On American prisons - the response

The final look at the Jason DeParle article The American Prison Nightmare in the New York Review of Books looks both at what faith based organizations have achieved, and a new bipartisan flavor to the discussion:

A few months earlier, at the urging of Colson and other religious conservatives, a Republican Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, which monitors and guides state efforts to eliminate sexual assaults on prisoners. As the law was signed, Colson argued in a column that "whatever a prisoner may have done, he is still created in the image of God, a being whose dignity is to be protected."

As the rape bill was heading to President Bush's desk, Justice Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, chided the members of the American Bar Association for their failure to show more interest in prisoners' fates. He warned,

A decent and free society, founded in respect for the individual, ought not to run a system with a sign at the entrance for inmates saying, "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here."

Elsewhere on the conservative landscape, several right-of-center think tanks have attacked the prison boom as wasteful of dollars and lives. The Texas Public Policy Foundation recently called for an expansion of parole, which "recognizes that inmates may change." And the new Democratic Congress, with the support of federal judges to the left and right, is talking of hearings to reexamine mandatory sentencing laws.

The three books reviewed by DeParle are:

• Punishment and Inequality in America by Bruce Western(Russell Sage Foundation)
• Confronting Confinement: A Report of the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons by John J. Gibbons and Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, co-chairs
  (Vera Institute of Justice, available at www.prisoncommission.org)
• Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy by Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen (Oxford University Press)