Mayor Pete Pledges to 'Cut Incarceration in Half'

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, pledged to cut incarceration by 50 percent if he is elected president.

“We are the most incarcerated country in the world and I have proposed and I insist as president on taking the steps to cut incarceration in half and when we do it right it will not be an increase in crime,” Buttigieg said on Wednesday during a reproductive rights town hall in Des Moines organized by the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL).

“There will an increase in safety and there’s a whole bunch of steps we’ve got to do in order to make that happen,” he added.

Buttigieg’s comments were made in response to a question about how he plans to take on public corruption.

“You have lots of issues with public corruption being condoned or even driven from the highest levels of all and when you have a president who doesn’t seem to think the law applies to everybody equally — that has an effect on our culture as well as the fact that we need a lot of policy changes,” he said.