The United States has embraced prison as a way to deal with crime more than any other country in the world. It leads in terms of overall number of incarcerated people—2.3 million—as well as incarceration rate—which the Brennan Center determines to be nine times higher than the rate of “Germany, eight times higher than Italy, five times higher than the U.K., and [fifteen] times higher than Japan.”  In fact, if you were to look at the prison population of the entire world, one in four inmates would be in the United States.

The U.S. loves locking up its residents, with terrible consequences.  People, their families, their entire communities are broken by this system of mass incarceration; furthermore, black, Latino, and Native Americans disproportionately find themselves victimized by this system, exacerbating extant models of inequality and inequity.

Too much of this country is sitting behind bars, and this has been the case for far too long.  It is time to act, time to examine the current model of mass incarceration and see it for all of its flaws, deadly inconsistencies, and cruel and unusual consequences.  It is time to overhaul the entire system and try something new.

Mass incarceration causes incredible harm to America with the professed aim of removing dangerous individuals from society and deterring future crime.  Nonviolent criminals do not pose an innate danger to society and can receive non-prison penalties in order to deter crime; therefore, prison sentences for nonviolent crimes are unnecessary and must be abolished in the United States.