On Monday, May 16, Chris Epps, commissioner of Mississippi’s department of corrections, sat at a long conference table, grasping a mound of financial documents. He was preparing to head to the state’s penitentiary, an 18,000-acre old cotton farm in the Mississippi River Delta, for the execution of a man convicted of murder nearly two decades ago. Since the mid-1990s, Mississippi has become one of America’s most aggressive incarcerators — a difficult feat, in a nation of jailers. Now, Epps is leading Mississippi on an improbable shift: dismantling the prison system. “We’ve got all these needs” — education, health care — “and spending all this money on corrections,” Epps says. “We’ve got to decide who we’re mad with, and who we’re afraid of.”
Incarceration has been America’s primary weapon in the war on crime. That’s why in the 80s, Congress passed laws mandating that if you were caught with just 50 grams of crack-cocaine — about 20 packs of sugar — you automatically got a decade in prison. In 1980, according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based advocacy group, an estimated 41,000 people were in prison or jail for drug offenses, and by 2003, that population had grown to nearly a half-million. Now, some 2.3 million people — about 1 in every 100 U.S. adults — are incarcerated. Prison overcrowding reached such crisis levels in California that, in May, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a judicial-panel decision that requires the state to release 46,000 inmates over the next two years.