Work release, and part of your pay goes to providing you a cell, and the rest goes to restoring your victims.
In theory, sure. In concept, I doubt it. Your going to get him (most likely) a minimum or near-minimum wage job. Let's say you get him a job at B-Bops for $9.50 an hour:
1. You hope he doesn't skip town.
2. He works 40 hours per week (unlikely) so he earns $380 per week before taxes. Let's say his take home pay is $340. He works 52 weeks per year and rakes in a whopping $17,680.
3. Based on my research, on average, it costs about $31,000 to house a prisoner. He's not in supermax or anything, so let's assume it costs 1/3 of that in his work release system.
4. So he pays $10,000 of his $17,680 to the state to house him which leaves him $7,680 to pay back to his victims.
5. How long are you going to keep him in this system? Indefinitely? Until he pays back his victims? He swindled about $1,200,000 (that we know of) out of people. So all we have to do is keep him in this work release program for 1,578 years and he's paid everyone back!
6. And this is assuming he won't scam or steal from anyone else while he is on this work release program.
Tell me how that system even remotely works?
Easy to throw a simplified solution out there when in reality, it just doesn't work. Send him to jail where he belongs for a a few years like the rest of the criminals.