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Everyone keeps telling me it’s going to be alright. Everyone keeps telling me they didn’t understand my work when I began in 2008 but now they do. They understand it because prison reform and criminal justice reform is in the news. They understand it because Orange Is The New Black is on their screens.

Everyone keeps telling me it is going to be okay because politicians and Departments of Corrections are trying to fix the problems. What? Back up. What makes you think that those who built the Prison Industrial Complex are best positioned to reverse its crimes and abuses?

I want to share in your optimism but I want to retain healthy skepticism toward careering politicians. Dan Berger just penned a sobering Op-Ed Getting The Money Out Of Prison Reform for Truthout.

It begins:

Much has been made about the bipartisan nature of contemporary efforts to end mass incarceration, as everyone from Newt Gingrich and the Koch Brothers to Van Jones and the American Civil Liberties Union, and now even Hillary Clinton, says that the United States needs to reduce the number of people it incarcerates in its own gulag archipelago. If all these people agree, the conventional wisdom goes, surely we can get something done. Are prisons the only thing that can end Washington gridlock?

And it ends:

To paraphrase the poet Gil Scott-Heron, “decarceration will not be incentivized,” decarceration will not be incentivized, decarceration will not be incentivized. Decarceration will not be incentivized.

Any OpEd that ends with that flourish gets my vote. A MUST READ.

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Image source: CUNY