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A Nation of Jailers by Glenn Loury

By Real Cost of Prisons Project (The Sentencing Project)

A Nation of Jailers by Glenn Loury Lead Essay- Cato Unbound March 11th, 2009 The most challenging problems of social policy in the modern world are never merely technical. In order properly to decide how we should govern ourselves, we must take up questions of social ethics and human values. What manner of people are we Americans? What vision would we affirm, and what example would we set, before the rest of the world? What kind of society would we bequeath to our children? How shall we live? Inevitably, queries such as these lurk just beneath the surface of the great policy debates of the day. So, those who would enter into public argument about what ails our common life need make no apology for speaking in such terms. It is precisely in these terms that I wish to discuss a preeminent moral challenge for our time ? that imprisonment on a massive scale has become one of the central aspects of our nation?s social policy toward the poor, powerfully impairing the lives of some of the most marginal of our fellow citizens, especially the poorly educated black and Hispanic men who reside in large numbers in our great urban centers...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog on March 14, 2009 (boomark / email).