This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 6th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

At the heart of America's massive prison population is the drug war.

That from economist Daniel DeMico, he argues that ending so-called mass incarceration

demands an appreciation for just how states take their cues from federal prerogatives. We spoke in June.

Would you argue that the broad institutional opposition to over-incarcer incarceration, whatever term you want to use is aimed at the wrong thing.

I mean if we're outcome oriented, I do think that there's something conspicuous about

just the sheer net size and amount of incarceration so if someone says oh I really

want to fix mass incarceration, I'm willing to accept that

it's conspicuous in and of itself, which is, as an economist, that's actually really, really

difficult to come to grips with.

Like the status quo bias of economists is that stable outcomes are efficient or in a condition of equilibrium.

So if you put me in a room with a bunch of activists who are saying,

yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm really really puzzled and and concerned about mass incarceration

I'm I'm definitely willing to say yeah this is this is conspicuous it's very very

worrisome that our government

state local and federal have this extreme punishment ability on the

citizenry.

And how does that compare with the rest of the world?

I mean, in terms of both like raw numbers and percentages.

I mean, in percentage terms, we're the largest incarceration nation on the planet.

We've plateaued a bit. A lot of these reform efforts are having some traction.

...