Will Broken State Budgets Mean Prison Reform?

In the past 20 years, state prison budgets have increased by 303 percent, outgrowing everything else except Medicaid. America's prison population is now much larger than China's, and five states spend more on corrections than higher education. But every state is now faced with the worst financial crisis in decades, and that's leading to cuts that only recently were considered off limits. The Public Safety Performance Project at the Pew Center on the States funded a recent report on the fiscal crisis in corrections.