Corene Kendrick (’03), Deputy Director of the ACLU National Prison Project, co-authored an article for the ACLU website advocating for lasting change as a landmark ACLU lawsuit resulting in a fifty percent reduction of the Orange County jail population comes to an end (“Orange County’s Dramatic Reduction in Jail Population Is a Model for the Nation,” June 11). “Indeed, as the OC reduction order comes to an end at the hoped-for waning of the pandemic, the court-ordered reductions show that mass incarceration — with its tremendous societal and monetary costs — is not only unnecessary, but also horrifically damaging, especially to people of color and low-income communities. . . . [I]t is critical that our policing, jail admissions, and prison sentencing systems do not return to business as usual — both in the OC and in communities across the U.S. . . . We are faced with an opportunity and a mandate: We must apply the same urgency to ending our mass incarceration crisis that we applied to keeping ourselves and our loved ones safe during the last year.”