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Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform
A groundbreaking examination of our system of imprisonment, revealing the true causes of mass incarceration as well as the best path to reform
The United States, home to about 5 percent of the world's population, holds nearly 25 percent of its prisoners. How did we get to this point?
In Locked In, John F. Pfaff argues that existing accounts of the causes of mass incarceration are fundamentally misguided. The most widely accepted explanations-the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons-actually tell us much less than we like to think. Instead, Pfaff urges us to look at other factors, including a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before.
An authoritative, clear-eyed account of the root causes of mass incarceration, Locked In ultimately forces us to reconsider what we must to do build a more equitable and humane society.
The United States, home to about 5 percent of the world's population, holds nearly 25 percent of its prisoners. How did we get to this point?
In Locked In, John F. Pfaff argues that existing accounts of the causes of mass incarceration are fundamentally misguided. The most widely accepted explanations-the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons-actually tell us much less than we like to think. Instead, Pfaff urges us to look at other factors, including a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before.
An authoritative, clear-eyed account of the root causes of mass incarceration, Locked In ultimately forces us to reconsider what we must to do build a more equitable and humane society.
321 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 7, 2017
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December 15, 2017
This is a "well, not exactly" response to the prevalent thinking on mass incarceration. His main thesis is that the war on drugs is not necessarily responsible for mass incarceration. And that federal laws in general are not as influential as local decision making. This book is not without critics (there is a Michigan law review response that attacks his data), but it's compelling even if the data is flawed. The proposal is that we need to strike while the iron is hot. We have bipartisan consensus on crime reform and we need to do it now, but we have to make sure that the measures we adopt are going to fix the problem. The problem is one of prosecutorial discretion, local politics, and the rhetoric around crime and sentencing. He observes astutely at the end that the worst thing a politician can say is "I'm going to make you safer." He's right. Being tough on crime has a ratcheting up effect. But locking people up has costs that are not accounted for. We should have a cost/benefit conversation about punishment. It's not a net positive to lock up even violent criminals. That sounds radical, but it shouldn't be.
December 1, 2017
Rating is really a 3.5, 4 for his research and data analysis, and 3 for his, at times, daft adherence to his own personal stump speech on Mass Incarceration.
Pfaff’s research and writing on mass incarceration is a deep dive into the data-based examination of conviction and incarceration, his rebuttals towhat he has termed “The Standard Story”, and an analysis of the distributed, local, and counterintuitive nature of America’s current mass incarceration crisis. It’s hard not to compare Locked In to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, not only because they address a similar topic, and also because Pfaff feels the need to call her out directly within his work, but in truth because the two books take fundamentally different and complimentary approaches to understanding the effects of incarceration on present day Americans.
While Alexander focuses and on the sociocultural underpinnings of the federal war on drugs as a tool for widespread disenfranchisement of people of color, Pfaff brings his dispassionate, statistical ethic to bear upon the available data. Alexander lays bare the haunting effects of personal and prejudicial turmoil in the face of a Kafkaesque justice system, while Pfaff informs us of the hidden boogeyman in our conceptions of mass incarceration: the problem is misrepresented by scholars and the government alike, and much more distributed and thus difficult to effect change upon. Pfaff’s reliance on setting the data straight to seek a record of true representation is only limited in his lack of focus on the personal, social, and cultural experiences and ramifications of a felony conviction. He pays these topics some mind in his work, but I would feel disingenuous by not suggesting that one should read both Alexander’s and Pfaff’s works to get a full picture of our current crisis.
Their distinctly different approaches allow for the more regular mass incarceration reader to approach the crisis as both prejudiced enforcement of federal policy in balance with the role that each local DA and prosecutors play in the aggressive increases in prison admissions. Pfaff hinges on this “mishmash of independent, often competitive bureaucracies,” all functioning with their own political priorities with “almost unfettered, unreviewable power.” It’s from this loci that Pfaff explicates how federal policy has only tangential effect upon local prosecutorial zeal, on how the available nationwide data hides the real trends relevant to prison populations, the role of violent crime, and the implications of more and less punitive sentencing policies.
The result he argues are more felony charges even in the face of falling crime rates, and legislators (whether local, state, or national) hesitant to reform enforcement of felony convictions. Pfaff’s book is structured to be countervailing to The Standard Story, as his research drives home counterintuitive understandings of how and why we punish and legislate. Though, to be fair, this approach often feels as though Pfaff is more interested in criticizing The Standard Story than focusing on the truths of our mass incarceration crisis.
He, of course, does break down the systems and lay bear the counter-intuitive forces driving prison admissions and population, but with less satisfaction than when he can take a well reasoned point and use it to undermine the existing narratives. While this can at first be somewhat off putting, his detailed analysis is in service of the same goals as are shared with all reformers, and his wide ranging focus leaves no stone left unturned. This all leads to the second half of Locked In, wherein he lays out a new path for reform based on data and trends within crime rates. He points out the major divergence between the enforcement that continues to perpetuate mass incarceration, and the realities of current crime rates.
That said, Pfaff often applies differing systems of logic when approaching data, and then when trying to apply it. He seems to have no problem analyzing the bureaucracy and dischord incumbent in the data of rising and falling crime rates and the current systems of incarceration/prosecution. He nimbly breaks down how we can better conceptualize and understand both sides of this equation. However, when attempting to make sense of why or how prosecutors and judges act, he assumes a rationality not befitting their positions of change within the incarceration systems. He drops any and all sense of bureaucratic entropy from their positions within system, sometimes to the detriment of his own arguments.
Essentially, he's arguing their localized, bottom-up motivation and saying that they act in accord with local precedent, policy, and voters, but in the same chapters he'll discuss the influence of top down ideas on how prosecutors execute their jobs (contradicting his idea that prosecutors aren't influenced by federal policy and politicians). Pfaff undermines his whole work by refusing to admit that the current ills of mass incarceration could be both bottom-up (as he argues) and top down (as the Standard Story suggests).
This is perhaps the greatest limitation to Locked In, and why I recommend reading it in accordance with a book like The New Jim Crow. While both Pfaff and Alexander attack how prosecutors use the existing system, Pfaff tends to delimit his critiques to plausible theories rather than taking his specific concerns and tracking them through the existent system. This limitation to Pfaff's work is likely just a reflection of his reluctance to rely on what he calls conjecture when outlining his New Narrative. You can't fault him too greatly for taking this conservative approach, but it does, again somewhat minimize the human toll so greatly focused on in other works on mass incarceration, and roots a contradiction of perspective within his analyses later in the book.
Pfaff’s research and writing on mass incarceration is a deep dive into the data-based examination of conviction and incarceration, his rebuttals towhat he has termed “The Standard Story”, and an analysis of the distributed, local, and counterintuitive nature of America’s current mass incarceration crisis. It’s hard not to compare Locked In to Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, not only because they address a similar topic, and also because Pfaff feels the need to call her out directly within his work, but in truth because the two books take fundamentally different and complimentary approaches to understanding the effects of incarceration on present day Americans.
While Alexander focuses and on the sociocultural underpinnings of the federal war on drugs as a tool for widespread disenfranchisement of people of color, Pfaff brings his dispassionate, statistical ethic to bear upon the available data. Alexander lays bare the haunting effects of personal and prejudicial turmoil in the face of a Kafkaesque justice system, while Pfaff informs us of the hidden boogeyman in our conceptions of mass incarceration: the problem is misrepresented by scholars and the government alike, and much more distributed and thus difficult to effect change upon. Pfaff’s reliance on setting the data straight to seek a record of true representation is only limited in his lack of focus on the personal, social, and cultural experiences and ramifications of a felony conviction. He pays these topics some mind in his work, but I would feel disingenuous by not suggesting that one should read both Alexander’s and Pfaff’s works to get a full picture of our current crisis.
Their distinctly different approaches allow for the more regular mass incarceration reader to approach the crisis as both prejudiced enforcement of federal policy in balance with the role that each local DA and prosecutors play in the aggressive increases in prison admissions. Pfaff hinges on this “mishmash of independent, often competitive bureaucracies,” all functioning with their own political priorities with “almost unfettered, unreviewable power.” It’s from this loci that Pfaff explicates how federal policy has only tangential effect upon local prosecutorial zeal, on how the available nationwide data hides the real trends relevant to prison populations, the role of violent crime, and the implications of more and less punitive sentencing policies.
The result he argues are more felony charges even in the face of falling crime rates, and legislators (whether local, state, or national) hesitant to reform enforcement of felony convictions. Pfaff’s book is structured to be countervailing to The Standard Story, as his research drives home counterintuitive understandings of how and why we punish and legislate. Though, to be fair, this approach often feels as though Pfaff is more interested in criticizing The Standard Story than focusing on the truths of our mass incarceration crisis.
He, of course, does break down the systems and lay bear the counter-intuitive forces driving prison admissions and population, but with less satisfaction than when he can take a well reasoned point and use it to undermine the existing narratives. While this can at first be somewhat off putting, his detailed analysis is in service of the same goals as are shared with all reformers, and his wide ranging focus leaves no stone left unturned. This all leads to the second half of Locked In, wherein he lays out a new path for reform based on data and trends within crime rates. He points out the major divergence between the enforcement that continues to perpetuate mass incarceration, and the realities of current crime rates.
That said, Pfaff often applies differing systems of logic when approaching data, and then when trying to apply it. He seems to have no problem analyzing the bureaucracy and dischord incumbent in the data of rising and falling crime rates and the current systems of incarceration/prosecution. He nimbly breaks down how we can better conceptualize and understand both sides of this equation. However, when attempting to make sense of why or how prosecutors and judges act, he assumes a rationality not befitting their positions of change within the incarceration systems. He drops any and all sense of bureaucratic entropy from their positions within system, sometimes to the detriment of his own arguments.
Essentially, he's arguing their localized, bottom-up motivation and saying that they act in accord with local precedent, policy, and voters, but in the same chapters he'll discuss the influence of top down ideas on how prosecutors execute their jobs (contradicting his idea that prosecutors aren't influenced by federal policy and politicians). Pfaff undermines his whole work by refusing to admit that the current ills of mass incarceration could be both bottom-up (as he argues) and top down (as the Standard Story suggests).
