The president is scheduled to sign the “Second Chance Act” tomorrow, thus officially making rehabilitation a goal of our misguided prison system. It’s difficult to get excited about any program from the architect of the spectacularly flawed No Child Left Behind, but the wheels of progress are turning exceptionally slowly these days and how wonderful that our government is even thinking about such things! I know it’s prompted more by prison overcrowding than deep concern for society, but we have to start somewhere.

Education is primary, but not just book learnin’; communication skills and techniques for mediation and meditation would be great. We should also teach them yoga, or send Peter, my Total Body Workout teacher, to whip them into shape. Physical workout classes using weights, balls and BOSUs create more centered bodies and minds. Prisoners would develop discipline and balance, and probably take a bit of an ego bruising in the process (as I do), but humility is always a good lesson.

Speaking of starting somewhere, if we’d stop making budget cuts in schools, we could lessen what is in LA a 50 percent high school dropout rate, and diminish the prison population over the next few decades. Let’s give the kids a second chance to create meaningful lives before they get anywhere close to a jail. It’s going to come out of the federal budget sooner or later, so doesn’t it make more sense to help our kids achieve productive lives and contribute to society? What, you say the teacher’s lobby isn’t as strong as the prison lobby? We noticed.

If we’re really going to look at where all this starts, we should be supporting family planning clinics so that every kid who gets born is affordable and wanted. Oops, I forgot, the gov doesn’t give money to clinics that promote any birth control besides abstinence, and we know how well that works.

All these elements are integrally related, and until we start looking at the way the puzzle pieces fit together, we’re swimming upstream.