Professor John Pfaff was quoted in Vox regarding mass incarceration and criminal justice reform in the United States.
John Pfaff, a criminal justice expert at Fordham University, has found evidence that prosecutors have in fact been the main drivers of mass incarceration over the past couple decades.
Analyzing data from state judiciaries, Pfaff compared the number of crimes, arrests, and prosecutions from 1994 to 2008. Pfaff found that reported violent and property crime fell and arrests for almost all crimes also fell. But one thing went up: Although the number of crimes and arrests dropped, the number of felony cases filed in court rose dramatically. Prosecutors were filing more charges even as crime and arrests dropped, throwing more people into the prison system. Prosecutors, in short, were driving mass incarceration.
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“When I first saw my own results, I stared at my computer for a few minutes in disbelief,” Pfaff wrote in his recent book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform. “I had expected to find that changes at every level — arrests, prosecutions, admissions, even time served — had pushed up prison populations. Yet across a wide number and variety of states, the pattern was the same: the only thing that really grew over time was the rate at which prosecutors filed felony charges against arrestees.”
In fact, Pfaff uncovered evidence that prosecutors may continue to drive incarceration up even as lawmakers pass reform to scale back imprisonment rates. “Take South Dakota, which in 2013 passed a reform bill that aimed to reduce prison populations,” he wrote. “The law did lead to prison declines in 2014 and 2015, yet at the same time prosecutors responded by charging more people with generally low-level felonies, and over these two years total felony convictions rose by 25 percent.” In the long term, this could lead to even larger prison populations.
Now apply this story on a national scale. There is less crime compared to the 1990s. Police are making fewer arrests. Lawmakers are slowly reducing the length of prison sentences. Yet until 2010, incarceration rates had continued climbing up nationwide — and, as Pfaff points out, the recent drop in incarceration would be much less pronounced if it wasn’t for court-ordered drops in California’s prison population. Prosecutors have been abetting more and more incarceration while other actors in the system have been pulling back.
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Despite the role of prosecutors in driving up mass incarceration, reformers have for the most part ignored these actors over the past few years. Pfaff notes: “No major piece of state-level reform legislation has directly challenged prosecutorial power (although some reforms do in fact impede it), and other than a few, generally local exceptions, their power is rarely a topic in the national debate over criminal justice reform. They are essentially invisible.”
