More than 2.4 million people are behind bars in the United States today.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission voted unanimously last week to allow nearly 50,000 nonviolent federal drug offenders to seek lower sentences. The decision of the commission retroactively applied an earlier change in sentencing guidelines to now cover roughly half of those serving federal drug sentences. Both the Department of Justice and prison-reform advocates have endorsed the change. It’s a significant step forward in reversing decades of mass incarceration, though in a global context, still modest.
Continue reading… “Mass incarceration may be the greatest social crisis in modern American history”
