The bigger surprises came in what he had to say about matters beyond the war. The senator bragged about walking a picket line during his campaign. Most strikingly, he lamented the country's high incarceration rates, singling out the fact that a black man who does not graduate from high school faces a 60 percent chance of ending up in jail.Read the whole thing."This is not something that fits into political campaigns, but I have long been concerned about the staggering prison incarceration rates in the United States, which are the highest in the world," he declared.
As a reminder, Webb is the junior senator from Virginia.
"We want to keep bad people off our streets. We want to break the backs of gangs, and we want to cut down on violent behavior," he said, "But there is something else going on when we are locking up such a high percentage of our people, marking them at an early age and in many cases eliminating their chances for a productive life as citizens."
He says the high incarceration is a "trajectory" issue. "It will take years of energy to sort it out, but I am committed to working on a solution that is both responsive to our need for law and order, and fairer to those who become entangled in this system."
Needless to say, not a lot of people are talking about the mind-boggling number of black men in jail and what to do about it -- and certainly not a lot of people in the United States Senate.
Webb said that he has sometimes been dismissed as a one-issue candidate: "Well, I probably do spend a little bit too much time on economic fairness," he said with a smirk, "but I don't simply dwell on that issue."
He came armed with a litany of statistics, and if you closed your eyes, you would have thought it was Huey Long talking:
--The Editors
