Do you know that feeling that you are trying to do too much and not doing any of it well enough? If you are a human, that feeling is pretty intolerable. If you are a system, you may not even notice that you are overstressed. For decades, our criminal justice system has become increasingly overwhelmed and spread thin, and it is, accordingly, doing an abysmal job at accomplishing its core functions.

The system needs to be pared down so that it can aim itself at taking people who are making bad decisions and turning them into people who make good decisions. This goal, like that of parenting, is amorphous and individualized, and can't be done without paying attention. Our criminal justice system is like a parent who has hundreds of kids and no idea how to take care of them. A parent treating all those kids the same.

From the 1970s through the early 2000s, the United States criminal justice system expanded dramatically, not just by processing an increasing number of people and imposing longer incarceration terms, but also by taking on responsibilities that would be better addressed by other systems—such as mental health care, drug treatment and the like. The system lost focus, and it forgot what it was designed for, let alone good at.

As we try to get back on track, reformers are looking at the choices that have been made in holding people accountable and what we have tried to hold them accountable for. The lessons learned? We have leaned way too hard on the incarceration tool. We have been too punitive, criminalized too much behavior, and used incarceration as the default response. Even for people who are not dangerous and even for people who have illnesses driving their behavior (read: locking these people up without effective interventions for their underlying issues and the constellation of needs is by design an ineffective—often even counterproductive response).

Most people we have been punishing for decades could be held accountable in their communities, without losing their jobs, homes and freedom. Studies show that supervision conditions that are not indicated by a person's individual risks and needs are more harmful than they are helpful. Instead, people are more successful if they are close to their support networks, getting any help they need to improve their job prospects and relationships. Over time, what we call “alternatives to incarceration” have in many cases proven far more effective than punitive prison terms at holding people accountable and helping them build functional, productive and sustainable lives—and at a greatly reduced expense.

Indeed, it seems we have designed a system that raced to meet itself at the bottom. I think we need to rethink it from the ground up. And we should start with our terminology.

Rewriting any sentence of writing requires, by necessity, using different words. As a former magazine editor, I know that sometimes rewrites entail merely minor edits; but sometimes complete restructuring, clarification and rethinking are required to make the full piece work. Many of the failures of our current system are at the level of substance, but we can't really think in the new frame without new framing language.

The obvious example is, what is the “criminal justice system” anyway? We put a lot of people in the system whom we don't think of as criminals (and whom we shouldn't so regard). We don't get just results in too many cases, like when we punish people for being ill instead of treating their illnesses. What's more, what we have going is not in any legitimate way a “system” at all, in that there are thousands of individual courts at different levels of government, with few requirements of uniformity in the way these various courts measure and track success, at the very least.

At the same time that we need more consistency in some areas, in others there needs to be a much more individuated approach—a more robust deployment of discretion to avoid the use of incarceration when a less disruptive means is indicated. When we scaled up our system, we did not scale up the capacity for humans to engage. Our system actors shoulder heavy caseloads and we did not design this system to process masses of humans and keep things humane. Mass incarceration is, unfortunately, the most apt term in our criminal justice lexicon.

Next week, hundreds of key stakeholders in our criminal legal system are gathering at The Aleph Institute's Rewriting the Sentence summit on alternatives to incarceration at Columbia Law School.  Rewriting the Sentence is part of Aleph's multi-pronged strategic initiative to drive change in our system of punishment away from the reflexive and harsh overuse of incarceration.

These projects are shining a light on the vast array of innovative alternatives to incarceration springing up all over the country, and bridging gaps in knowledge and research about what are best practices and how to understand the culture shift that is happening. The summit will bring together the very people who make decisions each day that impact the lives of the millions of people who pass through our criminal justice system each year and reexamine the tools available to hold people accountable so that prison is no longer considered the main one. The summit will advance the conversation around how to define and nudge the culture shift already happening in this arena.

Aleph is formally announcing at the summit the establishment of the Center for Fair Sentencing, which will host a digital portal and maintain a clearinghouse on alternatives to incarceration. This clearinghouse will bind together the community of stakeholders exploring or exemplifying the best practices in alternative programs, providing data and analysis; lift up examples of programs using data-informed approaches and best practices; publish turnkey guides, such as one for establishing alternative programs; proffer policy white papers and reports; and advocate for expansion of the use of non-custodial approaches.

As America's criminal justice system continues to shift away from an unthinkingly harsh mindset, other terms belong on the rebranding block too, such as “alternatives to incarceration” and “alternative sentencing.” These phrases lock us into the lock-'em-up mentality we so badly need to escape. What we really should be thinking of is alternatives to punishment, not incarceration, points out one summit partner, Miriam Krinsky. Krinsky is executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, an organization devoted to advancing the new generation of prosecutorial leadership.

Many more leaders already thinking in new terms will address the summiteers next week. One summit session titled “A New Wave of Prosecutorial Thinking: Views of Recently Elected District Attorneys,” for example, features John Creuzot, the newly elected Dallas district attorney who established an early drug diversion court 20 years ago. Creuzot explained the limited approach that had reigned before he took the helm: “Our office had been focused on dispositions, not the meaning of the dispositions. Harmful dispositions are harmful to the community.”

Another leading thinker in this area who is speaking at the summit is Lucy Lang, executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Lang just published a piece called “Words Matter In Criminal Justice Reform” (Next City, May 31, 2019), in which she proposes the term “responsive sentencing” in place of “alternatives to incarceration,” as a way to remove the presumption of incarceration from the very term.

Wherever the nomenclature lands, what is clear is that the era of mass incarceration must end, and we must begin to adopt a lexicon that will reflect our developing values. For more information about the Rewriting the Sentence 2019 summit on alternatives to incarceration, please visit rewritingthesentence.org.

Hanna Liebman Dershowitz is a criminal justice policy attorney based in New York and serves as director of special projects for the Alternative Sentencing Division of the Aleph Institute.