British Prime Minister David Cameron is backing eviction for public housing tenants who participated in last week's riots. "Let's make sure if people riot and break the law, they get thrown out of their [public subsidized] council houses," Cameron said this weekend.  The first riot-related eviction papers have already been served on an entire family in London.  Meanwhile, former New York and Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton (of "zero tolerance" fame) is being considered as Britain's top cop after the resignation of the chief of the Metropolitan Police over the Murdoch hacking scandal. Before Cameron and the British go down this  Murdoch-media fueled path to mass incarceration and collective punishment, they'd do well to spend ten minutes with Michelle Alexander, legal scholar and author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness." Getting tough the US way has created a caste-like closed-system in which ex-felons are discriminated against in housing and employment  - forever.  "If your family lives in public housing they risk eviction if you even go home to visit. If you're a drug offender you can be denied food stamps in some states, for the rest of your life, and for the rest of your life, when you apply for employment you have to check that box whether the felony is three weeks or thirty years old." What does this system accomplish? It returns people right back to prison. "Which is what it's designed to do," Alexander told me in this interview recorded earlier this summer. Her book comes out in paperback this fall. Cameron and Brits shouldn't wait that long to read it.