We are at a critical moment in the burgeoning criminal justice reform movement. Sentencing and correctional reform efforts continue to progress but have largely focused on the “low hanging fruit” of excessive use of incarceration for minor drug and property offenses.

While this approach has slowed the rate of prison growth, it has not yielded meaningful reductions in mass incarceration. Reforms targeting people convicted of nonviolent offenses are a necessary first step in rejecting the “tough on crime” policies of the past, but the evidence is clear that they are insufficient to effect deep and sustainable reductions in the prison population.

Rolling back mass incarceration requires moving beyond minor drug and property offenses and expanding focus to include long prison sentences and time served, particularly for violent offenses. People in prison for violent offenses have been the primary driver of the prison population for the last two decades. Recent trends in prison admissions suggest that violent offenses will continue to be the major driver of the prison population moving forward.

People serving long sentences place a major strain on public budgets and have a cumulative effect on the correctional population—even when admissions to prison decline, people serving long sentences are “stacking up” in prison.