Imagining the Presence of Justice

Over the past several decades, America has seen a startling divergence between crime and punishment. While crime rates dropped steadily from the dramatic peaks of the 1990s, the nation’s incarceration rates continued just as steadily to grow. And so, despite containing only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States came to hold a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

We’ve covered this divergence extensively in the print and digital pages of , from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s on the rise of the carceral state and the devastation it wreaked on. Among the findings that emerge most clearly from this robust, sad literature is that the factors driving both aspects of the divergence—the fall in crime, the increasing spread of punishment—are highly complex. Despite dawning awareness of the deep social and economic costs of mass incarceration, no one-size-fits-all solution exists to change this picture. Rolling back mass incarceration while protecting public safety will require a legion of efforts in thousands of prosecutors’ offices, police departments, parole boards, and legislative chambers. "What we have is not a system at all,” as Fordham University’s John Pfaff, "but a patchwork of competing bureaucracies with different constituencies, different incentives, who oftentimes might have similar political ideologies, but very different goals and very different pressures on them.”