The Correspondent: Why we can be hopeful about criminal justice in the US (even if it still jails the most people)
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Criminal justice reformers interviewed for this article offered a word of advice for those looking to strengthen their political position through tough-on-crime policies: beware of knee-jerk reactions.
"Don’t legislate by anecdote," warns Lauren Krisai, senior policy analyst at the DC-based Justice Action Network. “In the United States, we had the infamous Willie Horton [story, but] that one example isn’t representative of the entire system. And so to take one bad example of somebody who committed a crime; to use that to pass … tougher laws on everybody, it hasn’t worked out in the US, and it won’t work out in other places either."