Our criminal justice system has long failed to make our communities safer or more just. Today, frustrations with this system—including the enormous burdens it places on taxpayers and families and its failure to provide actual safety solutions—are being exploited to justify ineffective strategies like building more prisons. Meanwhile, proven alternatives are too-often ignored.

Without smart, politically resilient reform, these pressures will only intensify. Politicians will continue to weaponize them in ways that undermine our nation’s promise and democratic ideals.

Thankfully, we already know what works—and it isn’t more criminalization or more prisons. Over the past two decades, red, blue, and purple jurisdictions have advanced popular reforms that safely reduced prison and jail populations while expanding freedom and opportunity for tens of millions of Americans. It’s time to get to work.