Decarcerate, excarcerate

[Dave Wilton]

Heard someone use "decarcerate" to refer to the process of reducing prison
populations on KQED yesterday: http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201308130900;
it's about 19 minutes in.

It seems to be common in prison reform circles:

http://decarceratepa.info/about

http://nationinside.org/campaign/decarcerate-illinois/

There's also "excarcerate," which is not putting people in prison in the
first place:

http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/instead_of_prisons/chapter3.shtml

Both terms go back at least as far as the book: Morris, Mark, ed., _Instead
of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists_, Syracuse: Prison Research
Education Project, 1976. (Although I've only seen the web version of the
book at the above site.)

(Unrelated, the copyright page of the book has this on spelling reform: "The
reader's eye might trip over a few unusual spellings -- words such as 'tho'
and 'thru.' We have made these modest beginnings toward spelling reform
because we are made uncomfortable by the idea of cutting down forests to
make paper to print silent letters. -The editor")

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