A friend recommended the book *Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis* by Christian Parenti on the subject, ISBN 1-85984-303-3. Let me cite from the last section in the book, “Recommendations”:
Most books on criminal justice end with a coda earnestly enumerating what new and better things those in charge might do. My recommendation, as regards criminal justice, are quite simple: we need less. Less policing, less incarceration, shorter sentences, less surveillance, fewer laws governing individual behaviors, and less obsessive discussion of every lurid crime, less prohibition, and less puritanical concern withs “freaks” and “deviants.” Two-thirds of all people entering prison are sentenced for non-violent offenses, which means there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in prison who pose no major threat o public safety. These minor credit card fraudsters, joyriders, pot farmers, speed freaks, prostitutes, and shoplifters should not rot in prison at taxpayer’s expense.
And at the very end:
[...] All over the country there are pockets of dedicated activists fighting against tremendous odds and the deafening silence of the mainstream press. These are the people pointing the way out, the way forward, away from the waste, terror, and abuse of America’s criminal justice lockdown.
All of this against a background of unseen, unnoticed impoverishment of the lower classes, also mentioned in the book, and in other InformationSources.