... it seems that cages have become our one-size-fits-all answer to nearly every persistent social ill. Poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, all have become fodder for the prison-industrial complex. Hundreds of thousands of people have been removed from the unemployment statistics, from the rolls of understaffed mental health services, from overcrowded poor neighborhoods. People who self-medicate, who don't fit in, who show a preference for the wrong intoxicants. All of them have a home in one of our many correctional institutions ...

We are a nation of jailers ... and of jailed. We have zero-tolerance, and we brag about it. Our leaders ride to power on the backs of the convicted. Brown backs, black backs, for the most part. We have created powerful lobbies of people whose livelihoods depend on putting more of their fellow citizens in cages, for longer stretches of their lives, and we cannot seem to appease those lobbies fast enough.

This is America, home of the free, at the dawn of the new millennium. We are a nation singular in our urge to punish, and in our willingness to indulge that urge. But we are paying for that indulgence.

We are paying with our tax dollars, both what we spend to catch, convict and incarcerate the two million and what we fail to collect from their potential wages. We are paying in distrust of our system and of our institutions among those groups, Black and Latino mostly, against whom we have chosen to enforce the most punitive of our laws. We are paying with our futures, in the education dollars that have gone, in state after state, into the building and running of prisons, more so every year. And we are paying with our souls, scarred and hardened by our growing willingness to accept that which we know is immoral and inhumane and corrupt.