From Boston Review, an insightful report by Glenn Loury that's the talk of the blogosphere this week:"Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? Race and the Transformation of Criminal Justice"
From Nation magazine's Aug. 27 (upcoming) issue, an excellent overview of the politics of imprisonment:
How can you tell when a democracy is dead? When concentration camps spring up and everyone shivers in fear? Or is it when concentration camps spring up and no one shivers in fear because everyone knows they're not for "people like us" (in Woody Allen's marvelous phrase) but for the others, the troublemakers, the ones you can tell are guilty merely by the color of their skin, the shape of their nose or their social class?
And from Business Day across the Atlantic in Johannesburg, South Africa, a depressing analysis of that country’s prison system, which closely parallels our own. 
