I had a terrifying dream the other night.

It concerned a great, unseen power that operated an amusement park. Those who followed instructions pranced along and had a merry time, not noticing anything amiss. Those who didn't conform were separated out from the group and, to their surprise, were slowly and surely tortured and killed.

The dream was a neat summary of the column I've been writing, on prisons. Probably the best way to understand the scope, barbarity, and sheer sadism of the unseen, ever-expanding American Gulag is as a nightmare.

America's increasingly harsh and punitive attitude to whomever it brands as criminals, particularly through the War on Drugs, has led to a stunning growth in incarceration rates. This year, the U.S. surpassed the two million mark in its prison population. That's more than the entire population of the state of West Virginia; it is a quarter of the world's entire prison population. Far too few people wonder what the hell a "free" country is doing imprisoning 1 in 130 of its citizens; some 1 in 28 of its blacks.

Even more disturbingly, Corporate America has discovered the profitability of locking people up. Directly and indirectly, a jailed population is good for business. Directly, the growth in the Pacific Northwest and nationally of private companies that operate prisons for profit--such prisons have opened recently in Montana and Idaho, and the INS contracts out a for-profit detention center in Seattle--means that inmates suffer additionally through lax supervision and "downsized" education and rehabilitation programs. Indirectly, companies here and nationally have discovered the benefits of prison labor, where inmates are paid low low wages (much of which they can't keep), can't unionize, can't complain about conditions, and are delivered to work promptly every day. Moreover, America's prisons are creating an entire class of ex-cons who have that much harder a time afterwards finding jobs that are willing to pay them competitive wages.

"There's this whole sense from Congress on down that prisoners are somehow less than human, and that you can do anything you like behind prison walls," says Jenni Gainsborough of the D.C.-based Sentencing Project. The group tracks the excesses of the nation's prisons: sensory deprevation, stun technology, abuse of solitary conrinement, and endlessly on. Gainsborough says that Washington state's prisons are better than most nationally--but that the trend, like everywhere else, is steadily and rapidly worsening. Partiularly noteworthy, in Washington and elsewhere, is the new trend toward "Super-Max" prisons--prisons or control units whose harshness has justifiably drawn accusations of torture and inhumane treatment from groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. A new such unit is being built at Monroe.

The outrages seem endless. Prisons are chronically overcrowded; inmates are shuttled from state to state as prisons, particularly private ones, juggle to keep their beds full. Mandatory sentencing keeps inmates in longer; punitive parole boards prevent release even when inmates have served their time well. How does any of this serve society?

During a season in which we heard repeated platitudes about exercising one's right to vote, we heard nothing about the four million current and former prisoners who cannot vote. Disproportionately, the ban on voting--like criminal justice matters in general--falls hardest on minorities, particularly African Americans. The number of young African American men who have been swept up by the law and subsequently lost the right to vote is so extensive it has led some in the African American community to worry aloud about an intentional campaign to disenfranchise blacks.

These measures serve no particular purpose other than to exact societal revenge for what are often, as with the War on Drugs, "crimes" that hurt noone but the criminal. From any kind of penological standpoint, they are counterproductive; sooner or later, most prisoners are going to re-enter society, and it simply makes more sense for them to be suitably chastened but to have a job skill and a way to "go straight." Instead, we are warehousing literally millions of people who rot away, spending 23 or more hours a day in a cage, day after day after day. Unless they are unusually resourceful, they are learning nothing but anger and the tools of various criminal trades from fellow prisoners.

It is a state of affairs the country should be deeply ashamed of; instead, both major presidential candidates touted their love of the death penalty and the War on Drugs, and Washington had a gubernatorial candidate, John Carlson, who was propelled to political relevance by his tough-on-crime initiatives. Cons and ex-cons, remember, can't vote. All signs are that locking up as many people as possible, for as long as possible, as harshly as possible, is deeply popular with most Americans. But then, the Christian/lion spectacles at the Colosseum drew sellout crowds.