Roger, intelligent, creative, compassionate people have worked on the issue of prisons for centuries, and have constantly come up against the "dark avenging underside", the Salem witch hunt side, the judge without facts side, the surround Carthage jail and shoot Joseph Smith through the windows at night, mob mentality of this country.  Today, prisons in America serve one principle:  money.  People pretend it’s about something else, but the number one "legitimate" "industry" in California is prisons.  In Sweden, there is a sane prison system.  It’s a model for the world.  Roman Polansky, for one thing, could make brilliant, inciteful films for young boys and men about why you don’t drug and date-rape women.  Since much of our culture is directed toward telling them such behavior is just fine, it would be good to do something to counteract that.  Ms. Bergen could act as a consultant and make sure they were useful to the end of engendering respect for women.  That is one possibility.  We would rather live in a make-believe world that SVU rides to the rescue, locks up the bad guys, and throws away the keys.  What doors those keys are for, we don’t want to think. 

 According to the New York Times, "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners."  There are 2.3 million Americans in prison; China, for comparision, has 1.6, with 4 times the population.  And, as Jessica Mitford pointed out in her landmark Kind and Usual Punishment, it costs the same to send a man to prison for a year and to Yale University, which to her suggested the possibility of exchange scholarships.

Even a simpleton could figure out that if you paid a person $30,000 not to be a thief, chances are you’d save money over the $50,000 it costs to keep them in prison, and in America, prison is where the criminal behavior is schooled and hardened.  If a kid goes into prison at 18, they will come out at 25 an angry, hardened criminal.  There are an estimated 300,000 rapes in prison per year, so care to guess how those people treat women on the street when they get out, people?  Good job, America.  Almost as good a job as we do leading the world in education….  what is it now, 22nd among the world’s industrialized nations?

It is a total failure of imagination that we can’t figure out what better use than sitting in a cage Roman Polansky could be to our culture.