In recent years, we have seen renewed attention paid to problems that pervade the criminal justice system in the United States. The prison population has grown exponentially since 1980 due to the war on drugs, minimum sentencing laws, and other crime control measures instituted in the 1980s and 1990s. The United States now incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world, currently over two million. African Americans constitute nearly half of those prisoners. People on both sides of the political spectrum have become more attuned to the terrible consequences of mass incarceration: the problems of overcrowding, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the abuse of solitary confinement as a disciplinary mechanism. Mass incarceration has also devastated many African American communities already burdened by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. The Obama administration began to reform federal prison policy and worked with Congress to pass the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, which reduced the disparity in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine. But other sentencing reform legislation remains stalled in Congress