With vigils, rallies and teach-ins across America, a ragtag coalition of activists last Tuesday marked the moment when the nation's prison population theoretically rose above 2 million for the first time ever. Spirited though they were, the efforts rated little more than a yawn on the nation's attention meter. They certainly didn't create enough of a stir to overshadow the day's other groundbreaking event: television's first-ever win-a-multimillionaire pageant. In fact, the inmate projections (made by the Justice Policy Institute, a progressive criminal-justice think tank) may have outpaced reality.
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