In the first reading, a great point is made when the author says, “Whether crime has actually decreased is subject to debate considering that misdemeanor arrests have increased by fifty percent” (23). Bringing this to the national scale, isn’t this essentially the problem with our justice system? I know Lydia works very closely with research on the prison system in this country, so I want to try very hard not to sound stupid here, but isn’t the increase in arrests for minor charges, along with overly harsh punishments for said crimes, one of the biggest problems facing the “justice” system? Because of it, there are more people in jails and prisons, which have shown not to be correctional facilities but rather criminal-career-making facilities, which breed a kid that may have been locked up for having weed on him into a drug peddler for a gang establishment. And, because of these minor offenses, a person is then branded as second-class citizens, often making it much harder to maintain a legal job and pushing them further into criminal territory. My question, then, is how this is justified to be a sustainable practice? I feel as though, up to this point, these policies have been shown very blatantly to not work—so what is the justification for continuing them?