My cell mates fellow jurors and I have been in captivity now the jury room waiting for two hours and forty-five minutes.  No one has been called for a case.  We have, however, been offered the opportunity twice now to stand up and get something to drink.  The Today Show has been replaced by a program about Superman's adolescence.  Thankfully, I'm far enough away from the TV that it is hardly audible.  I'm using the time to start William Faulkner's Intruder In the Dust, which begins with the arrival of the sheriff to see Lucas Beauchamp, a black man arrested for the murder of a white man in the Old South. 

The book - along with sitting in a courthouse with a lot of time on my hands - started to remind me of an NPR story that ran a few days ago about prison conditions at Sana Quentin:

All Things Considered, July 7, 2008 · From the moment you walk through the metal doors of what was once Sana Quentin's gymnasium, all you can see are men and bunk beds. Packed together from front wall to back, more than 360 inmates live here because there's no room anywhere else.

A lone correctional officer, Michael McClain, sits on a riser in the middle of the gym, about 6 feet off the floor. Below, the conversations are loud and tense.

"It can get ugly. It can go at any moment, just at the drop of a hat," he says, watching the floor.

The gym is not the only room packed in this way. Officials at Sana Quentin, located in upscale Marin County, less than an hour from Sana Francisco, have set up beds in every available indoor space except the chapel.

Sending inmates to other California prisons isn't an option. In just the past 10 years, the state's already high prison population doubled. Now all of California's prisons are at twice or three times their capacity. And California is not alone: More than 30 states nationwide now house more inmates than their prisons were built for.

Cramming all these inmates into aging facilities has had clear results at Sana Quentin: an increase in violence, filth, racial tensions and the likelihood that inmates will keep coming back. At the same time, prison officials say they have no room for the programs that help inmates stay out — meaning that overcrowding has led to even more overcrowding.

Click here to listen / read the entire story.  What's clear is that our justice system is a mess.  Our policies help create the very criminals we then incarcerate.  A real plan to fight crime and to make our neighborhoods safer would include a massive expansion of mental health programs and alcohol and drug treatment facilities.  Politicians know this but you win votes not by presenting complicated plans that get at the root of societal problems.  Most of the time - unfortunately - you win votes by promising just to lock people up...no matter the long term costs.