The city's experience, Professor Zimring writes, "shows that huge increases in incarceration are unnecessary and inefficient.
The crime rate has plateaued at its lowest level in decades, a development variously attributed to the ebbing of the crack epidemic, an improved economy, smarter policing, the aging of the baby boomers, and, at huge expense, mass incarceration.
Yet in the United States, prison reform has been led in recent years by conservatives, who have unleashed a revolution by cutting crime along with the huge costs of incarceration.
Advocates of tougher prosecution and sentencing say the huge growth in imprisonment, with the incarceration rate quadrupling since 1980, has been largely responsible for the decrease in crime.
The government-commissioned Corston report calls, at last, for a definitive end to the incarceration of huge numbers of vulnerable women, far from their families.
The costs of policing and incarceration are huge, and we need to reduce them.
The man who came from nowhere to head a huge financial empire narrowly escaped incarceration in a Singapore jail and was found guilty of UK Companies Act offences.
Then I went to Guantánamo Bay itself, to photograph the prison camp and the US naval base, which has itself been a place of incarceration with a huge razor-wire fence since the Cuban revolution.
It would be comforting to think that New Orleans is uniquely dysfunctional, unfortunately, however, the criminal neglect that characterises the state of the criminal justice system in New Orleans - huge resources allocated toward arrest and incarceration while rehabilitation is left high and dry - is mirrored across the country.
We face huge problems as a society: mass incarceration, endless wars, income inequality.
