Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project writes in Democracy about harsh sentencing.
“No other industrialized nation incarcerates its citizens at more than a fraction of the rate in the United States. Fewer people are sent to prison in most nations and their terms of imprisonment are considerably less severe. And notably, such policies have not produced spikes in crime. It is long past time to eliminate mass incarceration, and the only way to accomplish that will be to think broadly about how far we have come from any reasonable conception of what a fair and effective justice system should look like.”