Joe Mathews: It’s time to overcome our dark instinct to lock people up

California’s long history of mass incarceration may have finally reached an inflection point.

California has taken notable steps to diversify its law enforcement agencies and reconsider draconian punishments, but police abuses still occur with far too much regularity, and our incarceration rates remain sky high. Zocalo commentator Joe Mathews says the protests over police killings and entrenched institutional racism that swept through American cities this spring may have finally jolted us out of our tacit acceptance of this reality. This state has a legacy of unjustly putting people behind bars, but Mathews says we may finally be ready to turn the page.

Read Mathews’ column below:

Forget it Jake, it’s California

This may sound very Chinatown. Wasson, in his book on the film, writes that the concluding scene creates “a temporal Sisyphean circle” that implies “emotional incarceration.” He then recounts how the film’s Polish director Roman Polanski rejected screenwriter Robert Towne’s original ending, in which the mother killed her abusive father, protecting her daughter.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.