This is perhaps the greatest limitation to Locked In, and why I recommend reading it in accordance with a book like The New Jim Crow. While both Pfaff and Alexander attack how prosecutors use the existing system, Pfaff tends to delimit his critiques to plausible theories rather than taking his specific concerns and tracking them through the existent system. This limitation to Pfaff's work is likely just a reflection of his reluctance to rely on what he calls conjecture when outlining his New Narrative. You can't fault him too greatly for taking this conservative approach, but it does, again somewhat minimize the human toll so greatly focused on in other works on mass incarceration, and roots a contradiction of perspective within his analyses later in the book.
June 6, 2022
Locked In provides a really great critique of the common proposals for criminal justice reform. Pfaff tackles topics like private prisons, nonviolent offenders, and criminalization of drugs. If nothing else, he does a great job highlighting how complicated these issues are and why the standard reform proposals centered around these issues won't accomplish everything proponents claim. He emphasizes several aspects of the criminal justice system that often go overlooked, like prosecutorial discretion, and suggests potential solutions addressing incentives in the current system and mandatory minimum sentencing.
Definitely worth reading if you're interested in criminal justice reform.
If I had one major critique, it would be that I found Pfaff's emphasis on "Democrats v. Republicans" frustrating. (And frequently undercut by his own statistics showing that criminal justice reform has gained traction within both parties.) He clearly is a Democrat and engages most with Democrat arguments. Well and good. But his complaints about Donald Trump and George H.W. Bush got old after a while. His arguments for why Republicans should care about funding public defenders (help curb governmental power) was interesting but almost offensively cursory. Frankly, I think it would have been a lot better if he had just labeled that an argument and not a Republican specific argument. That whole section felt like when your English teacher tells you that you need to address potential criticisms of your position so you throw in a line or two to check a box.
Overall, though, I'd say that's a pretty minor complaint for what ended up being a pretty insightful read.
Definitely worth reading if you're interested in criminal justice reform.
If I had one major critique, it would be that I found Pfaff's emphasis on "Democrats v. Republicans" frustrating. (And frequently undercut by his own statistics showing that criminal justice reform has gained traction within both parties.) He clearly is a Democrat and engages most with Democrat arguments. Well and good. But his complaints about Donald Trump and George H.W. Bush got old after a while. His arguments for why Republicans should care about funding public defenders (help curb governmental power) was interesting but almost offensively cursory. Frankly, I think it would have been a lot better if he had just labeled that an argument and not a Republican specific argument. That whole section felt like when your English teacher tells you that you need to address potential criticisms of your position so you throw in a line or two to check a box.
Overall, though, I'd say that's a pretty minor complaint for what ended up being a pretty insightful read.
April 18, 2017
John Pfaff was interviewed by Mike Pesca on The Gist on 11/2/2015. At the time I was a wannabe criminal justice reformer, toiling away in more generic nonprofit endeavors (and not aware that I was would begin a job in community corrections before the end of the year). I'd read Michelle Alexander and was absorbed in (what Pfaff calls) the standard account of mass incarceration, according to which prison populations had skyrocketed due to the over-policing of poor and minority neighborhoods, aimed at locking up nonviolent drug offenders for excessively long sentences in order to provide cheap labor to corporations that meant exorbitant profits for the private prisons in which inmates were housed. Pfaff seemed to have some contrarian views, but in the interview he came across as a clear thinker with an interesting perspective. I followed him on Twitter, and I said to him, "You should have a book!". He replied with "I have a book deal!" A year and change later, my pre-order of Locked In arrived in the mail.
There is some truth to every part of the standard account. But those pale in comparison to a more complicated picture that the standard account can obscure. Pfaff makes a compelling argument that meaningful criminal justice reform and meaningful decarceration will require a closer look at prosecutorial practices, the political influence of public sector correctional interests, and the fraught politics of locking up violent offenders.
Pfaff's book will be an invaluable resource in the pursuit of meaningful decarceration and criminal justice reform. I will be rereading this book multiple times, and I will be recommending it widely.
There is some truth to every part of the standard account. But those pale in comparison to a more complicated picture that the standard account can obscure. Pfaff makes a compelling argument that meaningful criminal justice reform and meaningful decarceration will require a closer look at prosecutorial practices, the political influence of public sector correctional interests, and the fraught politics of locking up violent offenders.
Pfaff's book will be an invaluable resource in the pursuit of meaningful decarceration and criminal justice reform. I will be rereading this book multiple times, and I will be recommending it widely.
July 1, 2021
This was the last of 3 Hoopla audiobooks that I rushed to squeeze in because my digital library is sunsetting my Hoopla access as of today (or technically yesterday, since it's after midnight as I write this). They were dead last on my prioritized reading list for a challenge I'm doing, because I don't particularly love Hoopla's app for audiobooks - but given a choice of KNOWING that I'll not be able to read them versus maybe just not getting to them, of course I had to rearrange.
So anyway, I moved this up, listened to it in one day and I'm glad that I did. This book was really a realist statistician's dream, especially if they also have an interest in social justice and criminal justice reforms.
This book is all about the real causes of higher prison populations (and it's not the War on Drugs, which surprised me). This book is nothing if not completely grounded in facts and stats, even when it runs completely counter to the popular narrative that the news cycle loves. In fact, this book exists exactly BECAUSE Pfaff wanted to counter that "standard story" narrative.
He contends that the War on Drugs, while harmful to many communities in a lot of ways, is not even close to being the main driver of high incarceration rates, and even if all drugs were legalized today, the effect on prison populations would be minimal. To this end, he calls out Michelle Alexander and her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, several times, which initially made me a scoooootch defensive, because her book is VERY good. BUT, he wasn't attacking her central point of racial and social inequalities under the law, and how negatively incarceration impacts and disenfranchises people and communities of color, often permanently, but he simply disagrees with her assessment of the CAUSE of that mass incarceration. Instead, he says, there are many reasons and causes of high incarceration rates in the US, and that makes it much more difficult to address... but not impossible.
I'll call out a couple of these things:
1) The "Criminal Justice System" is not a system. It's a matrix of systems, composed of county, state, and federal layers that each have their own laws and policies. Because of the doctrine of States' Rights, each state is able to determine their own penal code and sentencing policies etc, independent of the federal government's laws. That's why Colorado and California and Washington and a bunch of other states can legalize marijuana, while it's still illegal federally. It's also why so many states can all pass abortion ban laws, despite it being legal federally. So obviously, depending on the crime, and the jurisdiction, and so on, how the case is prosecuted or tried will vary widely.
2) Add in prosecutorial discretion, and things get even muddier still, because there is a LOT of leeway given to prosecutors to decide what cases to try and how to charge, including stacking charges and using very harsh sentences as incentive to obtain a plea deal. There's no oversight into their decisions, no justification needed for charging determinations or offers or even which cases to try. The prosecutor has an inordinate amount of power, and when politics enter the mix (as it often does), one must really question whether the goal is actually justice, or just to win at all costs and have a positive-on-paper conviction record.
3) Underfunded and extremely overloaded public defenders just do not have the resources to really defend the cases they receive. Not only are they not able to decide what to take, but they often only have minutes with a given client to advise them. Is it any wonder that so many plea deals are made? Every defendant has a right to representation, but in the "tough on crime" atmosphere of the US, it really seems like the there's a concerted effort to ensure that resources are not adequately available for proper defense.
At times, this book was quite frustrating because the focus on data and statistics was so consistent that it came across as cold or calculating, very unemotional and impersonal. While I get why and what he was setting out to do, and think that he did it and quite well... it was difficult to me to separate my empathy for people in a broken system (or many broken systems) and just look at the facts.
In the end though, I was quite pleased with this book, because while he does his whole Dragnet schtick, he does ALSO acknowledge the nuances and effects and negative impacts on those who are incarcerated, and the disparate effects that this has on minorities and Black communities and families and their prospects. There were MANY times that I paused the audiobook to dictate an irritated note to my phone about something like this, only for him to address it soon after, or in a later segment of the book. It's just that because the tone and feel of this is so dispassionate, it feels like that social justice and awareness aspect is unlikely to come, if that makes sense, so I call it out, only to have him address it. So it was a kind of frustration/relief cycle I kept going through.
For example, in a section about "installment plan" sentences, where an inmate is given a long sentence, paroled, and then ends up going back to prison for another term, he questions who has the longer sentence - someone who gets an initially longer sentence and serves it all, or someone who is paroled and returned and serves it in pieces, possibly with additions depending on what the parole-breaking offense was. My note was about the nature of parole, and the often insane restrictions and requirements that are placed on parolees, which in my opinion is just relocating the prison to the outside and as such should be included as part of the calculation of who actually served a longer sentence. IE: Count in-facility AND parole time together, not just when one is actually behind bars. And so, then when he DID mention those very things, I was like "OK. Good.... Thank you."
Anyway, I highly recommend this. It's interesting and insightful, and offers data and an alternative set of reasons to explain why the standard narrative of why the US has more prisoners than anywhere else isn't correct, and for that, I think this should be required reading.
So anyway, I moved this up, listened to it in one day and I'm glad that I did. This book was really a realist statistician's dream, especially if they also have an interest in social justice and criminal justice reforms.
This book is all about the real causes of higher prison populations (and it's not the War on Drugs, which surprised me). This book is nothing if not completely grounded in facts and stats, even when it runs completely counter to the popular narrative that the news cycle loves. In fact, this book exists exactly BECAUSE Pfaff wanted to counter that "standard story" narrative.
He contends that the War on Drugs, while harmful to many communities in a lot of ways, is not even close to being the main driver of high incarceration rates, and even if all drugs were legalized today, the effect on prison populations would be minimal. To this end, he calls out Michelle Alexander and her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, several times, which initially made me a scoooootch defensive, because her book is VERY good. BUT, he wasn't attacking her central point of racial and social inequalities under the law, and how negatively incarceration impacts and disenfranchises people and communities of color, often permanently, but he simply disagrees with her assessment of the CAUSE of that mass incarceration. Instead, he says, there are many reasons and causes of high incarceration rates in the US, and that makes it much more difficult to address... but not impossible.
I'll call out a couple of these things:
1) The "Criminal Justice System" is not a system. It's a matrix of systems, composed of county, state, and federal layers that each have their own laws and policies. Because of the doctrine of States' Rights, each state is able to determine their own penal code and sentencing policies etc, independent of the federal government's laws. That's why Colorado and California and Washington and a bunch of other states can legalize marijuana, while it's still illegal federally. It's also why so many states can all pass abortion ban laws, despite it being legal federally. So obviously, depending on the crime, and the jurisdiction, and so on, how the case is prosecuted or tried will vary widely.
