Starting in the early 2000s, a bipartisan consensus emerged around the untenable price tag of mass imprisonment. After thirty years of relentless growth in US prison populations, liberal and conservative political elites agreed that the American carceral experiment had gone too far. By 2011, even Newt Gingrich, who once warned that the 1994 crime bill “would release over 10,000 drug dealers who are currently in prison,” began promoting the idea that “there is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population.” Gingrich was one of several high-profile Republicans who had joined Right on Crime, a national campaign supporting conservative criminal justice reforms. Marc Levin, Right on Crime’s founder, in recounting his conversion into the cause of criminal justice reform in 2005, credits a board member of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation for opening his eyes: “We are not getting a good return for our money out of our prisons,” the board member told Levin, complaining about the exorbitant costs to Texan taxpayers of the prison-building boom under Governors Ann Richards and George W. Bush.