[Tapper:] Welcome back to TAKE 5. Send us your e-mail at TAKE5@cnn.com. Do it right now, and we'll read it on the show later. And check out our Web site, CNN.comTAKE5, for more about the show and online chat every Friday. This week, a 27-year-old woman from Washington state won a victory that could affect women across the country. Jennifer Erickson launched a case that persuaded a federal judge to rule that it was discriminatory for her employer's health plan not to cover women's prescription contraceptives. Michelle, I've been listening to you yammer about this for weeks. All right, sister, lay it on us. Why is this important?
[Cottle:] About time! I'm sick of hearing people talk about how fertility is not a disease. In fact, this is one of the most important preventative health care measures that women have. And it's very expensive. And that's what the court said, they said if a health care plan is covering preventative medicine, it needs to include prescription contraceptives.
[Tapper:] You know, what I thought was funny about this is the fact that this was not really an issue until about two years ago, when the Pfizer corporation discovered this pill called Viagra, and all of a sudden CEOs and insurers were, like, yes, let's cover that! Let's cover that!
[Cottle:] Absolutely! And they weren't covering contraceptives.
[Tapper:] I wonder why they were so excited.
[Cottle:] ... and women went berserk.
[Caldwell:] But this plan did not cover it, and this smacks of special pleading. Look, people are different. Men don't pay the same life insurance premiums as women, even though they die earlier. And this is just one of those accidents of nature, and I don't see why why it's the business of the government to compensate.
[Dickerson:] No, I disagree, because what happens in this case is they measured it against other preventative medicines. So, for example, men take blood pressure and cholesterol medicine. So, why you know, men who are overeating their stakes and all of that, women have to pay for that, I mean, in the overall insurance pool, so why in this case shouldn't this be the same as those other preventative medicines?
[Sanchez:] Another little tact here in terms of looking at who is opposing this. And I know that the Roman Catholic Church was opposed very much to this, both because they don't want to provide contraceptive, and they don't want anyone else providing contraceptives, but as a Roman Catholic, I think this is where I have a hard time with the church having such a narrow-minded approach to women today. And I think this is a struggle that is going on constantly within the American church.
[Cottle:] I think exactly. I think Felix has got an excellent point here. Jake, you are clearly wrong once more. From the pill to prisons and criminal justice, whiplash this week over new crime statistics. The FBI says crime is up. Another Justice Department report said it's down. But all agree that the prisons are packed. The number of people behind bars in local, state and federal prisons is more than two million, four times what it was 20 years ago. With 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. has 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Chris, has it been worth the cost?
[Caldwell:] No. We've had some benefits, but no. You can break those numbers down in even more terrifying ways, like say that half of the people in the world are American blacks, and over 10 percent of the world's prisoners are American blacks. The people we are putting in jail are not, in general, more violent offenders. It's more drug offenders, and it's the war on drugs that's driving this. Bad idea.
[Dickerson:] But if you put the drug offenders in jail, aren't they then so conservatives would say precluded from committing other crimes, and that's why we've seen both the number of crimes go down?
[Caldwell:] Yes, some people would say that. It's a high, high price to pay and it creates a real chilling effect on the rest of the...
[Cottle:] And the problem right now is there are huge numbers coming out of prisons. And you send them in for non-violent crimes, you then train them to be violent and to commit even worse crimes. It's a training program.
[Sanchez:] I think it continues to beg the question of the disparity between black and Hispanic prisoners that are populating these jails and the inequity of the system that seems to be profiling them and putting them into jail. And I mean, there's just no way that you can look at the population and seem to figure out how this is happening.
[Tapper:] Well, because is it not fair to say that blacks and Hispanics also make up more of the lower class, the classes that are more likely to commit crimes? I am not saying that I support the inequity, but I mean, that's at least one of the factors.
[Sanchez:] But I don't know that you know, we've always looked at those terms that if you come from a lower socioeconomic income, you are going to have a greater propensity to go into jail. And I think that all the white-collar crime that we know that is out there doesn't get attacked in the same way as the kind of drug crime that we're looking at that's putting people that are non-violent into prison.
[Cottle:] Well, Felix, sorry, I have to move on here, from crime and punishment to the music often accused of promoting the gangster lifestyle. In New York this week, a closed-door gathering of the kings and queens of hip-hop, the red-hot music that often uses raw language to highlight the raw issues of poverty and racism. Jake, you're a big hip-hop fan. Are the sexist and violent lyrics just poetry aimed at the establishment?
[Tapper:] That's Mack 10, by the way, in case you're wondering what that video was. You know, I did for another CNN show earlier this week, I had a bunch of these people from the hip-hop summit, Russell Simmons from Def Jam Records and Chuck D and a few others. And what amazed me yes, I like hip-hop. I am an adult, of course, purportedly, and a lot of this music is listened to by children and it is affecting these kids. I was amazed, none of these guys would accept any responsibility for the lyrics and for the message they were sending. It was really phenomenal.
[Dickerson:] Russell Simmons, in particular, since he makes money directly from all of this, and the others as well. One thing that's interesting, though, is you know a genre has made it when it starts navel-gazing. I mean, hip-hop is here to stay, and you know, there are a lot of other types of music that haven't done it. This is now a fundamental part of American culture.
[Caldwell:] Well, it might be a sign of demise, actually. What might be happening is what happened to the folk music movement in the '60s, where these things hang around until they get more and more pretentious and have these huge claims to want to reorder society, which is...
[Dickerson:] Well, I disagree. There seems to be a whole raft of new hip-hop artists who are going to see this summit and want to do everything that they are against whatever they are talking about in these closed rooms.
[Sanchez:] But the idea of the summit, which was to organize the hip-hop constituency to have a political action committee, et cetera I mean, when Cornell West from Harvard has his own hip-hop album about to come out to preach, basically, to young kids, I think that we're missing the boat about this genre of music. But at the same time...
[Caldwell:] ... it's like taking the booze out of Irish ballads, or something like that.
[Tapper:] But you know, one of main things they were worried about, the subtext of this, was how they were going to market the records, because they are terrified Russell Simmons in particular is terrified about a bill that is being introduced by Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman that is going to fine movie and video game and rap artists and music people, industry people, if they market adult contend to children. They are terrified of it. That was definitely one of the subtexts.
[Cottle:] Well, Jake, we're going have to check on your e-mails in a minute, plus "Our Takes" in a moment.