Over the past four decades, Democrats and Republicans have agreed on almost nothing beyond their ménage à trois love affair with Wall Street. One notable exception was the bipartisan fervor for crime policy “reform” that could be condensed into a campaign-ad bromide: lock ‘em up and throw away the key. A popular American lament rues the lack of political cooperation in Washington and in statehouses. But be careful what you wish for. Bipartisanship in the 1980s and ‘90s sowed the seeds for today’s mass incarceration crisis as pols cultivated crime platitudes over thoughtful analysis. And undoing this now-codified, multibillion-dollar political botch-job won’t be easy, despite the kumbaya incantations coming from both the Right and Left.

Nixon was the first to embrace mass incarceration, but it was Clinton who forged our prison industrial complex