With a higher percentage of our citizens behind bars than any other nation in the world, now is the time for some American soul searching. What has happened here? A growing chorus of voices are questioning the prison-industrial complex, including some unlikely dissenters. Ironically, sentencing a Republican to prison may be one of the most effective ways to draw attention to the crisis, as this article about former Pennsylvania attorney general and ex-con Ernie Preate makes clear.

But the African American community-faced with one in three twentysomething young men in prison, awaiting trial, or on probation-can't wait for the rest of the nation to mull over the issue. It needs immediate alternatives such as restorative justice programs, described in the NAACP magazine The Crisis, which offer a hopeful and less punitive approach to juvenile crime. –The Editors

Ernie Preate's epiphany came the first time he shuffled through the chow line at the federal prison camp in Duluth, Minnesota. As Pennsylvania's former attorney general, Preate obviously knew that a disproportionate number of minorities end up behind bars. But, serving time himself for mail fraud, Preate, who is white, saw that table after table in the minimum-security facility's dining hall was filled with African American and Hispanic men-most of them serving time for drug offenses.

"It was just a sea of black faces," Preate recalls of that day in 1996. "I said to myself, 'Oh, my God, I helped create this.'"

A vocal proponent of tough mandatory drug sentences, Preate had, as state attorney general, vowed to make Pennsylvania tougher on drugs than any other state-a pledge that had caught the attention of President George H.W. Bush, who met with Preate on several occasions to discuss strategy for the War on Drugs. Preate had also championed capital punishment, successfully arguing the constitutionality of the death penalty before the United States Supreme Court. He put five men on death row and even penned a book advising prosecutors how to pursue death-penalty cases.

But in 1993, Preate was to find himself on the other side of the law. Aspiring to be governor of Pennsylvania, he was the front-runner for the GOP nomination until the story broke, a month before the primary, that he was being investigated for mail fraud. The controversy sank his campaign. His leading challenger, Congressman Tom Ridge, ended up in the governor's mansion, and Preate wound up with a 14-month sentence in federal prison. When the feds had threatened to also charge Preate's brothers, he felt he didn't have enough money to fight the case and pleaded guilty. Though he takes full responsibility for his mistakes, he does feel the charge reeked of political maneuvering-the federal felony hinged on campaign contributions he had not disclosed a decade earlier.