The crime rate has gone down in the United States. I would probably argue that the increased incarceration rates had a positive impact on reducing the crime rate. Everybody can argue statistics in different ways, but that's my view on it. At the same time that we had this crackdown, we made some mistakes, and I hope that you can learn from those mistakes.
One mistake is mandatory minimums. It created a lot of unfairness in our sentencing. There were instances of someone, for example a girlfriend, being peripherally involved, getting brought in, getting hit with a mandatory minimum, and getting ten years or more in prison. So we created escape valves. That's not a very technical term, but it gave the judge more discretion to avoid a mandatory minimum when it created unfairness. We had to do some legislative fixes.
The second mistake we made was, as Professor Waller mentioned, re-entry programs. We didn't do a very good job of working to prevent recidivism whenever people came out of prison.