WHY DOES CORN POP OR HOW TO SOLVE OUR PRISON PROBLEM

We move in a world of many prisons. The prisons of our bodies and our minds, our dreams and our fears. And of course, a nationwide prison system in which 2.3 million Americans are incarcerated. This makes us the nation with the most citizens behind bars...!

If you're impressed by statistics, these will stagger you. When you include those on probation and parole, there are 7.4 million people in our criminal justice system. The inmate population alone has tripled over the last 25 years. With only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of the world's prisoners. As the land of the free and home of the brave, the numbers are as troubling as they are tragic.

A specialist in the field, Professor Glenn Loury of Brown University, puts it this way: "The current American prison system is a leviathan unmatched in human history." When asked why we have so many prisoners, two answers kept recurring: (1) the tough-on-crime policies since the 1960s, 25% of which involve drug crimes (2) politicians at all levels of government who insist on these policies, but resist increasing prison budgets and reforms.

The politicians can point to statistics which show crime rates have dropped significantly since the 1960s, especially violent crimes. In New York alone, the rates plunged 40% between 1997 and 2007. And yet, in those same years, its incarceration rate dropped 15%, "proving crime and incarceration rates can actually drop in tandem." However, New York is the exception that proves the rule by which most states just keep locking more and more people up.

There is also a demographic factor. While blacks are 12% of the national population, they constitute 38% of the felony convictions. However, ghetto poverty rather than race is the chief explanation, with most of the crimes black-on-black. One result is, "poor black neighborhoods brutalized by crime and torn by the removal of loved ones to prison."

But while the statisticians understand the problem, the experts have failed to find the reforms to turn the situation around. It's not unlikely that when the conservative critics find the time, they will somehow lay the blame on our first black president.

In contrast to the blame-makers are the reform-makers. I'm thinking here of the black preacher who asked the question: What makes corn pop...? His explanation goes something like this. The kernel's outer shell is hard to change from the outside, but when properly heated, it expands from the inside. Which means breaking the shell and producing the happy results.

Being a man of God, he concludes this way: "Getting at people from the inside will always do more to make them pop than forcing them from the outside!" Have you noticed in your own life, how true that is...?