John Pfaff’s book about mass incarceration and criminal justice reform was featured in The Crime Report.
In his book Locked In: the True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, Fordham University law professor John Pfaff challenges the popular narrative that mass incarceration is driven by War on Drugs-era policies that put non-violent drug offenders away for longer and longer periods. Pfaff shows that this story explains only a fraction of the increase in the US incarceration rate over the past few decades. He also introduces a new key character: the prosecutor. “Few people in the criminal justice system are as powerful, or as central to prison growth, as the prosecutor,” Pfaff writes. He also notes that, for all of their power, “prosecutors are almost completely ignored by reformers.”
