An op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal makes a provocative claim: That mass incarceration is a myth.

The piece is authored by Barry Latzer, a professor of criminal justice at City University of New York and the author of a book on violent crime. Latzer acknowledges that mass incarceration has become a bogeyman in public discourse, with politicians and advocates across the political spectrum calling for it to end. His claim is provocative because everyone from Bernie Sanders to the Koch brothers now acknowledge that too many people are locked up in America. As criminal justice reform advocates like to say, the United States houses more than 25 percent of the world’s inmates but has only 5 percent of the world’s population.