." White southerners resisting the Act are sent to re-education camps in Alaska, which has just been acquired by the United States (now the *real* reason Charles Sumner, ordinarily an enemy to Johnson and Seward, helped them get the purchase through the Senate, becomes clear )... :p
 
I joked about that last year in a thread about "imagine the most Radical Reconstruction possible":

***

Andrew Johnson is convicted in the Senate, Ben Wade becomes Acting POTUS, and the Radicals in Congress, emboldened, pass the "Thaddeus Stevens Memorial Land Reform Act." White southerners resisting the Act are sent to re-education camps in Alaska, which has just been acquired by the United States (now the *real* reason Charles Sumner, ordinarily an enemy to Johnson and Seward, helped them get the purchase through the Senate, becomes clear )... :p

o h
m y
f * c k i n g
g o d
 
What if in the years following the purchase of Alaska, the US decided to use the massive territory as penal colony?
Is this plausible, and if so, what sort've social effects might this have on post-civil war US?
Or the Russians make it an Sibirian like extended penal colony: Dissidends, Circassians, rebel Polish, Jews, etc. But it's mit so bad, there are possibilities to escape and survive and substain yourself.
 
Top