This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 28th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Is the Criminal Justice System due for an overhaul?

Alex Kaczynski, a federal appellate judge on the Ninth Circuit, says yes.

He made his case at the Kito Institute in November.

We've been doing the same thing. We've been doing criminal trials now for quite a long time,

for basically hundreds of years, but certainly the way we do them now for a couple

of hundred years and we make certain assumptions about the way the system operates and

it turns out many of those assumptions are just based on guesswork on what we think is experience and what much of what we see has been undermined recently by science and by

common sense and there's troubling signs on the horizon. Let me start by pointing out

fact that I don't think a lot of people focus on and that is that the United States

is an outlier in the number of people it has in prison.

If you look at the numbers above, the United States with 319 million people has over 2.2 million people behind bars.

That's a rate which is the number on the right-hand column of 698, almost 700 per 100,000

population. Compare that to other countries like China, which is a next country that has a large prison population.

They have about four times a number of people we do,

but they have much fewer people in prison.

So their rate is something like 119 per 100,000.

The only one that's anywhere close to ours is Russia.

But then you get India, Brazil, Mexico, United Kingdom, Canada.

Take a look at cut this particular way.

China has 90% of the global population,

...