So how is this for a "vision thing": According to a study to be released Tuesday by a nonpartisan think tank, under Gov. George W. Bush, Texas has become the world capital of imprisonment. The Justice Policy Institute in Washington reports that more than 200,000 people are locked up under the jurisdiction of the Lone Star State's prison system, more than in any other state.

Not only that: "If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate" -- higher than China or Russia -- and the number keeps increasing.

The Lone Star State's prison population is also growing at twice the national average. As the Justice Policy Institute points out, "Since 1990, nearly one in five new prisoners added to the nation's prisons was in Texas." This astonishing rise is not owed entirely to George W. Bush. In Texas, as in the rest of the country, prison expansion is a relentlessly bipartisan enterprise. Many of the reforms that have tripled Texas' incarcerated population in just a decade began under his Democratic predecessor, Ann Richards.

Yet the Justice Policy Institute's study "Texas Tough?" is profoundly relevant to this year's presidential race. For one thing, much of that growth can be traced to harsh reforms touted by Bush as governor: returning record numbers of ex-offenders to prison for technical violations of parole, tripling the juvenile incarceration rate, and broadening the nonviolent offenses that lead to prison time (according to the JPI study, nearly 90,000 individuals are locked up in Texas for nonviolent crime, more "than the entire incarcerated population of the United Kingdom ... and bigger than New York's prison system).

But the study also challenges today's conventional wisdom about crime and punishment in ways that go well beyond the presidential race. "There is little evidence," the Justice Policy Institute's researchers find, "that Texas' severe correctional system is responsible" for lower crime rates. To the contrary: When it comes to reducing crime, "a state-by-state comparison shows the Lone Star State to be lagging behind other jurisdictions which have not increased their prison systems as dramatically."

In fact, during the five years of Bush's prison-building tenure, Texas had the smallest drop in crime among other large states, and half that of the nation as a whole. New York, for instance, had one of the slowest-growing prison populations in the U.S. during the past five years -- yet crime fell four times faster. In other words, higher incarceration does not lead to falling crime.

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