With the economy in a shambles and a couple of intractable wars being waged, it's probably safe to say that prison reform is not a top priority, or even a blip on the radar screen of national concerns, for most Americans. That's why it is so notable that U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., has taken up this neglected cause, which has important implications for both Vermont and New Hampshire.

Webb may seem like an unlikely champion of prison reform, being a decorated former Marine and one-time secretary of the Navy under President Reagan. In short, he's no bleeding heart. But, as he told The Washington Post last week, “I think you can be a law-and-order leader and still understand that the criminal justice system as we understand it today is broken, unfair, locking up the wrong people in many cases and not locking up the right person in many cases.”

What Webb proposes is to introduce legislation this spring to establish a national commission to recommend ways to overhaul the criminal justice system. This comes not a moment too soon, in our view. With 2.3 million people in prison, the United States has jailed a higher percentage of its population than any other nation. Although the United States has only 5 percent of the world's population, it has 25 percent of its prison population, Webb says.

These shocking statistics are echoed much closer to home. Between 1996 and 2006, Vermont's inmate count doubled, from 1,058 to 2,123, although crime rates did not increase, according to the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Charitable Trusts. The project reports that Vermont's incarceration rate as a percentage of the population increased 80 percent during the 10-year period, compared with a national rate that went up by 18 percent. Meanwhile, state spending on corrections increased from $48 million in the 1996 fiscal year to $130 million in fiscal 2008, or from 4 percent of the general fund to 10 percent.

A recent report by The New Hampshire Women's Policy Institute noted that the number of females sent to county jails in New Hampshire increased by 24 percent between 2003 and 2007, compared with 14 percent for men. The admission of women to state prison increased 64 percent during that same period. And the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies identifies corrections as one of the major drivers of increased state spending over the past decade.

The huge financial costs imposed on the taxpayers by locking up so many people are compounded by the individual -- and societal -- tragedy of wasting so much human potential. Prisons are certainly necessary to incarcerate violent offenders. But holding large numbers of nonviolent offenders in prison makes little sense. Many could probably receive the substance-abuse and mental-health counseling they so desperately need more cheaply in a community setting, along with education and job training that would increase their odds of staying out of trouble -- and out of jail — once they are released from supervision, as almost all eventually are. Webb is right that the nation needs to re-examine its sentencing, treatment, parole and post-release policies to ensure that only those who need to be behind bars are there, and that the nation is not squandering financial and human resources on a vast scale.