Get Tough & Smart - How to Start Winning the War on Drug Addiction

Other writings by John Dewar Gleissner appear at the following websites: Academia.edu Corrections.com Hub Pages Digital Journal EzineArticles.com Westlaw

President Obama recently demonstrated his appreciation of America’s incarceration crisis by visiting a prison, the first U.S. president to do so, and by announcing he will try to provide funding for college courses to some prison inmates. This will add to the ongoing criticism of attempts to circumvent Congress with executive orders. Congress and most state legislatures perennially disallow amenities, benefits and privileges to America’s least popular class. The public insists that prison life be no better than the life of the poorest law-abiding citizens. This is the all-powerful principle of less eligibility.   It will strongly reassert itself against Obama’s plans when a chorus of law-abiding people complain that they have to take out loans for what the president plans to give prison inmates. Our president’s concern for the incarcerated is fully justified. Incarceration is in many respects a failed social experiment of the last 200 years. We see this most clearly in recidi...