This week, several leading presidential candidates — including Donald Trump — will gather in Columbia, South Carolina to discuss criminal justice reform and to offer plans for addressing the crisis of mass incarceration in America. The event is being held at Benedict College, less than an hour west of the Lee Correctional Institution, where seven young men bled to death last year during a riot that was the direct outcome of the barbarism of our nation’s prisons.

The conditions that led to the tragedy at Lee, and which are visible all over the country, have become so appalling that even politicians on the Right have begun to pay lip service to the problem. Though the United States makes up only 5 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of its prisoners.

Despite the bipartisan consensus that our system is flawed, there has been little mainstream discussion of the kind of political and economic transformation we will need to end mass incarceration.