The tough-on-crime mentality dominating today’s politics is an alarming backlash against the criminal justice and prison reform movement. It’s now fashionable for politicians to proclaim, just lock ’em up and bury the key.
Yet many studies show incarceration is costly and ineffective. Prison hardens the criminal, and most will return to society with few skills and no hope, and succumb to the ills that sent them away — poverty, violence, isolation.
