Ninth-grade civics--do they even teach it anymore? I had a great civics teacher once, but you wouldn't know it if you studied the career of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who sat in that same classroom with me some 30-odd years ago. We were both on the mock-trial team--Arkansas state champions, national finalists. In that same room where we practiced, I remember debating her on the death penalty. She argued emotion; I argued the law. I won that round.

But years later, she's winning the war.

Now she wants to spend $825 million of Arkansans' tax dollars on a project that promises not rehabilitation, but more of the same--a monument to punishment in a state already hemorrhaging from backward approaches to problems that progress, not politics, should be solving. Civics is supposed to teach us that

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