ClickNation

Tonight is a two-hour Ted Koppel presentation on prison (Discovery Channel 9pm). I’m hoping for some in-depth discussion of the issues, but I worry that it will be just more blah, blah, blah about overcrowding, lack of vocational services, racial segregation. We’ve seen all this before, as MSNBC seems to have its collection of “Lockup” documentaries on infinite loop. What we don’t see is solutions:

• building political will to crank down the criminalization of everything, especially drug use
• putting public money into alternatives to incarceration, which has got to be the best bargain out there
• rebuilding the educational and vocational programs in prison. We should consider prison an opportunity to extend high school and college to that segment who fell off the educational track earlier
• Oh yeah, and treat not just the substance abuse, but the other mental disorders