Raze the Carceral State

We need to resist the belief that the only way to raze the carceral state is to tackle the root causes of crime—massive unemployment, massive poverty, and high levels of social, political, and economic inequality. The U.S. penal system is the result of policies that can be dismantled in several years even if these structural determinants of crime persist. As a panel of experts from the National Academy of Sciences recently concluded, changes in public policies, not rising crimes rates, were the main engines of the decades-long spike in the incarceration rate.