“For too long, too many judges have been too quiet about an evil of which we are a part: the mass incarceration of people in the United States today. It is time that more of us spoke out.” That’s Jed S. Rakoff in The New York Review of Books with a piece on the silence of the judges and America’s massive (and growing) problem of over-incarceration. The numbers in this article are astounding.

+ Many of those who make up the increase in the prison population are nonviolent drug offenders, and most of those are black. A recent study in Milwaukee County found that “more than half of African-American men in their thirties had done prison time.” Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm is looking to change that trend, and a lot of other prosecutors are watching. The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin on The Milwaukee Experiment.