By now it is obvious to almost everyone that current “criminal justice” practices are at best ineffective and at worst brutal. Critics on many fronts have attacked the prison-industrial complex, with its “three-strikes” laws and for-profit bureaucratic schemes. Even the mainstream media have reported on the United States’ record rates of incarceration, the privatization of the prison industry, corporate use of convict labor, prison overcrowding, and the increasing application of the death penalty. There is now broad outrage at this systematized insanity masking as “law and order” and many have begun to search for alternative methods of understanding concepts such as crime, punishment, and justice. There is cause for hope in this, but also concern, given that so much still needs to be done and that the current crisis continues to worsen dramatically.