Prison Reform: In BR and On the Hill

As Dahlia Lithwick noted in Slate this past weekend, Guantanamo may be America’s most infamous “prison problem,” but it is far from our only one.

Our sentencing and incarceration system is broken. With the U.S. having only 5 percent of the world’s population and yet almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, we are imprisoning people at nearly five times the world average; according to Lithwick,

approximately one in every 31 adults in the United States is in prison, jail, or on supervised release.

Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, who famously served as Secretary of the Navy under Reagan and was at one point thought to be under consideration as Obama’s running-mate, has introduced landmark legislation to retool our prison system. Called the National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009, Webb’s bill would set up a commission to examine the American criminal justice system and make recommendations about how to best reform it.
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