2) Add in prosecutorial discretion, and things get even muddier still, because there is a LOT of leeway given to prosecutors to decide what cases to try and how to charge, including stacking charges and using very harsh sentences as incentive to obtain a plea deal. There's no oversight into their decisions, no justification needed for charging determinations or offers or even which cases to try. The prosecutor has an inordinate amount of power, and when politics enter the mix (as it often does), one must really question whether the goal is actually justice, or just to win at all costs and have a positive-on-paper conviction record.
3) Underfunded and extremely overloaded public defenders just do not have the resources to really defend the cases they receive. Not only are they not able to decide what to take, but they often only have minutes with a given client to advise them. Is it any wonder that so many plea deals are made? Every defendant has a right to representation, but in the "tough on crime" atmosphere of the US, it really seems like the there's a concerted effort to ensure that resources are not adequately available for proper defense.
At times, this book was quite frustrating because the focus on data and statistics was so consistent that it came across as cold or calculating, very unemotional and impersonal. While I get why and what he was setting out to do, and think that he did it and quite well... it was difficult to me to separate my empathy for people in a broken system (or many broken systems) and just look at the facts.
In the end though, I was quite pleased with this book, because while he does his whole Dragnet schtick, he does ALSO acknowledge the nuances and effects and negative impacts on those who are incarcerated, and the disparate effects that this has on minorities and Black communities and families and their prospects. There were MANY times that I paused the audiobook to dictate an irritated note to my phone about something like this, only for him to address it soon after, or in a later segment of the book. It's just that because the tone and feel of this is so dispassionate, it feels like that social justice and awareness aspect is unlikely to come, if that makes sense, so I call it out, only to have him address it. So it was a kind of frustration/relief cycle I kept going through.
For example, in a section about "installment plan" sentences, where an inmate is given a long sentence, paroled, and then ends up going back to prison for another term, he questions who has the longer sentence - someone who gets an initially longer sentence and serves it all, or someone who is paroled and returned and serves it in pieces, possibly with additions depending on what the parole-breaking offense was. My note was about the nature of parole, and the often insane restrictions and requirements that are placed on parolees, which in my opinion is just relocating the prison to the outside and as such should be included as part of the calculation of who actually served a longer sentence. IE: Count in-facility AND parole time together, not just when one is actually behind bars. And so, then when he DID mention those very things, I was like "OK. Good.... Thank you."
Anyway, I highly recommend this. It's interesting and insightful, and offers data and an alternative set of reasons to explain why the standard narrative of why the US has more prisoners than anywhere else isn't correct, and for that, I think this should be required reading.
July 4, 2017
It is rare than one comes across a book that covers a topic as thoroughly and dispassionately, but also as eloquently and as accessibly as this masterpiece criminologist John Pfaff has penned on reducing incarceration rates in the US.
That is not to say he lacks a strong view, but he does not allow it to blind him. Indeed, it seems as if he was very happy to lie low and carry on working hard in the trenches, until he felt the discourse was at risk of being hijacked by a narrative he does not disagree with at all, but considers dangerously incomplete and a risk to the more comprehensive approach he finds necessary.
Before I continue, I feel compelled to highlight the one shortcoming of this book: if you’re looking for the author’s arguments as to why the US needs to keep fewer people in its prisons, you’ve come to the wrong place. This is a book about how to bring the numbers down, not about why. You do encounter the author’s views on the topic, nary a page goes by where you do not see the reasons the author believes that to be an imperative, but this is quite simply not the purpose of the book. You won’t find a chapter or even a section here on the relative merits of incarceration versus other ways of keeping the public safe, let alone on the merits of spending money on jails rather than schools or hospitals, public golf courses, the space program or bank bailouts.
The book quickly goes over the numbers (summary: 1. There are more people in US jails than anywhere else, and that’s before we start talking per capita, where the US is five times more aggressive than any other nation 2. That’s five times more than in 1960 3. crime peaked in 1991, but incarceration rates only did so some five years ago and at a rate where it will take longer than a century to go back to normal) and moves on to debunk the “Standard Story” as detailed in Michelle Alexander’s “the New Jim Crow,” to which he opposes some cold numbers:
• Prisoners doing time for drug offenses are only 20% of the total
• Prisoners doing time for non-violent drug offences are only 6% of the total
• Private prisons account for only 6% of prisoners
• Contrary to public opinion, prison sentences aren’t getting longer, overall
The author is entirely sympathetic to the argument that the above statistics probably understate the reality on the ground, what with drug offenses being heavily related to other forms of crime and drug offenses being much more heavily prosecuted in black neighborhoods than white, among other things, but the main message he wants to shout from the rooftops is that we have been working that angle for ten years now and incarceration rates will not come down anywhere near enough until we go for the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter happens to be violent offenses, because that’s what an overwhelming majority of people in American jails are serving time for. The majority of a number that’s five times too high is by itself some three times too high. You don’t deal with that, you’re going nowhere.
Along the same lines, the vast majority of people in jail are in a public jail and you could shut down every private jail and it would not move the needle. It’s just that people who work in the field of decarceration also happen to have ideological issues with the involvement of the private sector (that the author, incidentally, shares) and that may allow ideology to creep into the argument, crowding out the more pressing need to do something about the actual incarceration rates.
The narrative, Pfaff believes, may also be driven by the fact that there is much richer data on the federal system and 100,000 out of 200,000 people in federal prisons (fully 50%, then) are serving for drug offenses. However, only 200,000 out of 1,300,000 people in state prisons and jails are serving drug-related sentences and the other authors who are talking about drugs have failed to grasp that there is hard work to be done at the local level of 3,000+ counties, rather than quick reform at the federal level, if we want to make real progress.
Rather than one system, we must basically reform 3,000 systems and they’re all different, but they all share one important actor: the prosecutor. And it’s him we need to focus our attention on:
We need to make sure he’s likelier to be deciding on cases in his community, not on cases from the inner city next door, for example. If he’s unnecessarily depriving a home from a father, make it a home in the place he lives. We need to make sure he bears the financial costs of his decisions, sending as few prisoners as possible to jails that hit somebody else’s budget. Conversely, we need to give him the budget to maintain statistics, of which there are currently none. We need to perhaps protect him from the electoral process and make him an appointee (and then, perhaps not: both arguments are presented). We need to restrict the manner in which he wields the nuclear weapon of plea bargaining, perhaps by setting much more prescriptive (and, other than for select well-specified cases, much more lenient) sentencing guidelines. We urgently need to fund his nemesis better, the public defender. Perhaps we need to give him strong budgetary incentives, as California is experimenting with.
We also need to understand his point of view: he faces a demand for punishment. People remember the case where leniency led to recidivism more than they remember or even notice unnecessarily harsh sentences. People have very little concept of how much crime there actually is, let alone whether crime is increasing or decreasing from one year to another (though people can distinguish between decades). He also faces politicians who want the budgets that come from prison populations and unions who want to protect prison jobs.
Away from the prosecutor, we need to study the people who commit violent crimes. We need to understand better why and when they offend, we need to make the connection between their incarceration and their potential for further violence and we need to stop calling them violent offenders and start thinking of them as people who have committed a violent offense but who regardless cost society value beyond the monetary expense of their incarceration every day they stay behind bars. The case of “three strikes you’re out” detainees who were released after 15 years is very poignant, as they’ve turned out to be an order of magnitude less likely to re-offend than the expectation.
While we’re on the rhetoric, we need to stop arguing that nonviolent offenders are occupying a bed that should be taken by a violent offender (oops, what did I just say?), the logic that we want the fewest possible people in jail, “provided our safety is not compromised.” Instead, we need to make the argument that everything is negotiable, because actually it is. At the very least, we need to recognize that, at current levels of incarceration, money spent on policing makes us much safer than money spent on punishment.
The conclusion of this book is given by the author when he introduces the chapter on “the third rail,” which is what he calls violent offenses:
“Any significant reduction in the US prison population is going to require states and counties to rethink how they punish people convicted of violent crimes, where ‘rethink’ means ‘think how to punish less.’”
The author does not stop with the conclusion. He actually finishes with a very strong 30 page chapter (“Quo Vadis”) where he outlines his best ideas. It’s the best chapter of the book and “worth the purchase price” alone, as they say.
So I loved it. But what I loved most has nothing to do with any of the above:
I’m a keen student of the recent financial meltdown, particularly as part of the general economic situation. On page 97 of the book there’s a chart of “Correction and Criminal Justice Spending as Share of State Budgets 1952-2012.” It is ENTIRELY self-similar to the chart for labor force participation that the economists bandy about on the first Friday of every month when they complain that the unemployment rate is fakely low because the low “labor participation rate” flatters it.
If the chart for participation in the labor force and the chart for spending on criminal justice are one and the same (despite the fact that if you are in jail you are REMOVING YOURSELF from the labor force) you can’t but conclude that crime is quite simply something that happens. Crime is but a feature of our economy and all the jailing in the world won’t stop it. So rather than punishment or even prevention, our duty is to concentrate on justice and fairness. That’s hard enough by itself.
That is not to say he lacks a strong view, but he does not allow it to blind him. Indeed, it seems as if he was very happy to lie low and carry on working hard in the trenches, until he felt the discourse was at risk of being hijacked by a narrative he does not disagree with at all, but considers dangerously incomplete and a risk to the more comprehensive approach he finds necessary.
Before I continue, I feel compelled to highlight the one shortcoming of this book: if you’re looking for the author’s arguments as to why the US needs to keep fewer people in its prisons, you’ve come to the wrong place. This is a book about how to bring the numbers down, not about why. You do encounter the author’s views on the topic, nary a page goes by where you do not see the reasons the author believes that to be an imperative, but this is quite simply not the purpose of the book. You won’t find a chapter or even a section here on the relative merits of incarceration versus other ways of keeping the public safe, let alone on the merits of spending money on jails rather than schools or hospitals, public golf courses, the space program or bank bailouts.
