How Unexpected

Here is the opening of a fascinating column by Glenn Greenwald regarding Virginia Senator Jim Webb's bill to create a National Criminal Justice Commission, a bill whose ultimate goal is to reform the criminal justice system in this country. It's a long dissertation, but so, so worth your time. As you can tell from the title of the article, it's really about more than just the obvious need for reform.

Jim Webb's courage v. the "pragmatism" excuse for politicians - Glenn Greenwald

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb's impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that. Webb's interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession. After decades of mindless "tough-on-crime" hysteria, an increasingly irrational "drug war," and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan -- and virtually every other country in the world -- to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a "a nation of jailers" whose "prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history."

You can read the rest here:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/28/webb/index.html