Half a million years have been siphoned from a generation living in New York’s prisons, jails and varia of confinement.1 Nationwide, 1,378 people have been executed since the mid-1970s while 144 on death row have been exonerated, most of whom spent a decade or more in prison awaiting their outcomes.2 And then there is the almost 12,500 years that the wrongfully convicted have lived behind bars over the last quarter century.3 These are the unaccounted dividends of mass incarceration,4 the irreducible measure of injustice in search of a remedy.
There comes a point in the life of every society when conscience can no longer be sacrificed to expedience. The war on crime has elevated the presumption of guilt, deflated the presumption of innocence and promoted retributive punishment to an end in itself. Hence, people have been wrongly incarcerated in numbers too high for a vaunted system of justice. Still, there is brewing a perfect storm of political will, economic necessity and fundamental fairness that might yet re-tune the machinery of guilt and punishment.
