John Pfaff’s book “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration — and How to Achieve Real Reform” was mentioned in a Bloomberg article regarding crime rates in the U.S.
There are a lot of possible reasons crime rates fell in the U.S. after 1990. Tougher policing, prosecuting and sentencing are among them, but I doubt they deserve all the credit. They do deserve almost all the credit, though, for the incarceration boom that continued even as crime subsided. I base this last assertion on the research of John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham University School of Law and author of the recent book “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration — and How to Achieve Real Reform.” In Pfaff’s telling, the incarceration boom began because of the sharp rise in crime from the 1960s through the 1980s, then continued because prosecutors became more aggressive and were granted more resources. Here’s a fun fact from a Pfaff lecture that I attended last year:
From 1974 to 1990, as crime rose, the number of assistant district attorneys in the U.S. rose with it, from 17,000 to 20,000. From 1990 to 2007, as crime fell, the number of assistant DAs kept rising to 25,000, and the overall number of local prosecutors rose to 30,000.
In recent years, some states and counties have reversed course and begun to roll back the prosecutorial tide.