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After decades of stability from the 1920s to the early 1970s, the rate of imprisonment in the United States more than quadrupled during the last four decades. The U.S. penal population of 2.2 million adults is by far the largest in the world. Just under one-quarter of the world's prisoners are held in American prisons. The U.S. rate of incarceration, with nearly 1 out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, is 5 to 10 times higher than the rates in Western Europe and other democracies. The U.S. prison population is largely drawn from the most disadvantaged part of the nation's population: mostly men under age 40, disproportionately minority, and poorly educated. Prisoners often carry additional deficits of drug and alcohol addictions, mental and physical illnesses, and lack of work preparation or experience. The growth of incarceration in the United States during four decades has prompted numerous critiques and a growing body of scientific knowledge about what prompted the rise and what its consequences have been for the people imprisoned, their families and communities, and for U.S. society. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States examines research and analysis of the dramatic rise of incarceration rates and its affects. This study makes the case that the United States has gone far past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits and has reached a level where these high rates of incarceration themselves constitute a source of injustice and social harm. The Growth of Incarceration in the United States recommends changes in sentencing policy, prison policy, and social policy to reduce the nation's reliance on incarceration. The report also identifies important research questions that must be answered to provide a firmer basis for policy. The study assesses the evidence and its implications for public policy to inform an extensive and thoughtful public debate about and reconsideration of policies.

Immigration enforcement is carried out by a complex legal and administrative system, operating under frequently changing legislative mandates and policy guidance, with authority and funding spread across several agencies in two executive departments and the courts. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is responsible for conducting immigration enforcement both at the border and in the United States; the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is responsible for conducting immigration removal procedures and criminal trials and for prosecuting people charged with immigration-related crimes. DOJ confronts at least five technical challenges to modeling its resource needs for immigration enforcement that are specific to the immigration enforcement system. Despite the inherent limitations, budgeting for immigration enforcement can be improved by changing the method for budgeting. Budgeting for Immigration Enforcement addresses how to improve budgeting for the federal immigration enforcement system, specifically focusing on the parts of that system that are operated and funded by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The report recommends that DOJ establish policy-level procedures to plan and coordinate policy planning and implementation to improve performance of the immigration enforcement system. The report also recommends that DOJ and DHS accelerate their design of an integrated capacity to track cases and project immigration enforcement activity. Policy makers and others who are interested in how the nation's immigration enforcement system is organized and operates also will find it useful.

A potential area of consensus in Washington is on the need to increase investment in public infrastructure. But there is less agreement on how the federal budget process should treat investments that may have future economic and social returns. Some believe the current budget process is biased against public investment. However, there are challenges in defining such investment, identifying the degree of bias, and constructing an improved process.

Budget experts have watched the federal government's budget process fail over the last few years as the policy choices required to put the budget on a sustainable path grew more challenging. The basis for budget process reforms and for progress in stabilizing the debt must be a new national agreement on a rule or target for fiscal policy. The Peterson-Pew Commission has advocated enacting a debt target for the medium term -- and with it a comprehensive set of procedural changes intended to help policy makers adopt and sustain a multi-year fiscal plan to reach it. Unless directly involved in budgeting for their agencies, there is little that federal managers can do directly to repair the federal budget process. However, they can approach their work in the same spirit and apply some of the same principles guiding the Peterson-Pew Commission recommendations.

The US federal government faces a large long-term mismatch between projected spending and projected revenues. Closing this fiscal gap will require hard choices to yield trillions of dollars in budget savings. Achieving these savings while sustaining the nation's highest public priorities, supporting robust economic growth, and dealing with inevitable emergencies will be difficult. To help the next administration and Congress meet the fiscal challenge, four expert observers have prepared an agenda of practical and bold budget process reforms that should be seriously considered in an effort to repair the federal budget process. These include steps to expand the budget's time horizon and to help policymakers act more strategically to meet the public's highest priorities while finding budget savings sufficient to put the federal budget on a sustainable path. The actions recommended in this article will help the president and Congress meet a looming fiscal challenge while protecting the nation's highest priorities.