Glenn Loury has an article in the March 11th Cato Unbound (also cited in the online Atlantic Monthly) with an excellent argument about why we need to reverse the trend in America of being a "nation of jailers" (cf Pew Trust recent survey on the incarcerated population of states):

...we benefit from a system of suffering, rooted in state violence, meted out at our behest. Put differently our society — the society we together have made — first tolerates crime-promoting conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then goes on to act out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice.

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/03/11/glenn-loury/a-nation-of-jailers/