. wrote:Sorry, No canon was given. And given that the books have dropped off the map, you may end up having to come up with your own Ideas...
As to the OP, I have a little bit about that in the First Responders books. It's not so fundamentally unchanged from today's system, but there is little to no capital punishment and courts are heavily influenced by the NAA, with special tri-national courts for criminals that act across national lines. A lot of focus is on rehabilitation, though the success of many programs is questionable. In many ways it mirrors the justice system of the EU.
It would be prohibitively expensive to ship prisoners off-planet. Remember that there is an international presence on the moon and Mars, plus space stations, but space travel is hardly commonplace.
The institutions, themselves, would be far more advanced, however. If you're looking at a Rifts game, prisons would be pretty high up there on the scale of buildings that survive the Dark Age. Also remember that it doesn't take long after the Coming of the Rifts for a thousand little fiefdoms and city-states to pop up, any number of which might utilize large superprisons, penal colonies, etc.