America's Shame: Can Jim Webb Fix the Prison Gulag?

[G_j]

http://www.alternet.org/story/126897/america%27s_shame%3A_can_jim_webb_fix_the_prison_gulag/

America's Shame: Can Jim Webb Fix the Prison Gulag?
By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation. Posted February 16, 2009.

An unlikely senator takes on the cause of reforming America's overloaded and barbaric jails.

Our criminal justice system is broken. The U.S. represents 5 percent of the world's population but accounts for nearly 25 percent of its prison population. We are incarcerating at a record rate with one in 100 American adults now locked up -- 2.3 million people overall. As a New York Times editorial stated simply, "This country puts too many people behind bars for too long."

But people who have been fighting for reform for decades are seeing new openings for change. The fiscal crisis has state governors and legislators looking for more efficient and effective alternatives to spending $50 billion a year on incarceration. At the federal level, there is reason to believe that the Obama administration and a reinvigorated Department of Justice will take a hard look at the inequities of the criminal justice system and work for a smarter and more effective approach to public safety. Finally, there are Congressional leaders -- none more prominent than Senator Jim Webb -- who understand that the system isn't functioning as it should and there is an urgent need for reform.

Indeed advocates for reform couldn't ask for a better standard-bearer than Senator Webb. As a decorated former Marine and Reagan Administration official no one is going to slap him with the politically-dreaded "soft on crime" label that has stymied so many Democrats who have taken on this issue in the past. There is a "Nixon goes to China" quality to Webb's call for change -- a law and order man who described his reform effort as "an act not of weakness but of strength."

As a journalist Webb wrote on the need for reform after visiting Japanese prisons and seeing a fundamental fairness and effectiveness that he recognized as lacking in the U.S. criminal justice system. As a Senator he's held hearings which have highlighted racial disparities in sentencing, the staggering costs of incarceration and effective and cost-efficient alternatives, and a futile and racially biased drug policy.

..more..

[Warren DeMontague]

1. #1: End The Drug War. Legalize, Regulate, and Tax Marijuana. nt

[leftstreet]

2. K&R

[FKA MNChimpH8R]

3. Imprisoning people for smoking dope is fucking insane

and costs this country billions of dollars that could better be used just about anywhere else. I smoked dope regularly all the way through the University of Minnesota (summa cum laude/Phi Beta Kappa) and Harvard Law School (same class as Michelle Obama and on a journal for all three years). Yeah, smoking Mary Jane really fucked me up and is a real threat to society.

[G_j]

4. it can never be "fixed" without changing this

& that is up to our politicians... :eyes:

[Zomby Woof]

5. Excellent

I recommend his recent book "A Time To Fight" for more insights on what he recommends for reforming the penal system. It was one of the highlights of the book, and an area where I found more agreement with him on most any issue he covered, alongside the Iraq War.

[izquierdista]

6. A bunch of BS

If the writer thinks that they can't disparage "a decorated former Marine and Reagan Administration official no one is going to slap him with the politically-dreaded "soft on crime" label that has stymied so many Democrats who have taken on this issue in the past. There is a "Nixon goes to China" quality to Webb's call for change -- a law and order man", he hasn't paid attention to Karl Rove.

Who was is that ran a draft dodger against a veteran with 3 Purple Hearts and won by mocking his service record and the Purple Heart medal? Who?

[G_j]

7. true

in the Rove universe, you could slander your own mother and smile the whole time.