Maybe I’ve finally put my finger on what bothered me about Black Lives Matter. Of course I’m not in favor of police brutality and nobody should be. Police brutality is a huge problem for the people on the receiving end of it, and it needs to be addressed. Addressing it would only remove drop from the bucket of violence and injustice in this country. We need to identify and address root causes of violence and injustice, but maybe that is too vague a concept for people to be marching in the streets about. Mass incarceration is concrete – we hear the numbers frequently, the U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. For every 100 or so people you see walking on the street, there is one American in a federal, state, or local jail. And some of those people on the street are on probation and parole. Add in friends and family of all those people, and a huge proportion of the population is affected, certainly enough to get a march together.

So what can we do about it? Just trying to reason it out, I would first identify things that don’t need to be crimes, and don’t make them crimes any more. Drug use and possession come to mind – unless you are selling drugs to children, you are really only hurting yourself and/or other consenting adults, and this should be dealt with through the health care system (we need a health care system!). Go ahead and legalize prostitution. Gambling is pretty much legal already. There might be other things in this category I haven’t thought of. Next, find non-violent ways to treat non-violent crimes. For example, address property crimes by taking away property.

Finally, you come down to just violent crimes, and violent criminals do need to be taken off the streets. But you can try to find ways to reduce and prevent crime rather than just treat the symptoms. Ultimately, as suggested in this Brennan Center for Justice report, the answer is to look at all those approaches and programs that have been tried on a small scale, follow the evidence, and then try to scale up the ones that have been proven to work. Things that have been tried include “deferred-sentencing diversion programs, pre-booking diversion programs, and alternative court models, including mental health and drug courts.”

This is hard, but unlike say, education, mass incarceration is pretty easy to measure and determine if we are making progress or not.