I totally agree with this article. flagamuffin asks a good question. For a long time, but not long enough, there was a law reform commission in Canada. I imagine there is something similar in each US state -- or is there. First of all it takes the will to do it, and as the article says, no politician wants to appear soft on crime. One quick step could be to give all judges more flexibility in sentencing -- and more options. One point regarding the article. Paragraph 4 gave me a pause: Since the early 1970s, the nation’s prison population has quadrupled to 2.2 million, making it the world’s biggest. That is five to 10 times the incarceration rate in other democracies.
The first sentence seems doubtful. Do we know the incarceration rate in North Korea, China, and Iran? The second sentence is narrower, saying "democracies" and can be fact-checked.