The Evolution of Prisons

When I was a young scholar, some of the earliest research I did was looking at the marginal impact of locking up more people. At the time when you worked through the numbers, it looked like we had really the right size of the prison population. Well, then the next 20 years happened, and the prison population doubled and tripled from where I'd done that research. And so I would be approached pretty consistently by various states and people who were advocating to put in more prisons.