Every day, more than 2 million people are behind bars in the United States, giving us one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Now, a Harvard University study has drawn attention to a program we initiated in Genesee County, Michigan, that is reducing recidivism and lessening the chaos inside our walls.
More than 600,000 inmates are being held in local jails like ours in Flint, Michigan, where they are awaiting trial or serving sentences of a year or less. They pass the hours in suffocating monotony, often filling the time getting into fights, assaulting corrections officers and coming up with new schemes to perfect their crimes…