Hard time gets a hard look
On a recent afternoon Vincent Schiraldi watched students file out of a Harvard classroom. Then he made an incisive comparison. “If you think about it, this age cohort of 18- to 25-year-olds — what most of the people in the room are — is pretty much the entrance-age cohort for prisons, too,” said Schiraldi, who worked for years in criminal justice before arriving in Cambridge last year to head the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management. “There’s a real kind of fork in the road that people take in life that either sends them to prison or sends them to productive lives, and in America the vast majority of those productive lives are going to involve some level of college.” Stats on U.S. incarceration paint a troubling picture. Prison population began a steady rise in the 1970s, peaking in 2009. The U.S. imprisons more citizens (2.2 million) than...