California has been slammed in recent years for its prison overcrowding and inhumane conditions but until now the issue of prisoners’ mental health has been largely swept under the rug.

As Congress continues a government shutdown that's gone on for nearly two weeks, the issue of mass incarceration just might be something both parties can agree on.

Co-Authored by Sarah Solon, Communications Strategist at the ACLU.

Frankie Barton's son has Hepatitis C. It's treatable, but she says the for-profit Corizon Prison Health Management has skimped on giving him the proper treatment while he's incarcerated. 

This week In the Public Interest (ITPI) has published a report exposing lock-up quotas in the contracts between private prisons and state and local governments nationwide. Nearly two-thirds of the prison contracts that ITPI analyzed have an occupancy guarantee. That means governments assure private prisons of inmates to lock up, with the quotas ranging from 80-100% of prison beds. If the inmates don’t materialize, taxpayers are on the hook for paying for the beds anyway — leading ITPI to dub the payments “low crime taxes.”

Attorney General Eric Holder forgot to mention something when he announced that federal prosecutors should treat nonviolent drug crimes differently: President Obama already has the power to release inmates but is choosing not to do so.

Hardly a day passes without news about reforming the prison system. Attorney General Eric Holder has announced that federal prosecutors should minimize charges for certain nonviolent drug offenders. Last Thursday he informed the governors of Colorado and Washington that new state laws legalizing marijuana would be honored as long as certain conditions were met. The issues of solitary confinement and mental illness have sparked public debate in California and elsewhere about prison policies—as has the hit Netflix series “Orange is the New Back,” which shows systemic flaws in the criminal justice system.

Next week, it will be 50 years since Martin Luther King Jr. gave the "I Have a Dream" speech. He railed then against "the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination," contending that the African-American was "an exile in his own land." Yet he could not have imagined that Jim Crow would soon be replaced with another oppressive system: mass incarceration.

Shows revolving around prisons and law enforcement have traditionally sensationalized crime and dehumanized criminals. Think Lockup, CSI, Oz, Cops, the Law & Order franchise -- there are good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys are really bad. But TV is changing. Pockets of programming are becoming sophisticated and analytical when it comes to crime, The Wire being perhaps the foremost example of a show that indicts our country's dysfunctional criminal justice system more than the individuals ensnared in it. Netflix's new series Orange Is the New Black is a welcome addition to this trend. It isn't as gritty or nakedly political as The Wire, but it has no fear about revealing that the good guys aren't always good, the bad guys aren't always bad, and the system is setting all of them up to fail.

Two prominent conservatives over the last week have spoken out on the need to hack away at our country’s system of mass incarceration — putting the lie to the notion that criminal justice reform is purely a bleeding-heart pursuit.

Despite legal action, the horrors of privately run prisons continue, as inmates at the Idaho Correctional Center have learned. In 2010, inmates filed a lawsuit against CCA over a prison so violent that it was known as “Gladiator School.”