THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM IN THE TWENTY–FIRST CENTURY

The American criminal justice system is a complex machine with scope and reach of previously unimagined proportions. Currently, we find ourselves at the very beginning of the end of the era of mass incarceration. At present, approximately 1.4 million adults are housed in state and federal prisons. Another six million or so are under other forms of criminal justice supervision. This state of affairs has come about as a result of a series of deliberate policy choices over the past four decades. These include the shift from indeterminate to determinate sentencing in the 1970s, the net-widening consequences of the era