Everyone involved in the incarceration debate knows that we can safely release all the nonviolent offenders -- defined as inmates whose present commitment offense has no adjudicated element of violence -- without the slightest harm to the public. Pictured here is one such offender from the past, whom our society cruelly sentenced to 11 years in prison even though he was only convicted of tax evasion.

"It's not what we don't know that gets us in trouble. It's what we know for a fact that just ain't so." -- Variously attributed