PRISON REFORM IS A TOUGH FIGHT IN THE U.S.

The world's tallest building is now in Dubai rather than New York.
Its largest shopping mall is in Beijing, and its biggest Ferris wheel
in Singapore. Once-mighty General Motors is suspended in a limbo
between bailout and bankruptcy; and the "war on terror" has
demonstrated the limits of American military might.

But in one area America is going from strength to strength -- the
incarceration of its population.

America has less than five per cent of the world's people but almost
25 per cent of its prisoners. It imprisons 756 people per 100,000
residents, a rate nearly five times the world average. About one in
every 31 adults is either in prison or on parole.

Black men have a one-in-three chance of being imprisoned at some
point in their lives.

"A Leviathan unmatched in human history," is how Glenn Loury,
professor of social studies at Brown University, characterizes
America's prison system.

Conditions in the Leviathan's belly can be brutal. More than 20 per
cent of inmates report that they have been sexually assaulted by
guards or fellow inmates. Federal prisons are operating at more than
130 per cent of capacity.

A sixth of prisoners suffer from mental illness of one sort or
another. There are four times as many mentally ill people in prison
as in mental hospitals.

As well as being brutal, prisons are ineffective. They may keep
offenders off the streets, but they fail to discourage them from re-offending.

Two-thirds of ex-prisoners are re-arrested within three years of
being released.

The punishment extends to prisoners' families, too. America's 1.7
million "prison orphans" are six times more likely than their peers
to end up in prison themselves. The punishment also sometimes
continues after prisoners are released.

America is one of only a handful of countries that bar prisoners from
voting, and in some states that ban is lifelong: two per cent of
American adults and 14 per cent of black men are disfranchised
because of criminal convictions.

It is possible to pick holes in these figures. Some of the world's
most repressive regimes do not own up to their addiction to
imprisonment (does anyone really believe that Cuba imprisons only
five in every 1,000 of its citizens?). No sane person would rather be
locked up in Russia or China than in America.

A country as large and diverse as America boasts plenty of model
prisons and exemplary training programs. But all that said, the
conclusion remains stark: America's incarceration habit is a
disgrace, wasting resources at home and damaging the country abroad.

Few mainstream politicians have had the courage to denounce any of
this. Which makes Jim Webb all the more remarkable. Webb is far from
being a lion of the Senate, roaring from the comfort of a safe seat.
He is a first-term senator for Virginia who barely squeaked into Congress.

But Webb is now America's leading advocate of prison reform. He is
not content with incremental change. He is willing to tackle what he
calls "the elephant in the bedroom," America's willingness to
imprison people for drug offences.

Does Webb have any chance of diminishing America's addiction to
incarceration? History is hardly on his side. For most of the 20th
century America imprisoned roughly the same proportion of its
population as many other countries -- a hundred people for every
100,000 citizens. But while other countries stayed where they were,
the American incarceration rate then took off -- to 313 per 100,000
in 1985 and 648 in 1997.

Webb also has some powerful forces ranged against him. The
prison-industrial complex (which includes private prisons as well as
public ones) employs thousands of people and armies of lobbyists.

Twenty-six states plus the federal government have passed "three
strikes and you're out" laws which put repeat offenders in prison for
life without parole. And the war on drugs has pushed the
incarceration business into overdrive.

The number of people serving time for drugs has increased from 41,000
in 1980 to 500,000 today, or 55 per cent of the population of federal
prisons and 21 per cent of those in state prisons. An astonishing
three-quarters of prisoners locked up on drug-related charges are black.

But Webb is no ordinary politician. He packed several distinguished
careers into his life before becoming a senator -- as a Marine in
Vietnam, a lawyer, a much-published author and secretary of the navy
in the Reagan administration.

And he is not a man to back down from a fight: one of his best books,
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, celebrates the
martial virtues of the clan to which he is proud to belong.

Some signs suggest that the tide is turning in Webb's direction.
Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003.

Barack Obama's Justice Department has hinted that it wants to do
something about the disparity in sentencing between blacks and whites
for drug crimes. Support for both the death penalty and the war on
drugs is softening: a dozen states have legalized the use of
marijuana for medical purposes.

If Webb can transform these glimmers of discontent with America's
prison-industrial complex into a full-fledged reform movement, then
he will go down in history as a great senator.