I applaud Sen. Webb for taking the lead on this, and I agree this issue is like an octopus with many tentacles, so I appreciate the fact that time and care will be taken with this (unlike, say, the stimulus bill or budget bill).

What are we? Chopped liver? How can you have a commission that studies the criminal justice system and the treatment and over-incarceration of offenders and not include their representatives, their champions, the people who spend so much time with them, individually and as a whole, both in jails and prisons and out?

The short answer is something like this:  In the future envisioned by TPTB, the job of the criminal defense community will be to help facilitate whatever decisions will be made for their "clients" by TPTB and ensure the process runs smoothly.  

In so many words, this commission will make the way for completing the conversion from the adversarial model of criminal justice to the administrative.  In that new model, such quaint ideas as "innocence" and "rights" will no longer have value as currency.  The decision to arrest will be the decision to convict, as the criminal law will be so thoroughly structured as to make everyone liable for some crime or other, and the only issue that will remain is "when" they will be convicted, rather than "whether" or even "if a crime was committed."

A while back, a friend related to me a conversation between that friend and another, the latter being a senior cop in a prominent department.  The cop had noted that he welcomed the existence of things like poverty, family strife, domestic violence, and poor education, as those made good starting  material for creating future people who could not conform their behavior to the requirements of society or the law, i.e., defendants.  The cop further noted that a steady stream of future defendants ensured the continuance of his job, paycheck, benefits and retirement.  In fact the cop went so far as to remark that there was no real point for police to undertake programs to cut down on things like poverty, family strife, domestic violence, and poor education because it did not make economic sense to the cops to be "Cutting their own throat", so to speak.

The fact of beer lubricating that conversation should be noted.  In vino veritas.

You have to get your head around the concept that law enforcement - explicitly (like the friend-of-a-friend cop) or implicitly - does not view the people they arrest, process, convict and incarcerate as people.  Rather, they view them as some sorta-intelligent animal whose behavior makes possible the cops' future mortgage and boat payments.

I'm concerned this will just put tempt Congress to put reform bills on the back burner, using Webb's Commission as an excuse for delay. "Let's wait until the report comes out before making any changes."

Webb's bill seems to have come more or less out of nowhere in terms of Congressional interest on this matter.  It's not as if (or, rather, I don't think) there were a slew of bills waiting for votes that will now be derailed by Webb's committee.