John Pfaff was quoted in a Vox article about the current prison population in the United States.
On Twitter, Fordham Law School criminal justice expert John Pfaff pulled out some interesting findings from the new Bureau of Justice Statistics report. First, while the imprisonment rate has dropped, it’s dropped slower than the overall crime rate, “so in a way our punitiveness is RISING,” Pfaff wrote.
Second, much of the decrease in the prison population is being driven by a handful of states, such as California, Florida, New York, and Texas. In fact, while about 25 states have seen their imprisoned populations fall since 2009, about 24 have seen theirs rise. (Illinois was left out of Pfaff’s analysis due to data issues.)
This gets to one of the key issues in the criminal justice system: While we often view the criminal justice system from a top-down, national perspective, much of it works through a variety of state and even local policies, with about 87 percent of people in prison held at the state level. Pfaff has argued in his book Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform that the US criminal justice system in the US is actually more than 3,100 different systems — each representing a county or county equivalent in America.
While much of the attention to these systems has gone to drug offenses, Pfaff also points out that, in fact, mass incarceration is mostly about violent offenses. At the state level, where the great majority of US prisoners are held, about 54.5 percent of prison inmates were in for violent offenses in 2015. About 15.2 percent were in for drug offenses.