I'm Lee Rowland from the ACLU. This is At Liberty, the podcast where we discuss today's most important civil rights and civil liberties issues.

Today we're going to talk about how prosecutors fuel mass incarceration.

The United States sends more people to prison and jail than any other nation in the world.

We currently hold a full 25% of the world's prisoners in custody, despite making up just 5% of the global population.

When Trump became president, he brought with him a promise to be tough on crime.

His attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is fully on board and has vowed to reinvigorate the war on drugs.

But in that same 2016 election, Americans also voted in scores of local candidates that ran on platforms vowing to reduce our prison population, including reform-minded district

attorney candidates. Criminal justice reform advocates have taken note, and many are now focused

on district attorney races in upcoming

elections as the linchpin in the fight against mass incarceration.

With us today to discuss prosecutors and their role in the criminal justice system is Udi

Ofer.

Udi is the deputy national political director of the ACLU, and he's director of the ACLU's campaign for

smart justice, which is dedicated to ending mass incarceration in the U.S. U.S. U.D. Welcome.

Good to be on. Thank you. So let's start big picture. Why are we in this place of mass

incarceration? And how do we get here? Mass incarceration is a term used for a

problem that really affects every part of American life. In its most literal sense, it just means the 2.3

million people who are on any given day locked up in cages in the United States. As you noted,

that is way disproportionate to how other

Western industrialized countries treat their own citizens. And not all communities are treated

alike. Mass incarceration is a problem that is mostly targeted at black communities in the

United States. How we got here?

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