Senator Jim Webb's article in Parade Magazine yesterday shows dialog is now moving forward.

We now seem more willing to resist the Abilene Paradox and speak truth to one another.

I raised these and other issues in my book and my Blog. The fact is incarcerating someone costs us taxpayers here in Nebraska $27,000 a year. Ten prisoners in prison ten years has a price tag of $2,700,000. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot and admiring our marksmanship? Certainly we want to be able to separate ourselves from the mentally unstable and the violent, but do we really want to incur these costs for drug use only? Is there a better way to achieve deterrence?

Here's hoping articles like this will spark intelligent discussion giving us better alternatives.

Here's a link to the article.

http://www.parade.com/news/2009/03/why-we-must-fix-our-prisons.html