For people that are not in Philadelphia, I remember being down in Philadelphia and someone telling me about you and it was like,

get a load of this, take out this story, like the guy that comes to collect the anarchists when they get arrested outside City Hall

and soos the cops, he's gonna run for prosecutor, like, not as a joke, but just as like a wild story that like obviously this individual will not be the next district attorney, Philadelphia,

but it's kind of interesting that someone with that background would run, like, how'd you go from there to winning?

I can't blame people for finding my candidacy hilarious or unlikely, it was both of those things, but it was both of those things if you think that the mainstream Democratic Party still has the answers, which they clearly do not.

The only answers that they seem to have are how to lose elections while someone is brilliant and magnetic as Barack Obama can still win.

Hello and welcome to Why Is This Happening With Me, your host, Chris Hayes.

So this episode of the podcast is really two stories in one. There's a policy story and it's a policy story about mass incarceration and criminal justice.

And then there's a dramatic story, a kind of mythic story and the mythic story is a story about what happens when the revolution ceases the palace.

What happens when the rebels take the capital when they actually storm the halls of power and throw out the old regime and sit in the throne room and start making the rules.

So the policy story, the policy story is about our country, which is the most incarcerated country in the world per capita.

It is, well, there's a few small islands with a very small number of people that are more incarcerated, but basically the most incarcerated country in the entire world.

And for years, people have been talking about and critiquing this phenomenon. We call it mass incarceration, the sheer number of people that we put in prison.

And then the even larger population of people that are under what we call penal supervision. So those are people that are on probation or on parole.

Huge, huge, huge numbers of people cycling through the criminal justice system.

And there's been a debate for a long time about what the cause of the growth of mass incarceration was.

And in recent years, thanks to some some really interesting scholarship, a lot of folks in the criminal justice world have started to focus on one key part of the system.

And it's not lawmakers and state capitals passing passing laws, although they have a huge effect. And it's not beat cops making a rest, although they have a huge effect.

The fulcrum that has been identified by a lot of the folks who are trying to reduce mass incarceration and remake American criminal justice is the prosecutor.

It turns out when you look at the data, when you study how it is that we have arrived at the prison population we have, a huge amount of what's driving it are prosecutors.

And that's because prosecutors have enormous discretion in the American system to not charge people for crimes or to charge people for crimes.

To charge someone for one misdemeanor or to charge someone for three misdemeanors or to charge someone for two misdemeanors and a felony or to charge someone for a class A felony rather than a class C felony to throw the book at people.

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