An OZY series examining how to fix the skewed scales of American justice.

America incarcerates more people per capita than anyone in the world by a healthy margin. That justice is meted out unequally by ZIP code, age, gender, disability, mental health status — and race.

Leaders across the political spectrum are rethinking the justice system, but old habits are hard to break, and federal reform efforts like the First Step Act only scratch the surface, when states do the bulk of the locking up. And each headline-grabbing police shooting comes with a politically charged debate attached and often serves to illuminate the lack of trust many hold in the application of justice.

OZY's Fair and Equal series explores the innovators who are tackling these big problems, as well as the lesser-known inequities of the system.

Judge Michael Nelson went rogue when he was fed up with pretrial inmates dying. Now he’s at the vanguard of a nationwide fight.

It was after the fifth inmate died at the Cuyahoga County Corrections Center when Judge Michael Nelson finally decided to break his silence.

In four months, they’d died for various reasons: some for being refused necessary medication, others by hanging when guards were asleep. Nelson was shy of two years on his municipal court seat when Allen Gomez, a 44-year-old on a $1,500 bond for five grams of cocaine possession, died of causes not yet known.

So Nelson, 70, became the first judge in the Cleveland area to simply stop setting high bonds for nonviolent arraignees who, unable to pay the $500 or so, would otherwise spend days, weeks or months sitting among convicted inmates.

Who is on the other end of the 911 call matters.

The No. 1 reason people in the United States call the police is domestic violence. Depending on the region, such abuses make up 15 to 50 percent of 911 calls on top of the estimated 20,000 calls per day to domestic violence hotlines.

It should be more. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, just one-quarter of physical assaults, one-fifth of rapes and half of the stalkings perpetrated against women by their partners are even reported. But there might be a straightforward way to change that. The more female officers there are on a police force, the more domestic violence reporting goes up.