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Liberals have long advocated prison reforms like reduced sentence lengths and alternatives to incarceration. Recently, however, conservatives have put these ideas on the congressional agenda—and their inspiration comes from that bastion of tough-on-crime conservatism, Texas.

Surprising? Perhaps. But seeing this coming didn’t require any sort of crystal ball. One had only to notice the forces driving every trend today: less money, higher expectations, and lower “weight.” Around the world and especially in the United States, both the public and private sectors have been under pressure since the Great Recession to cut costs and make the most of constrained resources. At the same time, consumers have become accustomed to expect better and better performance for their dollars. Many people have dismissed as “immature” or unrealistic the electorate’s expectation that governments provide both lower taxes and more services, but it’s not unreasonable given what the private sector has been able to deliver over the last generation. And the reason for declining cost coupled with higher performance, of course, has been technology that moved the economy in a more and more virtual.

As Diane Coyle observed almost two decades ago, this means a world that is increasingly “weightless”:  Every year, an increasing percentage of economic output comes in the services, or, like finance, via electronic media, rather than heavy machinery, consumer goods, or other “things.” Other technological advances have led to the miniaturization of many of the physical goods that are produced. Business organizations are flatter and leaner, firms carry smaller inventories, just-in-time manufacturing and the “sharing economy” require fewer facilities and capital goods to produce more output. Everywhere, places, facilities and things mean less and less—everywhere, that is, except government.

It’s overdue, then, for the public sector to revisit the costliest, least productive, and least “weightless” business lines in its portfolios—human services generally, and the corrections system in particular. What smacks more of outdated big government than large, costly, coercive institutions?

Incarceration as we know it today was originally a “progressive” idea. Compared to the days when every offense was punishable by execution—or at least corporal punishment—and prisons were simply a slow form of death, the modern penitentiary was conceived as a humane instrument of rehabilitation, not just punishment: The idea was that sitting alone in a cell and contemplating one’s transgressions—like a penitent—would lead to self-improvement. A close cousin, historically and conceptually, of the poorhouse and insane asylum, the penitentiary proved as much a misnomer, however, as today’s “corrections.” Nonetheless, along with the notion of redemption through hard work, the concept appealed to Jacksonian reformers and launched the first great era of prison construction in America. The second wave peaked, similarly, with the advent of the Progressive Era, which refined the concept with such additions as parole, probation, and indeterminate sentencing.

The third and latest wave of prison enthusiasm, however, was a reaction—against both liberal modifications to incarceration regimes and the social tumult of the ’60s. The War on Drugs increased the numbers of prisoners and lengthened the duration of sentences. The surge in incarceration also has been directly related to race: African-American males are jailed at about six times the rate of whites and three times the rate of Hispanics.

As a result, the United States today has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world: 743 adults per 100,000 population, or nearly 2.3 million adults, nearly one-quarter of the world’s total prison population. More than twice that number are on probation or parole, with more than 70,000 juveniles in detention, as well—roughly one in every 30 Americans is under supervision of some sort, a seven-fold increase since 1980.

The U.S. prison population has declined every year since 2008. With skyrocketing budgets and declining revenues, many state governments began looking for more effective ways to reduce crime and keep inmates from returning to prison once released. But the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center noted recently that it was not just fiscal pressures that led to the shift: Overall crime rates fell around 25 percent from 1988-2008, and there has been a growing recognition that the War on Drugs was counterproductive.