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.

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.

"I'm doing the best I can to live out my faith as I understand it," says Episcopal priest and Vanderbilt University chaplain Becca Stevens. "Love is the most powerful force for social change."

"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.

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)

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.

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.