US mass incarceration is terrible problem, it&#x27;s well known that the US has more prisoners than any other country and one of the highest per capita rates of imprisonment in the world.<p>The war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentencing, brutal probation regimes that throw ex-prisoners back into prison for minor offenses all play a part.<p>This is systematic problem, media-driven attacks on criminals are a reliable &quot;dog-whistle&quot; issue for politicians and so-forth.<p>It is encouraging to me when folks involved in this system put forward a critique and try to stop the overall downward trend here.<p>It is &quot;nice&quot; when someone engages in this sort of act of pure human kindness but this seem like exactly the sort of things that doesn&#x27;t scale, that doesn&#x27;t recognize larger problems and basically puts things down as a simple problem for veterans rather than a problem our whole society faces.<p>Anyone who&#x27;s spent a bit of time watching courts knows that a given judges sees dozens of people per day who get essentially assembly line justice with 90% of them being sad people who made sad choices with the courts meting out one more level penalties likely to continue these people&#x27;s downward spiral. It&#x27;s nice when a judge does one semi-good thing - but I can only see nice, not encouraging, here.