We’ve talked about US incarceration rates on CT before. Peter Moskos approaches it with an interesting twist in his new book In Defense of Flogging. I have not read the book, but I did read his piece in the WSJ’s Ideas Market and you should, too. It does a very nice job of summarizing some of what is fundamentally wrong with the US prison system. Here’s a brief quote, but as we like to say, go read the whole thing:

In much of America, prisons have become nothing more than a massive government-run—one might even say “socialist”—job program. To oversimplify, but just a bit, we pay poor unemployed rural whites to guard poor unemployed urban blacks. Prison guards and private prisons advocate for more and more prisoners, literally profiting from human bondage. Such a peculiar institution should be unconscionable.