Jim Webb, the former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan and current Democratic Senator from Virginia, wants to rehabilitate America's criminal justice system. So he's proposed a crime bill!

Webb's plan [1] starts with creating a bipartisan commission to study the system for 18 months and come up with a concrete legislative reform plan of its own.

Webb points out urgent reasons for the legislation, which include:

• About 25 percent of the world's prisoners live in the US, which only has five percent of the world's population.
• The number of drug offenders in prison has jumped 1,200 percent since 1980.
• Four times as many mentally ill people are in prison than in mental health hospitals.
• Post-prison re-entry programs are often nonexistent and threaten public safety.

The crime bill has begun gaining support [2] from both conservatives and liberals typically afraid of being labeled soft on crime.

Source [3]