This afternoon, my friend Michael Mushlin–a longtime member of the invaluable Correctional Association of New York and a venerable professor at Pace Law School–sent me a worthy article offering empirical evidence for a proposition we intuitively know: Harsh prison conditions in fact contribute to recidivism. What struck me in reading the article, just hours after skimming today’s New York Times profile of Dick Cheney’s hunting victim, is that Texas lawyer Harry Whittington has made the same point. "While serving on the board of the Texas Department of Corrections in the 1980s," the Times reports, "and after observing the conditions in many state prisons, Whittington once claimed, ‘Prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants.’"

Now, as the inimitable Molly Ivins put it in her column yesterday, Whittington isn’t some flaming liberal. He’s a liberal, Ivins writes, "only by Texas standards, and that sets the bar about the height of a matchbook. Nevertheless, [he] is seriously civilized, particularly on the issues of crime, punishment and prisons."

Seriously civilized. Hard to think of the Texans in this Administration–or its second-in-command, for that matter–in those terms.