United States incarceration statistics are well-known by now, but they still stun. Although the U.S. has only 5 percent of the world’s population, it has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. There are 2.2 million people in prisons and jails in this country. With an incarceration rate of 693 per 100,000 people, the United States trails only the Seychelles in the frequency with which it deprives its residents of liberty, and vastly outpaces that of Iran, Zimbabwe, and even notoriously punitive Singapore. This level of incarceration, hidden for so long in plain sight, has massive societal consequences. It drives and reinforces deep seated racial inequity and disproportionately punishes African Americans. It ruins people’s lives and breaks up families. Now it has become widely understood that this exorbitant incarceration rate is not needed to keep the public safe