Book excerpt: America's prisons are bursting at the seams. More than two million Americans are now behind bars, with the inmate population growing more than 10% year. Since it costs more to maintain a prisoner than to send someone to the finest medical or law school, this has become a corrosive political and social issue, capturing unprecedented media attention: cover stories in The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, The Economist, American Prospect, and Atlantic Monthly; a five-part Nightline series with Ted Koppel reporting from behind bars, etc. Fidel & Leo (the title is a pun on Beethoven's prison opera, Fidelio) is the story of a young Venezuelan software genius (Rocco, nicknamed "Fidel"), an old holocaust survivor (Leo), and a pioneering American woman filmmaker (Nora) who find a way to solve this problem by creating a new industry: small, inexpensive, and humane prisons with computer-simulated environments. The prisons are adapted from ordinary commercial real estate, franchised, and adopted all over the world, making billionaires of the partners. The story is about what happens to them, their prisoners and America.