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Prisons built as they have a shocking record of failure. allegedly, because prisons create crime rather than preventing it. we were incarcerating around 350,000 people. now we have over 2.2 million inmates, the world's highest rate. what are we doing? with us now is todd pitach who wrote "the jailhouse blues" for sat the saturday evening post." how are you, sir? >> good. good to be here. >> when you consider prison has no correctional aspect and criminalizes it takes in and creating the problem or adding to the problem, prison is not really helping america but it's actually hurting america. is...

Is if you break the problem down, we have a sort of historical vexing problem about what to do with people who break the law. when's the role of prison? that's a problem that's global. nobody really has ever gotten it right. but the more recent problem which you opened the segment on which is the american problem. and we know why that started. we know when it started. and the problem is i think that a lot of people in law enforcement know what the solution maybe, which is to this burgeoning prison population and that's to change the way we're approaching drug laws and drug prosecutions and tha...

Sort of reform, restorive justice as an option for victims? >> that's a great model. one of the programs that i wrote about in my story in "the saturday evening post" is council for unity. they go in to prisons and they get inmates talking. often rival gang members. restoretive justice is an idea that gives people an opportunity to begin to open up and begin to experience compassion in different ways and can be an interesting almost like a weapon against some of these guys because when they open up, they actually begin to experience remorse, begin to face what they've done. and if they have th...

Process. has an enormous role to play. i just want to mention something with regarding eastern state. we look at that today and it's a tourist site. you can visit it. and we look at it and said, god, how horrible? what they don't realize is at least at that time people were asking more serious questions than they are today and we've taken our prisons so far out of sight that we don't see that in an awful lot of cases they're very much worse than they were 200 years ago. >> yeah. you know, todd, when we talk about the topic of prison reform to the extent there is going to be prison reform, that...