and also the work of the assistant director right there and frankie lyons for organizing today's event. the history of mass incarceration, or the issue of mass incarceration has reached a critical mass of attention in the last six months or so. there have been initiatives like the senate did this week and in various other venues as well, all of them calling for reform of the system of incarceration. what is interesting is this has been a bipartisan initiative involving democrats and republicans. it's a response to what is clearly a serious problem. i want to offer a few brief statistics to highlight this, the united states today incarcerates about 2.3 million people, which is a larger proportion of our population than any other nation on earth. the united states has 5% of the world's population, but nearly 25% of the world's prison population. the issue today is how did the united states become what the "economist" magazine recently referred to as the jailhouse nation. we have three leading historians who will tell us how we got where we are today. sitting right next to me is the assoc