It’s a bold, novel proposal to change the American criminal-justice system, and one sure to draw its share of supporters and critics alike. I spoke with Inimai Chettiar, director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program, and Lauren-Brooke Eisen, the program’s senior counsel, about their report’s implications. Our conversation has been edited for style and clarity.

Matt Ford: One of the things that struck me about your report is a move away from the common focus on low-level nonviolent drug offenders and instead focusing on a much broader category of inmates. What led to that shift?

Inimai Chettiar: We wanted to step back and take a very data-driven look at who’s in prison and why, so we did not want to rule out any subsets of prisoners off the bat. It seems from our perspective that two of the main reasons that people are in prison and why we have mass incarceration are one, there are too many low-level offenders who should not be in prison at all, and two, that even those people who might warrant prison, they’re being sent to prison for way too long.

Ford: We hear a lot of folks on sentencing reform, but what this report actually advocates is just eliminating prison entirely for a certain set of offenses. How did you come to the decision to select these specific offenses, as opposed to more serious crimes? What was the balancing act?

Chettiar: So we actually came up with what we thought were factors that we could look at and [Lauren-Brooke Eisen] can get into them a little bit more. We looked at the full dataset of prisoners, so about 1.47 million prisoners, and we looked at each crime in terms of seriousness, victim impact, intent, and recidivism—all factors very much focused on public safety—and then made a recommendation based in research. A lot of research shows that if you put lower-level offenders in prison, it actually often increases the recidivism rate and can sometimes be counter-productive or not productive at all.

Ford: So for what kinds of crimes would imprisonment be eliminated? Are we talking about jaywalking, are we talking about mail fraud, or something more serious?

Lauren-Brooke Eisen: What we did is we looked at who should not be in prison at all, and that’s what you’re talking about right now, and those are more of the lower-level offenders: drug possession, minor larceny, minor property crimes, minor fraud and forgery, simple assault, minor trafficking of marijuana, even lesser burglary, and other minor drug offenses.

And then additionally we also looked at length of stays. A lot of the research we looked at indicated that prison may be justified in certain situations, especially for some more violent and egregious crimes. Our report looks at reducing the length of stay for some of the more serious crimes such as robbery, murder, aggravated assault, serious burglary, and that’s how we get to our 39 percent unnecessarily incarcerated number.