Great article, but the reason these changes cannot currently work in the US is because we haven't finished with our traumatic event--our version of the Holocaust--yet. That's why there is no talk about 'human dignity.' If you proposed humane prisons to the Nazis, they'd have ridiculed you, just like anyone proposing them in the US is currently ridiculed. As long as our government and society don't see any problems with locking up over two million people, many of them for nonviolent crimes, they certainly will not see any problems with treating them in the inhumane ways they're currently being treated. Germany had to end its war before it could start valuing human dignity again and the US will have to as well. Until then, human dignity will not exist in the US "justice" system.