The book quickly goes over the numbers (summary: 1. There are more people in US jails than anywhere else, and that’s before we start talking per capita, where the US is five times more aggressive than any other nation 2. That’s five times more than in 1960 3. crime peaked in 1991, but incarceration rates only did so some five years ago and at a rate where it will take longer than a century to go back to normal) and moves on to debunk the “Standard Story” as detailed in Michelle Alexander’s “the New Jim Crow,” to which he opposes some cold numbers:
• Prisoners doing time for drug offenses are only 20% of the total
• Prisoners doing time for non-violent drug offences are only 6% of the total
• Private prisons account for only 6% of prisoners
• Contrary to public opinion, prison sentences aren’t getting longer, overall
The author is entirely sympathetic to the argument that the above statistics probably understate the reality on the ground, what with drug offenses being heavily related to other forms of crime and drug offenses being much more heavily prosecuted in black neighborhoods than white, among other things, but the main message he wants to shout from the rooftops is that we have been working that angle for ten years now and incarceration rates will not come down anywhere near enough until we go for the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter happens to be violent offenses, because that’s what an overwhelming majority of people in American jails are serving time for. The majority of a number that’s five times too high is by itself some three times too high. You don’t deal with that, you’re going nowhere.
Along the same lines, the vast majority of people in jail are in a public jail and you could shut down every private jail and it would not move the needle. It’s just that people who work in the field of decarceration also happen to have ideological issues with the involvement of the private sector (that the author, incidentally, shares) and that may allow ideology to creep into the argument, crowding out the more pressing need to do something about the actual incarceration rates.
The narrative, Pfaff believes, may also be driven by the fact that there is much richer data on the federal system and 100,000 out of 200,000 people in federal prisons (fully 50%, then) are serving for drug offenses. However, only 200,000 out of 1,300,000 people in state prisons and jails are serving drug-related sentences and the other authors who are talking about drugs have failed to grasp that there is hard work to be done at the local level of 3,000+ counties, rather than quick reform at the federal level, if we want to make real progress.
Rather than one system, we must basically reform 3,000 systems and they’re all different, but they all share one important actor: the prosecutor. And it’s him we need to focus our attention on:
We need to make sure he’s likelier to be deciding on cases in his community, not on cases from the inner city next door, for example. If he’s unnecessarily depriving a home from a father, make it a home in the place he lives. We need to make sure he bears the financial costs of his decisions, sending as few prisoners as possible to jails that hit somebody else’s budget. Conversely, we need to give him the budget to maintain statistics, of which there are currently none. We need to perhaps protect him from the electoral process and make him an appointee (and then, perhaps not: both arguments are presented). We need to restrict the manner in which he wields the nuclear weapon of plea bargaining, perhaps by setting much more prescriptive (and, other than for select well-specified cases, much more lenient) sentencing guidelines. We urgently need to fund his nemesis better, the public defender. Perhaps we need to give him strong budgetary incentives, as California is experimenting with.
We also need to understand his point of view: he faces a demand for punishment. People remember the case where leniency led to recidivism more than they remember or even notice unnecessarily harsh sentences. People have very little concept of how much crime there actually is, let alone whether crime is increasing or decreasing from one year to another (though people can distinguish between decades). He also faces politicians who want the budgets that come from prison populations and unions who want to protect prison jobs.
Away from the prosecutor, we need to study the people who commit violent crimes. We need to understand better why and when they offend, we need to make the connection between their incarceration and their potential for further violence and we need to stop calling them violent offenders and start thinking of them as people who have committed a violent offense but who regardless cost society value beyond the monetary expense of their incarceration every day they stay behind bars. The case of “three strikes you’re out” detainees who were released after 15 years is very poignant, as they’ve turned out to be an order of magnitude less likely to re-offend than the expectation.
While we’re on the rhetoric, we need to stop arguing that nonviolent offenders are occupying a bed that should be taken by a violent offender (oops, what did I just say?), the logic that we want the fewest possible people in jail, “provided our safety is not compromised.” Instead, we need to make the argument that everything is negotiable, because actually it is. At the very least, we need to recognize that, at current levels of incarceration, money spent on policing makes us much safer than money spent on punishment.
The conclusion of this book is given by the author when he introduces the chapter on “the third rail,” which is what he calls violent offenses:
“Any significant reduction in the US prison population is going to require states and counties to rethink how they punish people convicted of violent crimes, where ‘rethink’ means ‘think how to punish less.’”
The author does not stop with the conclusion. He actually finishes with a very strong 30 page chapter (“Quo Vadis”) where he outlines his best ideas. It’s the best chapter of the book and “worth the purchase price” alone, as they say.
So I loved it. But what I loved most has nothing to do with any of the above:
I’m a keen student of the recent financial meltdown, particularly as part of the general economic situation. On page 97 of the book there’s a chart of “Correction and Criminal Justice Spending as Share of State Budgets 1952-2012.” It is ENTIRELY self-similar to the chart for labor force participation that the economists bandy about on the first Friday of every month when they complain that the unemployment rate is fakely low because the low “labor participation rate” flatters it.
If the chart for participation in the labor force and the chart for spending on criminal justice are one and the same (despite the fact that if you are in jail you are REMOVING YOURSELF from the labor force) you can’t but conclude that crime is quite simply something that happens. Crime is but a feature of our economy and all the jailing in the world won’t stop it. So rather than punishment or even prevention, our duty is to concentrate on justice and fairness. That’s hard enough by itself.
August 20, 2019
I think I would have liked this book more if I had not read Bazelon's Charged earlier this summer. Bazelon does a much better job of discussing the nuance and really getting into the data surrounding the problems with our criminal justice system. Pfaff comes to many of the same conclusions (at the risk of sounding too simplistic, it is all the prosecutor's fault), but his book is a lot more blather (and repetition) than hard data. In particular, I felt like he really padded these 235 pages with about 100 pages of duplication. For example, pages 147-159 present his idea of potential reforms and then pg 206-235 re-iterate these reforms with few additions and mostly just caveats about what is unlikely to work given political push back.
Some of his reforms, however, do seem feasible and unlike Bazelon's list do not focus exclusively on prosecutor offices taking the initiative to change.
His main suggestions are that we should adequately fund the defense, defense attorneys are paid far less, they have less access to investigative budgets and less power over what cases they pursue. If our national ethos really is "innocent until proven guilty", then we need to do a better job of providing tools for the defense to event the playing field both in the plea bargaining stage and when things get to court.
He also thinks that we should divert federal money to prevent crime by investing in mental health, community building and other social services as well as increase the clearance rate on series crime rather than focusing police energy/funds on low level and drug violations. He points to the HOPE model and notes the importance of certain immediate punishment rather than severe, uncertain punishment.
He also pushes for more data on prosecutors and suggests plea bargaining guidelines and/or charging tools. He suggest that having a commission develop these tools would reduce the potential political cost to both prosecutors and legislators because they do not have to bear the responsibility for any high profile recidivism. Along with this he suggests that any minimum sentencing laws should come with sunset clauses so that they will time out on their own in a period of declining crime rates.
He points out that that fact that states pay for prison and counties pay for jails gives prosecutors incentive to send people to prison (longer terms) over jails and suggests several budgetary changes to realign this as well as re-writing private prison contracts or changing public prison funding such that bonuses are paid for outcomes such as low recidivism rates. He suggest that we might be able to close prisons in the future if we follow the BRAC model, rather than relying on individual legislators to be willing to close large job sources within their district.
Finally, he points to the importance of changing the power of suburbanites over DA offices and political leaders by limiting prison gerrymandering and restructuring such that cities have individual offices (with individual votes) rather than being controlled at the county level. He also suggests that we work on public attitude campaigns that use "person who offended" rather than "violent offender" language in order to focus more on rehabilitation than retribution when talking about the criminal justice system.
Overall it is probably more readable to the general public, but also more wishy-washy and less grounded in real data.
Some of his reforms, however, do seem feasible and unlike Bazelon's list do not focus exclusively on prosecutor offices taking the initiative to change.
His main suggestions are that we should adequately fund the defense, defense attorneys are paid far less, they have less access to investigative budgets and less power over what cases they pursue. If our national ethos really is "innocent until proven guilty", then we need to do a better job of providing tools for the defense to event the playing field both in the plea bargaining stage and when things get to court.
He also thinks that we should divert federal money to prevent crime by investing in mental health, community building and other social services as well as increase the clearance rate on series crime rather than focusing police energy/funds on low level and drug violations. He points to the HOPE model and notes the importance of certain immediate punishment rather than severe, uncertain punishment.
He also pushes for more data on prosecutors and suggests plea bargaining guidelines and/or charging tools. He suggest that having a commission develop these tools would reduce the potential political cost to both prosecutors and legislators because they do not have to bear the responsibility for any high profile recidivism. Along with this he suggests that any minimum sentencing laws should come with sunset clauses so that they will time out on their own in a period of declining crime rates.
He points out that that fact that states pay for prison and counties pay for jails gives prosecutors incentive to send people to prison (longer terms) over jails and suggests several budgetary changes to realign this as well as re-writing private prison contracts or changing public prison funding such that bonuses are paid for outcomes such as low recidivism rates. He suggest that we might be able to close prisons in the future if we follow the BRAC model, rather than relying on individual legislators to be willing to close large job sources within their district.
Finally, he points to the importance of changing the power of suburbanites over DA offices and political leaders by limiting prison gerrymandering and restructuring such that cities have individual offices (with individual votes) rather than being controlled at the county level. He also suggests that we work on public attitude campaigns that use "person who offended" rather than "violent offender" language in order to focus more on rehabilitation than retribution when talking about the criminal justice system.
Overall it is probably more readable to the general public, but also more wishy-washy and less grounded in real data.
November 26, 2024
Excellent counterbalance to a lot of the generally accepted wisdom on criminal justice reform, urging people to transcend vibes-based-reform (my phrase not his) and to look at core drivers of mass incarceration
June 29, 2020
I'm not contrarian–the data is
John Pfaff's twitter bio pretty much sums it up.
It's a jarring reading experience at first, the way Locked In starts tackling mass incarceration, a cause associated by most with the fiery, intersectional discourse of The Left, by framing it in the clinical language of quantitative research and cost-benefit analysis. But if John F. Pfaff doesn't measure up to the level of indignant zeal you were expecting, it's only because he assumes that his audience is basically Down For the Cause and there's hardly a need to belabor the emotional and ethical appeals. And if it seems contrarian, even heretical, that racism is only a peripheral figure in his analysis, what he's actually proposing here isn't any less "radical" for it.
