Prisons are a bit like Baseball fields in cornfields..if you build them, you will fill them.

When I mentioned my Bible Concordance said there were virtually no jails or prisons in Pre-Roman times - nobody blinked and went on to quote statsitics about 1 in 25 people being sociopaths. Why is that, we should ask.

Before 1900, there were not many real prisons in The United States and then for a brief period early in the 20th Century we had prison reforms that did seem to work. What blew it all to hell was prohibition and the rise of orgnaized crime combined with the collapse of manufacturing in American cities which then created Ghettos and Inner-Cities in decay... oh bother...

My point is that if you don't have lots of cells in prisons as an out - you find solutions. The more prisons you have - the easier it is criminalise diseases such as addiction - toss them into jail and throw away the key. Maybe we should toss sociopaths down Cisterns like they did to Joseph in The Old Testament.. works for me.

Joel Norris actually argued quite well in his book on sociopathology that at least in Western societies, we are creating conditions that are condusive to growing more sociopaths and he referred to the rise in the numbers of serial killers as ' a public health crisis.' He made a good argument that the following forumla can be counted upon to create serial killers:

Malnourished male children + physical abuse (especially to the right brain) + sexual abuse + a couple other variables such as genetic predispostion = Serial killer

His contention that violent crime should be approached from a neurological perspective was revolutionary back in its day. Now we know that other things such as low resting heart rate can also predispose male children to violence later in life.

Where am I going with this.. I dunno... Just trying to suggest it isn't so simple as locking them all away. To a degree we get what we make of this world.