“Each year, our country spends $80 billion to incarcerate nearly one out of every 100 people. After a lengthy legal career, and as a concerned citizen, I’m here to say that things must change.
“In Mississippi, we had similar incarceration patterns. Our state’s prison population grew by 300 percent between 1983 and 2013. In 2012, we had the second-highest incarceration rate in the country. Had these concerning trends continued, studies projected the prison population would have grown for the next 10 years — at a cost of $266 million to taxpayers.”