To be clear, Pfaff doesn't pretend that systemic racism isn't a factor. He points to unambiguous discrepancies in the data on sentencing and parole for the same crimes, and he's a wizard at untangling the ways funding and election structures at the local, county, and state level empower wealthy white suburbs to set aggressive policy for the poorer and blacker communities most hurt by over-incarceration. But his advocacy efforts aren't directed towards "dismantling the white supremacy inherent in the prison system" (legitimate and admirable as it might be); instead, he's focused on the tangible, measurable matter of reducing the number of people in prison as much as possible.
Pfaff's whole brand of hyper-specialized data wonk prison reformism is compelling for me in large part because it's so different from but complementary to the brand of discourse I'm used to. To, uh, conveniently choose the only two other full-length prison critiques I've read up 'til now, let's consider Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Angela Davis' Are Prisons Obsolete?. In terms of what's being ultimately advocated for, APO is more explicitly radical than TNJC, but I'd argue their styles of diagnosis are far more similar to each other than they are to Pfaff. They're animated not only by data but by narratives or ideologies that contextualize mass incarceration on the order of centuries rather than decades; they write from an altitude where white supremacy itself is as legitimate a causal agent as any concrete change in policy or leadership.
One approach draws connections between disparate systems and struggles, while another zooms in until all the casual threads can be isolated and measured against each other. The word "structural" as I understand it might not be specific enough here, since I think it applies equally well to their respective analyses of mass incarceration, but in ways that feel almost opposite at times. One way to put it: Davis and Alexander got their doctorates in philosophy and law respectively, while Pfaff got his in economics, and it shows.
So is one approach "better" than the other for achieving justice? Locked In makes me think that Pfaff thinks the answer is "yes". When he criticizes TNJC's emphasis on The War on Drugs, you get the sense he's also gesturing towards a broader accusation; that the activists and public figures best at galvanizing the public around an issue ought to defer to the specialists (like Pfaff, of course) when it comes to diagnosis and triage, at least if they truly value results over the tidiness and emotional appeal of their preferred narrative.
At face value, there's a cheeky flipping here of our expectations around what kind of language and methods "radicals" employ: in effect, Pfaff is trying to position himself as more radical than Alexander. The unspoken rule of liberal prison reform discourse states mass incarceration is problematically "mass"-ive only up to the point that it no longer serves the sacred priority of "public safety"; Pfaff names it and openly defies it. The subversion seems fun and provocative, but only until you consider the fact that, as Pfaff openly acknowledges, The Standard Story that Alexander played such a big role in popularizing is precisely what created the political climate in which, 7 years after TNJC was published, Locked In's ideas could find an audience and be taken seriously in the first place.
The emphasis on the War on Drugs is just one pillar of The Standard Story, and maybe the dynamic with Alexander - whom the book and all the press around it haven't been coy about naming - is less about one-upmanship and really just the healthy kind of goalpost-moving you see when social movements get wider traction. You can imagine the spirit of this book condensed into a concise subtweet dunk: "Society has evolved past the need for focusing reform efforts on non-violent drug offenders".
The angle that's less obvious and more provocative, though, is that he might be trying to pull this same kind of "well, actually" out-radicalizing maneuver on Angela Y. Davis herself - the undisputed queen of anti-prison discourse, who was articulating a framework for outright abolition while Pfaff was still pooping his pants. In case you missed it, this happens when he takes on another pillar of The Standard Story that TNJC barely mentions and which, AFAIK, is most popularly associated with Davis' work: the matter of private prisons.
The outline of the critique is similar to the one against the War on Drugs narrative, arguing that the supposed perverse incentives decried by anti-capitalist-minded critics just aren't born out by the data - conditions in public facilities aren't appreciably better than private ones, and public unions and lobbies are just as or more effective than private ones in using their power to oppose decarceration. Therefore, he asserts, focusing on private prisons does less than nothing to advance the cause.
Of the pillars in The Standard Story, private prisons might be the better case study in the dynamic between Ideology and Empiricism that, for me, undergirds the whole discourse of Locked In. Here's how I'd paraphrase Pfaff's implied pro-Empiricism subtext:
"As opposed to performative woke-ness or pure ideology, the active pursuit of social justice implies accountability to the facts and to the people on whose behalf we claim to be fighting. While we can never have perfect knowledge, we have a moral duty to at least care about effectiveness. For us researchers and public intellectuals shaping the discourse, that means having the intellectual humbleness to practice skepticism: to form hypotheses, assume they're wrong until the data or research we gather indicates that they're far more likely to be right, and then crucially, update our models and refocus our research/activism to reflect that.
In the case of private prisons, the data is clear that their net effect is negligible, so anyone continuing to advance the narrative that they deserve our special attention, while supposedly grounding their advocacy in compassion for those impacted by over-incarceration, is either practicing shoddy scholarship or is more committed to ideological purity than they are to harm reduction"
So how is centering private prisons in your anti-incarceration rhetoric any different than centering The War on Drugs? They're both equally concordant with leftist models of capitalism and racism in general, but the crucial difference is the degree to which the specific hypothesis being "wrong" undermines the underlying model:
* Whether or not The War on Drugs itself was the primary driver in the rise of mass incarceration, the fact remains that it is still profoundly racist, not only in its substantive impacts, but literally in its motivation (as baldly documented in the John Ehrlichman quote). Furthermore, as Pfaff acknowledges, it's not as if Alexander's whole analysis in TNJC rests on that being the #1 driver, as opposed to #2 or #3. Her main insight - that racism permeates every level of the criminal justice system - isn't even controversial to him, and there's nothing in his own finer-grained diagnosis that's incompatible with it. Some specifics need to be tweaked, but model is sound.
* The matter of private prisons is a different story though. Simplifying a bit: if the defining attitude of the left towards capitalism is that it values growth and profit over people, and its abuses can only be reigned in by bringing the economy under democratic control, then it follows pretty much inevitably that the privatization of prisons would lead to more incarceration and more abuse. But if, "empirically", the private prison system isn't really any more self-interested and harmful than the public one, that would seem to represent a much deeper fissure in the model... And the deeper the fissure, the more that doubling down on the hypothesis starts to look like willful ideological dogmatism.
Here's where Angela Davis, avowed Marxist, would jump in:
"Hold up - while it's true that some of my writing has analyzed the ways in which private prisons are uniquely problematic, and that plenty of misguided Woke-Lite progressives have latched onto that as a pet issue, the idea that we should expect prisons run by the state to have fewer, better-treated prisoners than ones run by capitalists is ludicrous. The whole point of the state as we know it in America is to uphold capital and white supremacy. The goal here isn't to 'reign in the abuses of [prisons] by bringing them under democratic control' - it is to Abolish Prisons, and any reformist-ass concern troll treating 'harm reduction' like some big multivariable equation to be solved can go suck a toe."
Ok, this has gotten more self-indulgent than I ever intended, so at this point, I should wrap up by saying this: I think Pfaff's hyper-specialized, data-driven approach has essential insights, but it definitely has weaknesses and blind-spots as well. The most vivid example of this might be the way Pfaff fails to apply the exact same principles his prison analysis yielded elsewhere, at one point evening proposing in earnest that some of the savings from decarceration be applied towards more policing. As I later found out, he's moved on from "better training and body cams" and come around to "gradually defund and reinvest in alternatives" since this was published in 2017, which is great. We learn, we change; we absorb ideas about what's possible from the changing culture around us. But did he get new data, or did the zeitgeist catch up and allow him to see the systems side by side from the appropriate altitude? I wonder.
May 22, 2019
John Pfaff does an impressive amount of work in this book to not only cast doubt on the ‘Standard Story’ of mass incarceration, but also to illuminate the actual causes of prison growth in the US and possible solutions to curb incarceration numbers. Most criminal justice reform rhetoric focuses on the war on drugs, lengthy sentences, & private prisons. Although all objectionable, there’s little research to suggest that any of those factors primarily caused or maintain high prison populations, meaning that reforms targeting those will be unlikely to put a meaningful dent in high number of people incarcerated. Pfaff devotes a significant amount of pages in Locked In to argue that actually combatting mass incarceration requires us to shift our focus directly to prosecutorial power, public sector incentives, & people convicted of violent crime. Pfaff’s book is a great resource for those casually interested in criminal justice reform to those who devote their lives to combat mass incarceration.
April 26, 2020
offers another view of a very complex problem of incarceration. The book offers a compelling argument that to reform a politically driven aspect of government, the solutions are complex. Punishment is a politically driven part of governing and it requires a closer look at how it is accomplished from street to prison door. I did agree that swift and responsive response to crime is the greatest deterrent. Further, I agree that most violent offenses are an act of violence and not a reflection of a total person. There are always the poster children for the idea of a violent offender... but most are not. I thought the book was very interesting and factual in many aspects. However, I do not believe that a single idea can reflect the totality of this complex topic. I do know that a continuation of what we are doing will only get us more of what we have now. If you are interested in the system, then the book is for you.
4 star reading.
Happy Reading
September 27, 2018
If you enjoy Michelle Alexander, this is an excellent addition and viewpoint to better understanding criminal justice reform. Pfaff does a thorough, empirical overview of the myths of our current system. Pfaff argues that to lower our incarceration rate significantly, it is not just non-violent drug offenders that should be focused on, but all prisoners and offenders, including those in for violent crimes. We as a society have to consider what amount of crime is okay and compare it to the societal costs of locking people up on a mass scale. We also have to reevaluate the social roots of violence.
While Pfaff covers many areas, one of his biggest focuses is the role of prosecutorial discretion and accountability. While crime and arrests fell from 1994-2008, felony convictions rose 40%. Pfaff argues that that is due to prosecutors. The cases prosecutors choose to try end in a guilty plea 95% of the time. They have almost no limit in what they are able to threaten and mandatory minimums certainly help. "Nearly everyone in prison ended up there by signing a piece of paper in a dingy conference room in a county office building” (Pfaff).
Pfaff ends with some hopeful solutions that could lead to reform. Overall, an interesting alternative to the standard story of mass incarceration.
