New York Times national legal correspondent Adam Liptak, named last month to replace Linda Greenhouse (who shocked folks at the Harvard Crimson when she accepted a buyout after covering the Supreme Court for 30 years), was interviewed last week by Dave Davies for Fresh Air.

They spoke about Liptak’s American Exception series. The United States, with less than five percent of the world’s population, has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. That’s 2.3 million Americans. China has four times as many people as we do but comes in a distant second with 1.6 million people imprisoned.

Among the things that make us unique, the bail bondsman:

Mr. LIPTAK: What a bail bondsman does is, a private businessman is given the opportunity to get you out of jail in exchange for a nonrefundable fee, typically 10 percent of the amount the judge said. And that sounds great. So, you know, you don’t have the thousand dollars, but for $100 he’ll come up with bail for you and you’ll get out, pending trial.

But think about that for a second. You have someone who is presumed innocent, has not been convicted of anything, and we’re going to hold him unless he pays a nonrefundable fee to a private business. And we outsource to this private businessman both the question of should someone presumed innocent get out or not, and then allow him to make a profit on that person’s freedom. And many, many people, although initially charged, are ultimately not convicted. So we not only have someone presumed innocent but someone adjudicated innocent, and nonetheless we’ve made that person pay a fee in order to retain their freedom.

DAVIES: And the reason the court system does it is that it appears to assure people are more likely to come back for trial. I mean, does it?

Mr. LIPTAK: The numbers suggest it, although it’s a little hard to control for it. Yes, it is true that bail bondsmen have an economic incentive to make sure that people show up for trial. They also have an economic incentive to choose only those people who are likely to show up for trial to begin with, so it’s not as though we live in a world of bounty hunters. Ninety-nine percent of people would show up regardless. But it is also true that the 1 percent who goes on the lam, bail bondsmen, because they’re on the hook for the whole amount, will aggressively try to get those people, probably more aggressively than systems in which the government handles this whole business.

DAVIES: And that’s where it gets weird. We’ve empowered private citizens to arm themselves and go after criminals and lock them up. I mean, what powers to they have? Can they handcuff somebody to a hotel bed and transport them across state lines, things like that?

Mr. LIPTAK: It’s extraordinary. They can cross state lines. They can bust down the door of a private house. They can imprison that person. The theory behind it is that if you enter into this bail bond relationship with somebody and you sign a contract, you are their prisoners and they can on a whim revoke your bail at any time, snatch you up and take you back. This truly is a sort of frontier, Wild West legacy of Americana that is retained in almost every state still.

DAVIES: Well, OK, so how do other countries handle this, and are they less likely to get defendants back for court appearances?

Mr. LIPTAK: They handle it in lots of ways. Some countries don’t let you out. They lock you up pre-trial. Some countries let you out, but they make it a crime for you not to come back. So they’ll prosecute you for that second crime. Some countries will take a deposit from you and give it back to you if you show up. Some countries will write down a number on a piece of paper, and if you don’t show up they’ll make you liable for it and they’ll try to collect it from you later. So there are lots and lots of different ways to do it; but except for the Philippines, the US is the only one that turns it into a commercial business.

The U.S. not only locks up the most people, we are the most punitive — Liptak explains that we are the only country in the world that elects our judges so we get a “tough, tough, tough on criminals…feedback loop” — and we spend next to nothing on education and rehabilitation services:

The model elsewhere in the world–and, you know, it’s hard to say that every place else is–I mean, there are variations all around the world–but the model elsewhere in the world is to try to figure out a way to bring people back into society, not to sort of cut them off forever. In the US–and people think that there is a dividing line. If you do something bad enough, we sort of cast you out from society forever. We keep you in prison for a long time and then we let you out, but you’re a convicted felon. You’ll find it very hard to get a job. There are places perhaps that you’re not allowed to live. There are states in which you’re not allowed to vote. We have a very binary idea of who’s a good person and who’s a bad one, and I think other parts of the world think that’s a more fluid thing.

DAVIES: Has it always been true that American prisons have completely neglected rehabilitation, or did we try and address this in past years?

Mr. LIPTAK: In the 1800s, our penitentiary system was the model of the world. People came here to visit. De Tocqueville came here to visit, to marvel at how we’d constructed a system in which people would be reformed and returned to society, and they would go back and write pamphlets and books about this fantastic American innovation of the penitentiary system, which was a model to the rest of the world. And we have gone from that to really the exact opposite. The rest of the world is no longer sending delegations to American prisons to learn how it might be done.

But the exception that I find hardest to accept is life without parole for kids under 18:

Mr. LIPTAK: We are literally alone in the world in doing this. No other nation in the world thinks it’s a good idea to send, say, a 13- or 14-year-old who, without question, did something horrible, away to prison for the rest of his or her life, without even the possibility of parole. The important point to pause on is that life sentences–although there, too, we are a very big user of life sentences but with the possibility of parole–is one kind of thing. The idea that you can make a decision about somebody who’s done something terrible at 13 or 14, that by the time they’re 40 or 50 or 60 they will remain beyond redemption, that there’s nothing they could say about themselves to anyone that would let you re-open the book and say, `You know what? Let’s take a fresh look. Maybe we let you out. Maybe we don’t. But at least we’ll listen to you.’ That notion is literally unique to the United States.

For more on that, I point you to the Frontline documentary, when kids get life. The full program is available to view online.

In my town there are six state prisons. That helps sharpen one’s focus!

I don’t see my argument as solely a humanitarian one, though it is that. I see my argument as pragmatic, both from a criminal justice perspective and an economic perspective.

We are making criminals when we put people (mainly men) in the prison system. Either we put them there for life, or they come out equipped to do one thing and one thing only: commit more crime and go back.

Then there’s the cost. How do we pay? We keep extending sentences, mandatory minimums, no parole… while we cut budgets! The clear message: we’re not willing to spend more money on the criminal justice system.

It seems a far better investment would be to make them to the fullest extent possible–and I am aware of the limitations–fully functioning, productive, contributing members of the community.