It's been a great week at TPM. My final post will focus on a few more issues for President Obama and attorney general-designate Eric Holder, as well as some closing words on my 1960s experience in the context of our current moment.

President Obama has enough on his plate that needs urgent attention without adding more. So does attorney general-designate Holder. But there are two areas that cry out for attention even if they do not appear to have the urgency of other issues: political contributions and reform of the criminal justice system. The President need not take substantive positions on these issues right away, but both are ripe for independent bipartisan commissions to examine. Obama can then make his own independent decisions in the light of what an informed bipartisan group concludes.

I think it is obvious that elected officials' dependence on money to run elections makes difficult their independent judgment on policy. Repeated attempts to resolve the problem through legislation have been, at best, watered-down versions of what is necessary. The money that lobbyists earn and contribute is evidence of the importance to business of government laws and regulations, and it is proper that interests be heard. But accompanying argument with money does not improve the chance of rational resolution. Serious conflicts of interest abound, affecting the confidence the general public has in the integrity of both elected and appointed officials.

(Note: Nick Katzenbach is the author of the new book Some of It Was Fun: Working with RFK and LBJ.)

These are soluble problems but difficult for those with a potential financial interest in the resolution to resolve. Hence the necessity for an independent commission to balance free speech and the political power of money. An independent commission could come up with untainted recommendations for reforming political contributions, and it is possible that they could gain enough public support to be enacted. At any rate, it is worth trying, and worth giving such a commission the resources and power to get the public informed and involved.

When I became AG the country was just beginning to be concerned with so-called crime in the streets and the growing use of cocaine and other illicit drugs. I had also been concerned about the treatment of prisoners in many state institutions. At my suggestion President Johnson formed a commission to examine the problems of criminal justice and to recommend reforms. When I refer to reforming the criminal justice system I am obviously referring to an area which is predominantly the product of state policies. But it was an area which needs general fact-finding and recommendations to solve common problems. The commission came up with an excellent report with many recommendations which are still valid today. Unfortunately, it got swallowed up in the controversy over Vietnam and the reaction to LBJ's liberal agenda, especially with respect to race. After the race riots of the late 1960s, some politicians capitalized on fear of black crime as an argument for more severe punishment, and because a disproportionate amount of street crime and drug dealing involved young African Americans, rational proposals for improving criminal justice became used as tools of subtle racism in the form of increased punishment, mandatory sentences, and little attention to rehabilitation.

The cost of maintaining overcrowded prisons today is enormous and effective crime control could be done far cheaper. But cost is not the basic issue. How we treat in the name of criminal "justice" our fellow human beings is. We should be ashamed and disgusted at the conditions prevailing in many of our prisons. The criminal process has been abused by exploiting the fear of crime, by imposing long mandatory sentences for non-violent crimes, by creating unhealthy conditions within prisons which affect the health of the community outside, by abandoning rehabilitation efforts, and by releasing prisoners back into the community with no supervision, help or attention. We forget that prison is the ultimate and last resort and fail to use alternate means of punishment for non-violent crimes. We starve funds so that corrections people have no capacity to treat prisoners with decency. We put the insane in with the sane, the violent in with the non violent. We have let our prisons in too many instances become breeding places for more crime, not places interested in corrections. I believe the system as it exists today does not promote public safety nearly as well as could be done at the same or less expense and with a decent regard for our fellow human beings.

From 2005 to 2006, I co-chaired with John Gibbons, former Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, a bipartisan panel through the Vera Institute of Justice called the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons. The Commission explored violence and abuse in America's prisons and jails and how to make correctional facilities safer for prisoners and staff and more effective in promoting public safety and public health. Our findings and a set of 30 practical recommendations for operating correctional facilities that reflect America's values and serve our best interests are captured in the report, Confronting Confinement.

I think the country is ready for a good look at what is going on. We can reduce crime; we can have decency at less cost than brutality and, yes, what comes very close in a few prisons to torture. It is time to take a serious look at the problems and see if we cannot devise a fairer justice system.

* * * *

I have found the past eight years discouraging, as though somehow we had inexplicably lost our way. In 2001, I went to Washington for the dedication of the Justice Department building to Bobby in the hope that this momentous occasion might symbolize some change. No such luck. It was a simple ceremony and nothing was said or done that in any way was inconsistent with honoring Bobby in a manner that we all appreciated. Yet for some time thereafter I was depressed by the whole affair. I think it was because at no point did anyone, even briefly, describe the Bobby I knew and the department he headed. The speakers--I am sure inadvertently--made it appear routine, business as usual, with a little humor but with none of the energy, the excitement, the hope that permeated the building in the early sixties. What, I wondered, is government if it cannot seek to realize the hopes and aspirations of the governed? It may not succeed, but it must try.

When I read about the sixties, I find them described as tumultuous, with violence, riots, demonstrations, sit-ins, arrests, political assassinations, student unrest over Vietnam, and so forth. All true, but that is not how I remember them. More important, they were a time of hope, of shared aspirations for a better America. I think of Dr. King leading hundreds of black citizens, tired of racial discrimination and of being treated as second-class citizens, to assert their rights in the certain knowledge of arrests, beatings, and police brutality. I think of the Freedom Riders, blacks and whites riding integrated buses with knowledge of the dangers they were courting from southern authorities. I think of the young people going south to help blacks register to vote, the murders of Goodman, Cheney, and Schwerner for trying to help others exercise constitutional rights to which all of us are entitled. I think of the dignity of both whites and blacks in the March on Washington, proclaiming the need for this country to live up to its great democratic tradition. I think of students protesting a war they did not understand or approve of. I think of nations all around the globe seeing us vindicate our beliefs about human equality and individual worth in the face of opposition and looking to us for leadership to a better world.

But most of all I think of this nation coming together, finally, to face up to our problems and try to live up to our principles; of Republicans and Democrats working together to attempt to solve a racial problem as old as our democracy; of Congressman William McCulloch of Ohio, with absolutely no political gain for himself but with a conscience and a sense that Congress must represent all the people, leading the way in the House to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; of the party of Lincoln, with Senator Dirksen from Lincoln's Illinois, acting with determination and courage. Had Republicans left the problem to the administration and Democrats, there would have been no solution, and the rule of law would have been immeasurably damaged.

Those were the thoughts I had during and after the naming of the Justice Department for my friend and leader. I longed for rhetoric about what this country could be, how we could work together, how together we could face up to and solve our problems. I longed for an end to partisan bickering and political confrontation, and for a restoration of leadership that sought to persuade, not unilaterally seek to have its own way and thereby divide. If we had learned anything from the tumultuous sixties, it was that racial problems could not be resolved effectively by a judicial elite but required the voice of the people and the hard work of a bipartisan Congress to put policy into law; and that a president, however sincere and determined, could not conduct a war without the support and understanding of the Congress and, through it, the people. The leadership of President Kennedy and President Johnson worked when it was open and designed to persuade, as in civil rights, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Great Society programs, and it failed--in the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam--when the Congress and the public were not an essential part of the policy.

The most exciting aspect of working for Kennedy and Johnson was witnessing the young people who demonstrated, marched, and were arrested for civil rights, who flocked south to help register African American voters, who protested a misguided war in Vietnam. Our democracy depends so heavily on the young having trust and confidence in what we, as a people, can do, on their dedication to making us true to our values and to ourselves. President Obama has ignited that confidence. It is his message of hope that resounds so strongly with the young and, I think, makes those of who lived through the sixties feel young again.