"Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind in the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon," says Michelle Alexander, author of "The New Jim Crow."

Watch more of our conversation with author Michelle Alexander about crime, the war on drugs, and the disproportionately high number of African-Americans in prison.

"The houses are not just 'given' to the families," says Dr. Brenda Williams, "They have to work for it. They have to earn it." She and her husband have been using their own money to provide homes to disadvantaged families.

At the central jail in Bhopal, India, the prison superintendent says a yoga program calms the jail’s atmosphere and speeds the release of inmates.

"Faith-based organizations, as a matter of public policy, have been designated first-responders by default. But they're being asked to do it with no resources," according to one pastor who works with ex-offenders.

"As chaplains we absorb people’s sadness, their brokenness, their depth of spiritual despair," says Dennis Gibbs, an Episcopal chaplain at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles. "In many ways we hold for these inmates what they cannot hold for themselves."

Five Supreme Court justices have agreed that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment forbids sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole for juveniles who commit crimes in which no one is killed.

A Mennonite pastor in Fresno, California believes that "even the worst of the worst of the worst are human beings, and they can change."

For this Grammy-nominated singer and Seventh-day Adventist pastor, music is both a ministry and "the most powerful way of impressing the human mind with hope." (Originally aired April 10, 2009)

On November 9, a divided Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases about just punishment for juveniles convicted of non-homicide offenses. Are life sentences imposed on juvenile offenders cruel and unusual?