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.

“We were building million-dollar vacation town homes, and we were displacing people,” says Nancy Murray, founder and CEO of Builders of Hope, and then “I started getting a conscience.”

"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."

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?

Today there are two million inmates in US prisons and jails, and according to social policy analyst Eric Cadora our overdependence on criminal justice is threatening our cities, communities, and neighborhoods.

The US is the only Western democracy that still sentences youthful offenders to life in prison without parole for serious crimes. But there is growing resistance to that.

Some say that without safeguards it is a slippery slope on the road to genetic surveillance. Others are convinced it will bring many more criminals to justice.

In Memphis, fugitives are turning themselves in at local churches as part of a two-year old Justice Department program called Fugitive Safe Surrender.

A story about a former state legislator who believed the answer to crime was more and more prisons -- until he got locked up himself. Now he's leading a faith-based program for prisoner rehabilitation, and he says it works.