jail

PFC Bradley Manning remains in solitary confinement despite not having been tried or convicted of any crime. The accused leaker of much of the military information that WikiLeaks has so far published turned 23 on Friday and celebrated his birthday without family or friends, in a six foot by twelve foot cell without a pillow and in which he is not allowed to exercise. Michael Whitney of FireDogLake has been following Manning's case closely, and joins us via Skype to fill us in on the latest reports on Manning's condition--and why the government feels the need to hold Manning in conditions like those of an enemy combatant.

As Republican freshmen head to Congress, many of them are riding a wave of promises to repeal "Obamacare." As Jamie Court noted on our show last week, one of the most unpopular elements of the bill is the mandate that Americans purchase private health insurance. But Wendell Potter, former health insurance industry insider, notes that that is the part of the bill that is most popular with the insurance companies that bankrolled those same Republicans.Donna Smith of National Nurses United (and of Michael Moore's health care film Sicko) asks, meanwhile, if there's any value at all created by the private health care industry. We try to answer that question with Donna and Wendell in our studio, as well as the question of what luck Republicans will have with repeal, and what can be done on a state level.Hope is in short supply these days, particularly for those in America's packed prison system. California incarcerates more women than any other state, and when those women get out of jail they often have nothing more than $200 in their pockets and hope to go on. Susan Burton was one of those women once, and now she's founder and executive director of A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a nonprofit organization that helps formerly incarcerated women get their lives back together.Susan has been named one of CNN's ten Heroes this year, and is in the running for the top spot, and she joins us via Skype, along with Kimberle Crenshaw, who explains just why Susan's nomination gives her hope in a bleak time.

The United States incarcerates more of its population, both in aggregate numbers and per capita, than any other country in the world--four times as much as China, which has more people and makes no pretense at being a democracy. This is just one of the troubling facts about the prison industry in the US that Robert Perkinson uncovers in his book, Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire. He traces the modern prison complex to its Southern roots, and connects its racial disparities to the backlash against the civil rights movement. All this might sound depressing, but Perkinson and Leonard Noisette of the Criminal Justice Fund of the Open Society Institute note that the economic crisis and a new administration have combined for one of the best chances for real prison reform since the Johnson administration. They join Laura in studio to discuss.