Don't forget the other reason politicians have no desire to reform our prison system - if you let the hundreds of thousands of prisoners out that are incarcerated for bullshit petty crimes, you will dramatically increase unemployment. Not only will a lot of corrections workers lose their jobs, but you're releasing a shit load of new people out into the job market as well. Inmates are not counted against your unemployment figures. They've taken the necessary evil of a corrections system and turned it into an entire industry and that's why we have the exploding prison populations.