This "culture of incarceration" you seem to decry will be more difficult to reverse if we continue to quench our urge to "lock 'em up!" by building larger jails and prisons.

Draconian laws and sentencing will be more difficult to strike off the books if one of the resulting casualties is that a newly-constructed jail is no longer needed. The expense of unused jail/prison capacity would be a mistake that is too politically costly to admit. So it follows that "Liberal" legislation would succumb to political expediency, and the jail would remain full.

This is a significant argument against any jail/prison expansion to those of us who don't feel that we are any "safer" now with over 2 million americans locked up, than we were thirty years ago. With a vote for jail expansion, we would in effect be giving up on any hopes of law and sentencing reform and returning to our more "liberal" past. A romantic last ditch effort to resist the New World Order, if you will.

In your letter to the professor, you observed that even though crime rates have fallen over the years, prison construction and incarceration have increased. This brings to mind an ironic twist to the omniscient movie line, "If you build it, they will come."