Heather Ann Thompson says that in 2015 there was a growing consensus across both political parties that America’s criminal justice system – with its “harsh policies of more prisons, longer sentences, punitive drug laws… was a massive, expensive failure.” But today, she says, the much-heralded bill to create proposals to “improve policing and prosecution, sentencing, and prisons at every level—local, state, and federal” has stalled out.

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