Celebrities shouldn’t be the last hope for nonviolent offenders

Celebrities tend to be the last hope for nonviolent offenders. That shouldn’t be the case.

Today, there are more than 2 million individuals behind bars. Due to the increasing prison population from 1980 until today, spending on federal prisons has spiked by nearly 600 percent, from less than $1 billion to roughly $7 billion annually in inflation-adjusted dollars. We are putting too many Americans in prison for nonviolent crimes, wasting taxpayer dollars, and tearing apart families in the process. Keeping nonviolent and low-risk criminals in prison has human and monetary costs that we simply cannot afford to ignore.