While Pfaff covers many areas, one of his biggest focuses is the role of prosecutorial discretion and accountability. While crime and arrests fell from 1994-2008, felony convictions rose 40%. Pfaff argues that that is due to prosecutors. The cases prosecutors choose to try end in a guilty plea 95% of the time. They have almost no limit in what they are able to threaten and mandatory minimums certainly help. "Nearly everyone in prison ended up there by signing a piece of paper in a dingy conference room in a county office building” (Pfaff).
Pfaff ends with some hopeful solutions that could lead to reform. Overall, an interesting alternative to the standard story of mass incarceration.
November 24, 2017
Time for some non-fiction. John Pfaff’s study of mass incarceration in the United States, a problem that should engage us all, is a rebuttal, or at least an addendum, of Michelle Alexader’s “The New Jim Crow.” The latter describes mass incarceration as arising primarily from such things as mandatory sentencing of relatively minor drug offenders, often racially motivated, and privatization of prisons. Pfaff’s book argues instead that in order to radically decrease our prison population we must come to terms with prosecutorial practice, the political context that shapes the judicial system, and, perhaps most importantly, how we treat and think about violent crime. His proposals are sometimes radical, but he knows full well the great difficulty of reform within the context of what he calls a “low information high salience” electorate—that is, an electorate that condemns a single failure in criminal reform much more loudly than they applaud a hundred successes. This study is filled with detail, much of if statistical, and deserves to be carefully studied rather than quickly read. A valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about criminal justice in the United States.
August 13, 2018
I love hearing arguments against what we all accept to be true. Obviously privatized prisons are not a cause of U.S. increased incarceration rates. As Pfaff explains, public employee unions are vastly more powerful than any few contractors. Better yet, he goes further and claims we need to use private prisons more and in different ways. Another point that might shock some, ending the drug war won't reduce incarceration to the amount some want to think. The 800 lb gorilla in the room is the fact that most in prison are there for violent crime. If we want to reduce our prison population then we need to be willing to accept less harsh sentences and use the savings in more effective ways. If you live in the U.S. and you're politically on the left or right you'll be annoyed on many points. I love it, a must read.
March 17, 2019
God bless the wonks. They are here to give us the data and puncture the narratives. This book certainly punctures some narratives, and it is important. It focuses in on the big issues we really need to tackle to bring down incarceration rates.
His big point is that the War on Drugs is driving mass incarceration far less than we think it is. The standard story, which he assigns largely to the New Jim Crow, is that low-level drug offenders have constituted the majority of the increase in prisoners. While the WOG is responsible for a lot of violent crime, only about 15% of prisoners at any given time are non-violent drug offenders. In a sense, it would be nice if the NJC narrative was true: it would make mass incarceration politically easier to solve. The reality is tougher: mass incarceration is driven largely by violent offenders, who make up the bulk of the prison population. Trying to lower imprisonment rates and keep the public safe (and feeling safe) will be much tougher as a result, but it is important to face up to the real challenge.
So what then has kept incarceration rates high even as crime has declined? Pfaff points the finger at a few sources, but the biggest ones are prosecutors and counties. Prosecutors have strong political incentives to be as tough as possible. They have enormous discretion over what people are charged with and how many charges they will face. They are way more well-equipped and funded than public defenders, and they receive automatic benefits in making their cases such as cooperation with the police in accumulating evidence. They face the "Willie Horton" problem: if the book is not thrown at baddies, and just a few of those baddies go on to commit horrible crimes, everyone involved in the "lax" punishment will suffer politically. Counties, moreover, vary incredibly in their enforcement of the law. In some cases, only a small percentage of counties drive prisoner increases or more extreme punishments like the death penalty. Counties face the moral hazard problem in that they sentence people but the states pay for lockup.
After doing a series of statistical studies of the various potential "acceleration points" in the growth of incarceration, Pfaff found that the main acceleration point was at the prosecutorial level: prosecutors were charging a higher percentage of cases at tougher levels even though the overall number of possible defendants was decreasing. Moreover, he points a big finger at public sector prison guard unions, prosector's unions, and politicians with prisons in their districts for keeping tough laws on the books and resisting reforms. Private prisons, he claims convincingly, have roughly the same perverse incentive problem here as the public sector, and as a result he downplays both their uniqueness and their significance in terms of causing mass incarceration.
The nicest thing about this book is how it criticizes both sides of the debate but also offers them a way forward. I'm sure a lot of people with straw man this argument, especially on the issue of race. That's not fair. In fact, Pfaff shows that race is built into the structure of mass incarceration in many ways, including non-violent drug offenders; the big point though is that these types of offenders are not driving incarceration. For example, there's a structural problem in that suburban and rural voters have disproportional power over the laws that govern cities. Something as seemingly anodyne as raising the penalty for selling drugs in a school zone can have a racial bias, because in a more condensed city you are far more likely to live in a school zone. Pfaff agrees that mass incarceration and the various restrictions on released prisoners forms a sort of "new caste system," as Alexander argues, but his argument points us in very different directions for reform: shorter sentences for violent offenses, more money for public defenders, and more scrutiny over prosecutors.
This book is dense and stats heavy, even though Pfaff is clear in his arguments. He's right that we are in a political moment, aided by the decline of crime rates and growing awareness of the racial disparity in the justice system, in which we can pursue significant reforms. This book is an asset in that it points us in a new, and probably more productive, direction. Hopefully people will listen to this sensible, informed voice. If you read and enjoyed the NJC, which I did, you have to check out Pfaff. If you don't, it would be hard for you to say you have really engaged with significant counterpoints to Alexander's story, although their arguments are compatible in many ways.
His big point is that the War on Drugs is driving mass incarceration far less than we think it is. The standard story, which he assigns largely to the New Jim Crow, is that low-level drug offenders have constituted the majority of the increase in prisoners. While the WOG is responsible for a lot of violent crime, only about 15% of prisoners at any given time are non-violent drug offenders. In a sense, it would be nice if the NJC narrative was true: it would make mass incarceration politically easier to solve. The reality is tougher: mass incarceration is driven largely by violent offenders, who make up the bulk of the prison population. Trying to lower imprisonment rates and keep the public safe (and feeling safe) will be much tougher as a result, but it is important to face up to the real challenge.
So what then has kept incarceration rates high even as crime has declined? Pfaff points the finger at a few sources, but the biggest ones are prosecutors and counties. Prosecutors have strong political incentives to be as tough as possible. They have enormous discretion over what people are charged with and how many charges they will face. They are way more well-equipped and funded than public defenders, and they receive automatic benefits in making their cases such as cooperation with the police in accumulating evidence. They face the "Willie Horton" problem: if the book is not thrown at baddies, and just a few of those baddies go on to commit horrible crimes, everyone involved in the "lax" punishment will suffer politically. Counties, moreover, vary incredibly in their enforcement of the law. In some cases, only a small percentage of counties drive prisoner increases or more extreme punishments like the death penalty. Counties face the moral hazard problem in that they sentence people but the states pay for lockup.
After doing a series of statistical studies of the various potential "acceleration points" in the growth of incarceration, Pfaff found that the main acceleration point was at the prosecutorial level: prosecutors were charging a higher percentage of cases at tougher levels even though the overall number of possible defendants was decreasing. Moreover, he points a big finger at public sector prison guard unions, prosector's unions, and politicians with prisons in their districts for keeping tough laws on the books and resisting reforms. Private prisons, he claims convincingly, have roughly the same perverse incentive problem here as the public sector, and as a result he downplays both their uniqueness and their significance in terms of causing mass incarceration.
The nicest thing about this book is how it criticizes both sides of the debate but also offers them a way forward. I'm sure a lot of people with straw man this argument, especially on the issue of race. That's not fair. In fact, Pfaff shows that race is built into the structure of mass incarceration in many ways, including non-violent drug offenders; the big point though is that these types of offenders are not driving incarceration. For example, there's a structural problem in that suburban and rural voters have disproportional power over the laws that govern cities. Something as seemingly anodyne as raising the penalty for selling drugs in a school zone can have a racial bias, because in a more condensed city you are far more likely to live in a school zone. Pfaff agrees that mass incarceration and the various restrictions on released prisoners forms a sort of "new caste system," as Alexander argues, but his argument points us in very different directions for reform: shorter sentences for violent offenses, more money for public defenders, and more scrutiny over prosecutors.
This book is dense and stats heavy, even though Pfaff is clear in his arguments. He's right that we are in a political moment, aided by the decline of crime rates and growing awareness of the racial disparity in the justice system, in which we can pursue significant reforms. This book is an asset in that it points us in a new, and probably more productive, direction. Hopefully people will listen to this sensible, informed voice. If you read and enjoyed the NJC, which I did, you have to check out Pfaff. If you don't, it would be hard for you to say you have really engaged with significant counterpoints to Alexander's story, although their arguments are compatible in many ways.
August 11, 2019
The central claim of the book is that changes is the number of prison admissions driven by prosecutor behavior, NOT private prisons, the War on Drugs, or longer sentences, drove the rise from 100 people in prison per 100,000 around 1970 to over 500 people per 100,000 in 2008.
(This is a claim I agree with, and while I'm against private prisons and the War on Drugs, changing those things won't change the scale of mass incarceration. Only 8% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons, and as of 2013 we could have "released half of all people convicted of property and public order crimes, 100% of those in for drug possession, and 75% of those in for drug trafficking. Our prison population would have dropped from 1.3 million to 950,000...more than three times the prison population we had when the boom began.")
A few things I took away & some actions I think they demand of us:
-State & local elections are incredibly important, and crucially lack participation. For example: 95% of prosecutors win re-election, and 85% of them run unopposed.
-action: make sure your favorite pres. candidate is signed on to the #DownBallotPledge, and find out when your local & state elections are (especially primary elections!) https://www.runforofficeday.com/
-action: who's the district attorney where you live? how have they promised to stop spending taxpayer money on keeping people in cages? have they followed through on those promises?
-Locked In" as a book is fundamentally about prison growth, though Pfaff does highlight the life-changing impact (job loss, stigma, disenfranchisement, loss of social ties, etc.) of stints of incarceration with many different lengths. More Americans see the inside of a jail cell (~10 million admissions per year) than prisons. The web of mass incarceration is larger than just prisons, and there are other promising reforms, like eliminating or severely reducing money bail, that can help us decarcerate.
-Action: get involved with your local bail fund, donate, advocate for changes where you are. (link: https://www.communityjusticeexchange....) communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-dir... There are more legally innocent pretrial detainees in our jails than there are people held for drug crimes in state & federal prison. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/...
