In this article in Christianity Today, Chuck Colson urges our political candidates to raise and debate the problem of our growing prison population. He points out that in the last 35 years there has been a six-fold increase in the number of prisoners, and that currently 1 in every 100 U.S. citizens are incarterated. State governments spend $50 billion per year in prisons.

Colson advocates programs to change the lives of those imprisoned. Citing studies he notes

Though many sociologists of the 19th and early 20th centuries attributed crime to environmental factors like poverty, an inadequate criminal justice system, and racism, landmark studies in the last 30 years have shown that crime is really about wrong moral decisions. For example, in their 17-year-long study The Criminal Personality, psychologists Stanton Samenow and Samuel Yochelson found that crime, in every case, was "the product of deliberation," and gave the antidote of "conversion to a whole new lifestyle." And in their definitive study Crime and Human Nature, Harvard social scientists James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein found that crime is caused by a lack of moral teaching during the morally formative years.

Colson's point echoes two of my recent posts, on the spread of crime in Memphis, and on the shaping of killers by the Nazis.
At bottom, what we need to debate nationally, is how to become a society that provides positive shaping of the human conscience, and encourages healthy family life.

As you can guess, I am not a Libertarian.