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Big cuts in the prison population won’t be easy.
That much was clear in an article last week that pointed to an interactive Prison Population Forecaster from the Urban Institute. By using the interactive’s tools, readers could choose various policies and see their effects on mass incarceration.
To make a major difference in many states, it turns out, “there is no avoiding the politically poisonous question of releasing violent offenders or reducing their long sentences,” Erik Eckholm wrote.
“The real debate over how to deal with criminals has hardly begun,” he added. “And that debate will inevitably have to be argued state by state on terms that may well cause the bipartisan agreement on the need for change, focused on nonviolent offenders, to break down.”
Readers joined that debate.
[For more of this story go to http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08...p;abt=0002&abg=1]
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