-Reading the book, I continue to be excited for efforts to capture the true social costs of incarceration. I've long referred to this estimate of over $1 trillion (https://joinnia.com/…/The-Economic-Bu...-…). But the clearer we get in measuring and communicating the human and financial costs of mass incarceration, the better we'll be able to win the change we need. The debate needs a reframe from: "public safety at all costs" to what true public safety looks like - understanding that our current conception of public safety is tearing apart communities, putting people who are unwell in cages who shouldn't be there, and causing huge ripple effects in crime and violence.
Overall: very important read for folks interested in US politics. Clear & important argument.
(This is a claim I agree with, and while I'm against private prisons and the War on Drugs, changing those things won't change the scale of mass incarceration. Only 8% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons, and as of 2013 we could have "released half of all people convicted of property and public order crimes, 100% of those in for drug possession, and 75% of those in for drug trafficking. Our prison population would have dropped from 1.3 million to 950,000...more than three times the prison population we had when the boom began.")
A few things I took away & some actions I think they demand of us:
-State & local elections are incredibly important, and crucially lack participation. For example: 95% of prosecutors win re-election, and 85% of them run unopposed.
-action: make sure your favorite pres. candidate is signed on to the #DownBallotPledge, and find out when your local & state elections are (especially primary elections!) https://www.runforofficeday.com/
-action: who's the district attorney where you live? how have they promised to stop spending taxpayer money on keeping people in cages? have they followed through on those promises?
-Locked In" as a book is fundamentally about prison growth, though Pfaff does highlight the life-changing impact (job loss, stigma, disenfranchisement, loss of social ties, etc.) of stints of incarceration with many different lengths. More Americans see the inside of a jail cell (~10 million admissions per year) than prisons. The web of mass incarceration is larger than just prisons, and there are other promising reforms, like eliminating or severely reducing money bail, that can help us decarcerate.
-Action: get involved with your local bail fund, donate, advocate for changes where you are. (link: https://www.communityjusticeexchange....) communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-dir... There are more legally innocent pretrial detainees in our jails than there are people held for drug crimes in state & federal prison. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/...
-Reading the book, I continue to be excited for efforts to capture the true social costs of incarceration. I've long referred to this estimate of over $1 trillion (https://joinnia.com/…/The-Economic-Bu...-…). But the clearer we get in measuring and communicating the human and financial costs of mass incarceration, the better we'll be able to win the change we need. The debate needs a reframe from: "public safety at all costs" to what true public safety looks like - understanding that our current conception of public safety is tearing apart communities, putting people who are unwell in cages who shouldn't be there, and causing huge ripple effects in crime and violence.
Overall: very important read for folks interested in US politics. Clear & important argument.
September 20, 2018
Should be read as an addendum to The New Jim Crow, as it is both a response to (what he calls the "Standard Story" put forth by The New Jim Crow and the modern prison reform movement) and an additional source of information that informs The New Jim Crow and also tries to show a new way forward. John Pfaff discusses how prison reformers in the US have gotten reform backwards and begs reformers to shift their approach, as focusing on drug offenders (16% of the US prison population) that are low level and non-violent (5-6% of that 16%) will not work, since the majority of prisoners in the prison system are incarcerated for violent charges. Pfaff argues that we should shift our approach to both how we charge violent offenses and how we think about violence as a culture (as a phase in a person's life and not as a permanent stigma) and cultural views of how punitive we should be to violent offenders (obviously quite an immense goal, but important nonetheless - he also talks about how we need to have real political discussions of safety vs. societal cohesion, broken families, prisoners as invisible and voiceless, etc.). Pfaff also rightly points out that prosecutors get very little focus in the prison reform movement, which needs to change immediately, as prosecutors have an enormous amount of power over what criminal charges are filed and how punitive those charges may be. He argues the reform movement should focus on reigning in prosecutors and setting guidelines for how and what they charge, as well as advocating for gathering the correct information about prosecutors and their actions, as we have very little data in this area, creating a huge blind spot for going ahead with prison reform. Pfaff's criticisms of Michelle Alexander fall a little flat here, in my opinion, because if I remember correctly, she does talk about how prosecutors have a huge amount of power and can charge black people with felonies (and often do) even when it is unnecessary. Pfaff also discusses how most (87%) of prisoners are held in state systems and therefore prison reform focus should be on the state level, not the federal level. All in all, an essential book for anyone who cares about fixing our broken and racist prison system. 10/10
October 15, 2017
I picked this up in the new book section at the library, and wow am I glad I did. It’s very recent, the foreword was written just after Donald Trump won the election. The author, John Pfaff, sets out to both explain the causes behind mass incarceration and to provide a roadmap for reform. He criticizes what he calls the “standard story”: that mass incarceration began under Ronald Reagan, that the majority of people in prison have been convicted of non-violent drug offenses, that private prisons have fueled prison growth, and that decreasing the number of people imprisoned will significantly decrease government expenditures.
Instead, Pfaff provides his own story that has different problems and different solutions. He is both a law professor and has a PhD in economics, and I found the book to be extremely well-researched. There are 57 pages of notes/citations for a 238-page book.
Here are some of his main points:
1. The criminal justice system looks different in every state and county in the United States.
2. Public prison groups (such as correctional officers’ unions) lobby for prison growth far more aggressively and successfully than private prisons.
3. Prosecutors are the most powerful group fueling incarceration, and face almost no oversight.
4. Politicians(including elected prosecutors) will face far more pushback for “allowing” one serious crime to occur through more lenient policies than many years of causing over-incarceration.
One of the things that impressed me the most about the book was that Pfaff dared to bring up a different trade-off than the one we are used to hearing about: he suggested that there may be a point at which it is desirable to risk higher rates of violent crime in exchange for other benefits such as having children growing up with parents at home.
Great book, I highly recommend it to anyone.
Instead, Pfaff provides his own story that has different problems and different solutions. He is both a law professor and has a PhD in economics, and I found the book to be extremely well-researched. There are 57 pages of notes/citations for a 238-page book.
Here are some of his main points:
1. The criminal justice system looks different in every state and county in the United States.
2. Public prison groups (such as correctional officers’ unions) lobby for prison growth far more aggressively and successfully than private prisons.
3. Prosecutors are the most powerful group fueling incarceration, and face almost no oversight.
4. Politicians(including elected prosecutors) will face far more pushback for “allowing” one serious crime to occur through more lenient policies than many years of causing over-incarceration.
One of the things that impressed me the most about the book was that Pfaff dared to bring up a different trade-off than the one we are used to hearing about: he suggested that there may be a point at which it is desirable to risk higher rates of violent crime in exchange for other benefits such as having children growing up with parents at home.
Great book, I highly recommend it to anyone.
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May 1, 2025This is a must read for anyone who is interested in prison reform. I do not 100% agree with all his positions or recommendations, but this is the other way to think about the pressures that have led to mass incarceration. If we intend to make any headway in reducing incarceration, these are things we must understand and address.
July 1, 2017
good complement to several other texts on related topics, most notably michelle alexander's "the new jim crow."
August 13, 2020
Its thesis is familiar, the United States has too many people in prison. The difference between this and other books and articles is its reliance on research and lack of avoiding nuance. In researching the causes of prison population it correctlyrejects the popular view that prisons are full of drug offenders and low level non violent offenders and cites numerous studies to support that conclusion noting that those who argue that our prison are full of those low level offenders rely on anecdote and opinion. The book also acknowledges not only the differences between federal prison population and state prison populations but also the differences between the different state prison populations which result from differences between determinate sentencing and indeterminate sentences, the different types of guidelines and different amounts of judicial discretion in the different states. It also downplays the roles of private prisons noting that in the many states don't have them, the incarceration rates are no different. In fact, the author, John Pfaff, puts much blame on public employee corrections unions for driving up incarceration rates.
Pfaff argues that one of the main reasons for today's mass incarceration is that prosecutors have too much power and discusses reforms such as limiting prosecutorial discretion. I should note that I am a prosecutor.
Pfaff is refreshingly honest in this debate by acknowledging that a true substantial reduction in prison population requires releasing offenders who committed sex crimes and other crimes of violence. The fault with his honest analysis is that while he cites research that many such offenders could be safely released earlier than is done under current laws, he ignores the impact of those crimes on victims of crimes and families of murder victims. My experience is that sentence lengths matter to victims in these cases, the pain and results of the crime last years afterwards. That does not mean that victim impacts should over ride all other considerations, but it does mean that those impacts cannot be ignored
Pfaff argues that one of the main reasons for today's mass incarceration is that prosecutors have too much power and discusses reforms such as limiting prosecutorial discretion. I should note that I am a prosecutor.
Pfaff is refreshingly honest in this debate by acknowledging that a true substantial reduction in prison population requires releasing offenders who committed sex crimes and other crimes of violence. The fault with his honest analysis is that while he cites research that many such offenders could be safely released earlier than is done under current laws, he ignores the impact of those crimes on victims of crimes and families of murder victims. My experience is that sentence lengths matter to victims in these cases, the pain and results of the crime last years afterwards. That does not mean that victim impacts should over ride all other considerations, but it does mean that those impacts cannot be ignored
November 14, 2019
Very thorough, and perhaps necessarily stats-heavy, but I think he makes a good case. Yes, the US incarcerates more of its citizens than any other western country, but the US also has a much higher rate of violent crime than these other countries. I wish he would have spent a little more time discussing the etiology of crime in our culture, and how we can decrease the prevalence of violent crime, not just reduce the resultant incarceration.
February 20, 2023
This is a must-read if you want to learn about the true causes of mass incarceration and some realistic fixes. I was skeptical of this book and thought it was going to be a hardcore right wing book that basically said the prison problem isn’t that bad and we don’t really have any racial issues with policing, but I was wrong. While the author does debunk a lot of stats and common wisdom about prisons and arrests, I do think his chapter on the drug war was off a bit and he left quite a bit out. But overall, this is a great analysis of the prison problem as well as the policing issues and some rational solutions.
January 26, 2019
A necessary complement to Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow." This definitely tempers her argument and challenges its premises in important ways. It does not reject her thesis, and Pfaff certainly does not challenge her assertions about racial inequalities present within the system; however, it makes important distinctions on how to go about reform, mostly focusing on prosecutorial discretion and changing cultural conceptions of violent offenders.
