Although I consider myself pretty liberal, I'm not against punishment. There's nothing wrong with punishing someone who has done something wrong. Or with public safety. Lock up a pedophile and there are fewer raped children, but locking up a drug dealer just creates a job opening.

I don't think we can reduce the prison population now, so many of these people are damaged goods once they've spent much time in prison. It would have to be over a generation. But certainly, yeah, white collar crime.

There's no straight line between closing the mental institutions and filling the prisons but there is some sort of relationship. And it's hard to tell how much mental illness among prisoners came in with them and how much is because of prison. I just imagine the real tragedy is there's probably a huge number of people who went in a little bit f - ked up and left completely insane because it's just a horrible treatment.

I'm not fond of ideologies. I don't like it when people have answers before they know the question.

I'm not a fan of the death penalty. At some level I think killing is wrong, but I don't have sympathy for most of the people sentenced - I'm not a passionate anti-death penalty person. In truth, given all the other problems of the justice system, the numbers are so small, I think there are bigger fish to fry. Ironically, in terms of mental health and care, death row is probably the best prison situation to be in. There's a little more public eye on that, to ensure at least minimal levels of official treatment are actually given to death row prisoners.

I think there is a lot of crime caused by desperation, and it doesn't mean that people commit crime because they're poor, but certainly a lot of people who are poor commit crime and they might not if they weren't poor. You understand the difference there? That's not news, but it comes up when I hear people say poverty doesn't affect crime - that crime is still going down in America even though the economy is bad.

I find it weird that people who claim to speak for the prisoners basically want to keep them in cages all the time - and then they'll fight for better prison libraries or whatever. It's like they're missing the big picture. If I were in prison, of course I would prefer to be outside doing physical labour. It's not physical labour but prison life that kills a person. It's so bad inside that the outside jobs are often sought after. So, yeah, call them work crews and let them do it. At the same time the retributive side can feel the cons are being punished.