It's patently ridiculous that regions like the Black Belt, where populations have fallen so far in recent decades that barely more than 20 people inhabit each square mile, have been forgotten and ignored.

It's a place that seems more like a developing nation than a land of opportunity, where children are more likely to be born to single mothers and more likely to die before they learn to walk.

Eight of the counties in Alabama's Black Belt are on the list of the 100 poorest counties by median household income, as counted by the U.S. Census Bureau. Four of them - Wilcox, Sumter, Green and Bullock - are in the bottom 25.

The bottom 25. Out of more than 3,000 counties nationally. Ridiculous.

"Punishing and imprisoning the poor is the distinctively American response to poverty in the twenty-first century," it said. "Workers who cannot pay their debts, those who cannot afford private probation services, minorities targeted for traffic infractions, the homeless, the mentally ill, fathers who cannot pay child support and many others are all locked up. Mass incarceration is used to make social problems temporarily invisible and to create the mirage of something having been done."