Progress is hard to come by in today’s political climate. It has been especially hard in matters of criminal justice, where for many years the fear of being “soft” on crime drove politicians to compete on the toughness scale. The ratchet drove sentences up, never down. With 5 percent of the world’s population, we now hold 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.
But we are seeing now some progress toward lowering incarceration rates. After years of being branded soft on crime, Democrats have become timid while Republicans have had greater freedom to think through the problems created by three decades of increase in jail populations. It has burdened state budgets and devastated minority communities. (In Louisiana, the most punitive state, one in 86 adults is doing time, nearly double the national average. Among black men from New Orleans, one in 14 is behind bars and one in seven is either in prison, on parole or on probation.)
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