I know this in a way from my police background: the second you mention, "The system's racist," one-third of the country simply puts down the book and says, "Oh, it's one of those guys."

I am very cynical. That is absolutely what police is doing. But you don't even have to be cynical. I mean, politicians don't even pretend they're doing otherwise. The problem is the other side is not screaming bloody murder and saying, you know, "This is immoral, this is slavery, you're profiting from human bondage."

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 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.

When I talk to people the usual progression is, "Flogging's cruel and barbaric," moving very quickly to, "Only 10 lashes for five years?" Then I do worry, actually. On the one hand, once you start quibbling about the number of lashes, I've won. But on the other hand, people who say flogging's not cruel enough... I mean, well, what have we become? God forbid I wake up a couple years from now and we have even longer sentences and we flog people. I mean, then I might jump out a window.

I would prefer to get lashed rather than go to prison.

These 2.3 million prisoners, somehow we've convinced ourselves that's normal and rational, more prisoners than soldiers, more prisoners than China, more than one per cent of the adult population, seven times the incarceration rate of Canada or any Western European country.