All while the United States is rethinking their prison system, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives seem hell bent on pushing for a prison system that models the current one south of the boarder.

As a point of contrast, Democratic Senator Jim Webb of Virginia is leading the charge to reform what he calls a broken system, noting that the United States currently incarcerates 25% of the world's inmates with no reduction in crime.  He said, ""America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace" and "we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail," in a floor speech when he tabled legislation to create a commission to study what can be done for prison reform. 

Here's a portion of his speech that day as appeared in Glen Greenwald's article over at Salon.com:

Let's start with a premise that I don't think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world's population; we have 25% of the world's known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world's greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .

The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .

In many cases these issues involve people's ability to have proper counsel and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .

Another piece of this issue that I hope we will address with this National Criminal Justice Commission is what happens inside our prisons. . . . We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve.

Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy - the whole area of drug policy in this country?

And how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives that we might look at?

Does Canada really want to travel down this road when we already know what the outcome will be?  Couple this expansion of prisons, with a huge price tag I might add, with yet another attempt to pass their get tough on crime bill which would help fill those new prisons with nonviolent drug offenders, and you have a replica of the broken system in the United States.

If ever it was obvious that this government is guided by ideology over sound logic and evidence, this is it.