John Pfaff was quoted in a Fortune article about race-baiting and the criminal justice system.
A new, racially divisive ad focused loosely on immigration and created by the Trump campaign, recalls an earlier political ad designed to stoke the fear of white voters.
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John F. Pfaff, an author and professor at Fordham Law School, says “the Willie Horton Effect” continues to plague criminal justice reform efforts to this day.
“Horton was an outlier—more than 99% of those allowed to go home on leaves returned without incident,” he explains. But otherwise smart attempts to reduce prison populations are derailed when other outlier incidents occur. Here’s one example: “In 2011, Arkansas passed a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill that caused its prison population to drop quickly by almost 10%.” When a single parolee committed a murder, the parole board ended reforms so aggressively that the prison population rose 17% to an all time high. “It didn’t matter that overall the reforms appeared to be safely addressing the state’s mass incarceration problem,” he says. It was just too politically costly.