A proposal to cut prison population

Slate - A team led by UCLA public policy professor Mark A.R. Kleiman published a provocative proposal, outlining a system they say would go a long way toward achieving an 80 percent reduction in the prison population, without sacrificing public safety.* Advertisement

What Kleiman and his co-authors suggest is letting offenders out of prison before their sentences are up and placing them in apartments rented by the government, where they can be monitored 24/7 via webcam. In their proposed scenario, convicts are assigned public service jobs, while retaining their status as prisoners, and are subject to a set of strict rules regarding things like curfew, drug use, and geographic location. Each apartment is located in a community otherwise populated by fully free citizens and functions, in the words of Kleiman and his co-authors, “as a prison without bars.”