Here's another example of the insanity of the War on (Some) Drugs, and its incompatibility with waging a real war:

It's a bad idea to keep so many people in prison, and it's a worse idea to do so and then have them exposed to radical "clerics."

Yes. A really bad idea.

A better solution would be enforced silence and meditation, like they do in Japanese prisons. Maybe prison operations should be outsourced to the Japanese government?

I believe in the marketplace of ideas! Don't you?
Instead of enforced silence, how about they go to school, which could include a free-ranging philosophy class.

I love that line in the movie 'Blow' with Johnny Depp, "I went to prison with a masters in Marijuana and left with a PhD in Cocaine."

And he went to Danbury, which in the big scheme of things; isn't as severe a place as Pelican
Bay or SuperMax. Of course, they sent Gordon Liddy
there and he organized the laundry detail.

This post reminds me of that Youtube clip of Phillipine prisoners doing their impression of
"Thriller". Now as to the whole drug wars brouhaha; the French tried taxing opium in the
1870s using it to finance at least one bank; The
Banque de Indochine, where Francois Mitterand's Vichy pal Rene Bousquet, got a seat in the 1950s.

Abominable I bet silence even without the meditation is more educational and more of a "marketplace of ideas" than the great majority of schools across the globe.