The reality is that locking up lawbreakers has worked better than going easy on them, and has worked best for law-abiding black people. After incarceration rates began to rise in the 1980s, crime plummeted. “The rate of reported crimes in the United States dropped each year after 1991 for nine years in a row, the longest decline ever recorded,” wrote Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “And crime dropped all over the United States—in every region, in the country as well as the city, in poor neighborhoods as well as rich neighborhoods. By the start of
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