An underlying problem is that we've become addicted to prisons and punishment as a solution to all of our issues. The author didn't mention length of sentences, but the fact remains that we, in the US, impose sentences that are far longer than those in other western democracies. Over the past century, we've gradually increased the length of sentences imposed for all crimes, now sentencing people on the average to almost four times the length of imprisonment as we did a hundred years ago. That fact by itself guarantees a prison population at any given time which will be far larger simply because prisoners are staying behind bars four times as long when new ones enter the system.

On top of that, our current obsession with background checks for everything is actually causing more recidivism. When a person can't even get a job at McDonalds without passing a criminal background check, it means that the guy who got out of jail or prison is unlikely to find work. Do we really think that someone who can't find work and, by virtue of a felony conviction, isn't eligible for any sort of public assistance is just going to crawl off into a corner somewhere and quietly starve to death? When we eliminate all legal means of survival, we guarantee that people will use illegal methods to get by. I sometimes think that we really don't want anyone to succeed in rehabilitating himself when he finishes a prison sentence. Instead, we've set up mutually exclusive goals for everyone, insisting that prisoners have a release plan before getting out that includes housing and employment, and then do everything we can to make sure that they can't rent housing or find a job. We need to make up our collective mind about it. Do we want people rehabilitated and able to become productive members of society, or are we determined to create a permanent underclass of people who are marginalized and live illegally on the outskirts of society? If we want to stop spending more money each year on prisons than we do on education, then we need to abandon the present system which generates recidivism and guarantees a high percentage of people doing a life sentence in installments.

EdB, you're so right! It's all very disheartening. It's almost as if we want a large prison population and a high crime rate... Does a large group of people forced to live on the margin provides the fear used to force the rest of us to work for an ever shrinking paycheck? I'm not a conspiracy theory person, but a historian would no doubt find a correlation between these two things. Remember during the time of the very worst working conditions of the Industrial Revolution in England (children as young as three years old were actually chained to their machines in factories....) you would be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread .. Is this where we are heading?

make up our minds? it's clear they are made up. i swallowed the national myths when i was a kid, as most do, but a bit of time overseas and in the library turns up the lights. that stuff obama wants to 'look forward' from is everywhere in american history. prisons are part and parcel of the national character.

nothing good is going to happen in the youessofay, for the proportion of mean-spirited ignorant yokels is way too high, and the rich add blind arrogance to the nation's political character.

i suppose lithwick makes part of her living by writing here. commenting is harmless. also useless. this article is just describing a single zit on the american face- this problem and most others come from fundamental flaws in the nation's political structure and resulting ethos. until someone examines the relationship of wealth and power in the usa, talking about prisons is just trivial gossip among the impotent subjects of 'is majesty king [insert current name here].