Cato Event Podcast

“Mass incarceration” has been a ubiquitous term in criminal justice circles because of the extraordinary number of people behind bars in the United States. Many partial solutions have been implemented on the state and federal levels, mostly concerned with sentence length and re-entry services for nonviolent offenders. Those changes have been improvements, for the most part, and have been life changing for thousands of inmates, returning citizens, and their families.However, the fundamentals of our criminal justice system remain unchanged, and our policies continue to put too many people in cages for too long. The politics surrounding crime policy are often driven by fear and vengeance, not experience and data, and thus many jurisdictions are one tragedy — or a crime-rate increase — away from another wave of bad criminal laws. Our collective desire to punish wrongdoing through our criminal justice system too often outweighs the data that suggest better ways to improve public safety and reduce crimi