Professor Joan Petersilia discusses the financial incentive that the government could use to keep people out of jail in this Vice article. 

The United States of America locks up more people than any other country on the planet. Over the past 50 years, an era of mass incarceration took shape as politicians raced to erect a sprawling detention system. Now, with nearly 2.2 million of its citizens behind bars—or 1 in 99 adults on any given day—America’s grim labyrinth of federal and state prisons, local jails, juvenile correctional facilities, and immigration detention centers represents an unprecedented effort to isolate criminals from society.

Some nations may also be at fault for human rights violations in their prisons, but America’s mass-incarceration syndrome is—like the country’s attitude toward just about everything else—super-sized. If states were countries, Cuba—with 510 per 100,000 persons behind bars—would rank 37 in the world for the highest percentage of its population in prison. Rwanda, at 41, would fall just behind the state of New York.

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In order to pull this off, Dr. Joan Petersilia, a professor at Stanford Law School and a faculty co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, argues that Washington, DC, must lead like it did more than 20 years ago. Just in the opposite direction.

“There is symbolism in closing federal prisons, and that symbolism is very important,” she tells me. “But there is also a financial incentive that can exist. And could Washington use this to keep people out of jail? Yes.”

In other words, it has to be financially alluring in the most self-consciously capitalist nation on the planet for states to put an end to the era of mass incarceration. So rather than forcing them to be tough on crime, Washington, DC, can encourage localities to provide alternatives to imprisonment by dangling federal funds as leverage. This has already been achieved on a small scale, Petersilia points out, with federal-state initiatives like giving Pell grants to outgoing inmates to reduce recidivism, and the Second Chance Act, which boosts states’ reentry programs for those coming out of prison.

A system as large as this one, Petersilia admits, will not disappear overnight. It’ll take time to unravel 50 years worth of law enforcement overkill, especially in a way that is both just and sensible to the general public.

“There have been movements in the past for reform, but something about this moment is unique,” Petersilia said. “It’s about government getting out of people’s lives. It’s about what criminal justice is doing for the rest of us.”