Over the last week, we’ve been focused on Attorney General William Barr’s distortions of the Mueller Report, but many years ago he did something even more damaging. In his first stint as attorney general, Barr in 1992 issued a report called “The Case for More Incarceration.” He was one of many politicians and officeholders, Democrats as well as Republicans, who led the United States, with 5 percent of the world’s population, to hold almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

Finally, America is beginning to unravel this historic mistake.

The best thing the Trump administration has done so far is its backing of the bipartisan First Step Act on criminal justice reform. The act, signed into law by Trump in December, marked a turning point away from mass incarceration, and small numbers of federal offenders have been released early since then.

I saw the new mood on criminal justice while moderating a panel the other day at the Milken Institute Conference in Los Angeles. Beside me was Republican Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi, a conservative with whom I agree on nothing else, but he has worked heroically since 2014 to reduce Mississippi’s prison population by 11 percent. This has saved the state $46 million, he said.

Bryant also argued in the panel discussion for ending America’s system of de facto debtor prisons, in which poor people end up jailed because of an inability to pay fines. This is a problem in many states: One day when I visited the Tulsa county jail, 23 people were locked up simply for failure to pay government fines and fees.

Another conservative on the panel, Mark Holden of Koch Industries, spoke eloquently about how our criminal justice system traps people in poverty when they need second chances. He said that the system is so flawed that “it needs to be blown up, quite frankly — in a nonviolent way.”