Jed Rakoff

Well, now we're the leader of the unfree world in the sense of we lock up so many people.

The second thing we know is that even when crime rates go down, it doesn't affect that statistic.

We still have 2.2 million people locked up year after year.

Why is that?

Because under these laws, the courts are giving ever longer sentences and an ever greater percentage of people who are charged are sentenced to long periods of time.

For example, something like 19 percent of all.

Presently incarcerated people are doing mandatory life sentences, many of them not because they committed murder or things like that, but because they committed three felonies.

And even though the felonies may not have been individually that major under career offender laws, three strikes and you're out, they get mandatory life imprisonment.

In terms of what crimes...

These people are committing, aside from the 10% are completely innocent and didn't commit any crime.

It varies a lot from state to state and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

In the federal system, it's mostly drug cases, often minor drug cases, but drug cases.

That's the biggest part of the federal incarceration.

many states, it's minor robberies, burglaries.

In some other states, it's assaults.

We're a big country and there's a lot of variation.

So there's no one crime that sticks out.

But the overall result is pretty much the same everywhere.

We lead the world both on a per capita basis and on a absolute number basis by a substantial margin.

We're not even close to China or Russia.