I. Introduction
Americans have been conditioned to think of the criminal justice system as an organized bureaucratic machine that follows a neat and precise sequence of events. A person commits a crime for which they are arrested, they appear before a judge for sentencing and they take a hiatus from society for a few years while they pay their debt; after which time they will be fully rehabilitated and ready to rejoin their former communities. Sadly, this model is work of fiction in comparison to the massive prison-industrial machine that has been cultivated over the past several decades. In the land of the free, not only do we possess the highest population of incarcerated