December 28, 2020
An interesting and unique contribution to the conversation on mass incarceration. It’s far from the final word on the subject and has some shaky moments, but I’d recommend it to anyone who is looking to round out their understanding of the criminal justice system.
December 19, 2020
A dense read but I learned a lot about criminal justice systems and their foundations and current status. Nice to be able to apply this new understanding to stories in the news.
March 7, 2024
In many ways, I found this book less enjoyable to read than the book it is directly responding to, namely Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. However, Pfaff directly and convincingly refutes many key points of Alexander's, pointing out that she often cites statistics misleadingly or draws from studies of low quality. He also raises several good points to expand efforts of criminal justice reform, but none are particularly emotionally-tied, so I wanted things to move faster at times. It has certainly changed how I think about some aspects of prison reform, however, especially how local the issue is and how most imprisoned people are there for violent offenses. I'd consider this just about essential reading---but I also think it could be presented fruitfully in many fewer pages.
Pfaff himself---while not emphasizing it for sure---seems to agree with many of the points of Alexander's: race is a part of mass incarceration, imprisoning people for long sentences for drugs via three-strikes is absurd, etc., but he makes clear that most of these issues are actually relatively small and should not continue to receive undue attention at the expense of higher impact areas of consideration.
What are those main points? For my own recollection of this book, I'll talk a bit about that now.
Pfaff himself---while not emphasizing it for sure---seems to agree with many of the points of Alexander's: race is a part of mass incarceration, imprisoning people for long sentences for drugs via three-strikes is absurd, etc., but he makes clear that most of these issues are actually relatively small and should not continue to receive undue attention at the expense of higher impact areas of consideration.
What are those main points? For my own recollection of this book, I'll talk a bit about that now.
January 25, 2019
Pfaff, a law professor at Fordham, provocatively argues that the "Standard Story" surrounding mass incarceration, as told by Michelle Alexander and others, is wrong. He does not disagree that mass incarceration exists, that reform is necessary, and that race is a major component. Where he disagrees is why. His analysis of the data is that nonviolent offenses, particularly drug offenses, represent only a relatively small amount of crimes. While reforming how we handle them is worthwhile, it will not create a major reduction in the number of prisoners.
This is a data driven book. That's a double edged sword: as Pfaff repeatedly says, we don't have data on many of the issues. He also uses, somewhat by necessity, a narrow definition of drug related offenses. Does the War on Drugs have follow on effects beyond direct drug offenses? Undoubtedly yes, but we do not have data to measure them. Nonetheless, it's worth following his arguments, which show how prison populations have grown. He dismantles the elements of the "standard story" piece by piece. They are not necessarily false; they are just insufficient explanations.
So, if not the War on Drugs--at least directly--what is responsible? His answer is, effectively, politics. Prosecutors have wide latitude and are subject to political pressures and biases. They are able to manipulate precisely which charges are filed and can use the threat of high sentencing to force plea bargains. Defense lawyers are desperately underfunded and unable to provide an adequate defense. A single Willie Horton leads to crusades against light sentencing. We overpunish for violent offenses. While he touches on it, I'm not sure he gives enough credit or analysis of how harsh punishment can lead to a cycle of crime--information and research on recidivism would have been really helpful here.
In order to reduce the prison population, then, we are going to have to tackle how we handle violent crime. This is a tough political sell, as he acknowledges. But if the data is accurate, it's an inescapable conclusion.
I am neither a lawyer nor a criminologist, but my conclusion--based on reading both this and The New Jim Crow--is that they actually tell complementary tales. It's difficult to measure all impacts of the War on Drugs. Its specter, and the politics surrounding it, have taken hold of how the public and politicians handle the criminal justice system. It plays right into the biases Pfaff discusses.
This isn't a gripping read like Alexander's book; the prose is certainly adequate, but a touch workmanlike. Nonetheless I recommend it, alongside other works.
This is a data driven book. That's a double edged sword: as Pfaff repeatedly says, we don't have data on many of the issues. He also uses, somewhat by necessity, a narrow definition of drug related offenses. Does the War on Drugs have follow on effects beyond direct drug offenses? Undoubtedly yes, but we do not have data to measure them. Nonetheless, it's worth following his arguments, which show how prison populations have grown. He dismantles the elements of the "standard story" piece by piece. They are not necessarily false; they are just insufficient explanations.
So, if not the War on Drugs--at least directly--what is responsible? His answer is, effectively, politics. Prosecutors have wide latitude and are subject to political pressures and biases. They are able to manipulate precisely which charges are filed and can use the threat of high sentencing to force plea bargains. Defense lawyers are desperately underfunded and unable to provide an adequate defense. A single Willie Horton leads to crusades against light sentencing. We overpunish for violent offenses. While he touches on it, I'm not sure he gives enough credit or analysis of how harsh punishment can lead to a cycle of crime--information and research on recidivism would have been really helpful here.
In order to reduce the prison population, then, we are going to have to tackle how we handle violent crime. This is a tough political sell, as he acknowledges. But if the data is accurate, it's an inescapable conclusion.
I am neither a lawyer nor a criminologist, but my conclusion--based on reading both this and The New Jim Crow--is that they actually tell complementary tales. It's difficult to measure all impacts of the War on Drugs. Its specter, and the politics surrounding it, have taken hold of how the public and politicians handle the criminal justice system. It plays right into the biases Pfaff discusses.
This isn't a gripping read like Alexander's book; the prose is certainly adequate, but a touch workmanlike. Nonetheless I recommend it, alongside other works.
January 17, 2018
The first part of the book was a refreshingly thorough look at "The Standard Story," and its too heavy reliance on the idea that prisons are clogged with low level drug offenders. He lays out the stats and repaints the picture.
The chapter on public versus private prisons was boring and close to irrelevant.
Where the author loses me a bit is his criticism of prosecutors, in general. The problem isn't that he is criticizing them (us), but that he continually reminds us that data on prosecutors simply isn't available. Yet, even with this unavailability of information, the author makes, what I believe, unfounded arguments relating to reigning in prosecutors.
Despite what the author assumes, Prosecutors do have plea bargaining guidelines, and those guidelines take into account a number of mitigating and aggravating circumstances. The problem is not that we don't have guidelines, or that we have unlimited discretion, it's that our options are limited by virtue of a lack of monetary resources available for programs that provide an alternative to incarceration. I would absolutely like to see, in a vast majority of cases, mental health and/or substance abuse treatment in lieu of incarceration; however, there are no free in-patient treatment clinics, many defendants don't have the ability to navigate treatment on their own, and lack support to make treatment successful, and on and on.
While the author makes some really good points and debunks some false assumptions, glaringly absent from his analysis is the mental health/substance abuse treatment component. Even without this info, the book is worth a read, if even to gain a fresh perspective in mass incarceration that doesn't land on the premise that we are locking up a bunch of people for simple possession.
The chapter on public versus private prisons was boring and close to irrelevant.
Where the author loses me a bit is his criticism of prosecutors, in general. The problem isn't that he is criticizing them (us), but that he continually reminds us that data on prosecutors simply isn't available. Yet, even with this unavailability of information, the author makes, what I believe, unfounded arguments relating to reigning in prosecutors.
Despite what the author assumes, Prosecutors do have plea bargaining guidelines, and those guidelines take into account a number of mitigating and aggravating circumstances. The problem is not that we don't have guidelines, or that we have unlimited discretion, it's that our options are limited by virtue of a lack of monetary resources available for programs that provide an alternative to incarceration. I would absolutely like to see, in a vast majority of cases, mental health and/or substance abuse treatment in lieu of incarceration; however, there are no free in-patient treatment clinics, many defendants don't have the ability to navigate treatment on their own, and lack support to make treatment successful, and on and on.
While the author makes some really good points and debunks some false assumptions, glaringly absent from his analysis is the mental health/substance abuse treatment component. Even without this info, the book is worth a read, if even to gain a fresh perspective in mass incarceration that doesn't land on the premise that we are locking up a bunch of people for simple possession.
May 17, 2022
Locked In : The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform (2017) by John Pfaff looks at incarceration in the US and delves into why US incarceration rates are so high. Pfaff is a law professor.
Locked In is a dense read. Pfaff goes into detail as to why US incarceration rates are so high and he shows how what many people believe, including myself until I read this book, is wrong. Pfaff goes through jail statistics and makes the very important point that the imprisonment of non-violent drug offenders is not what is driving the US’s high incarceration rates. Pfaff goes on to look at the role of minimum sentences and private prisons and uses the evidence to look at their roles as well.
Locked In looks more deeply at the roles of prosecutors in the US system and their incentives. As well as this the way the US prisons are state run but counties send people to prison means that it counties don’t bear the costs of imprisonment. Pfaff also points out that spending on police is better than spending on prisons.
Pfaff makes the point that efforts to reduce the US prison population that ran from about 2005 to 2019 would come to an end if there crime were again to spike in the US. As crime rates in the US are now spiking this looks very prescient. Depressingly Pfaff’s recommendation for more police is exactly the opposite of the what the BLM movement sought.
Pfaff’s recommendations are very much worth reading, although as he admits because the problem is complex the answers are hard to evaluate.
Locked In is a really good book. It changed my views on US imprisonment.
Locked In is a dense read. Pfaff goes into detail as to why US incarceration rates are so high and he shows how what many people believe, including myself until I read this book, is wrong. Pfaff goes through jail statistics and makes the very important point that the imprisonment of non-violent drug offenders is not what is driving the US’s high incarceration rates. Pfaff goes on to look at the role of minimum sentences and private prisons and uses the evidence to look at their roles as well.
Locked In looks more deeply at the roles of prosecutors in the US system and their incentives. As well as this the way the US prisons are state run but counties send people to prison means that it counties don’t bear the costs of imprisonment. Pfaff also points out that spending on police is better than spending on prisons.
Pfaff makes the point that efforts to reduce the US prison population that ran from about 2005 to 2019 would come to an end if there crime were again to spike in the US. As crime rates in the US are now spiking this looks very prescient. Depressingly Pfaff’s recommendation for more police is exactly the opposite of the what the BLM movement sought.
Pfaff’s recommendations are very much worth reading, although as he admits because the problem is complex the answers are hard to evaluate.
Locked In is a really good book. It changed my views on US imprisonment.
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