John Pfaff was mentioned in a Slate article about the prosecution of drug dealers.
And incarceration rates, both overall and for drug crimes in particular, have fallen. Nationwide, the number of people in state prisons whose most serious conviction was for drugs has declined even as the opioid crisis took off, from 251,000 in 2000 to 206,000 by the end of 2014, the last year for which we have data, according to John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham Law School and an expert on mass incarceration.
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Furthermore, most of the de-carceration we have witnessed in the U.S. has taken place in urban counties. Rural counties have grown more punitive—and even though rural areas don’t have higher fatal overdose rates than cities, they have seen their fatal overdose rates increase more rapidly. A 2016 analysis in the New York Times found that between 2006 and 2013, more populous counties saw the rate of prison admission drop, with the sharpest declines in the largest counties, while more sparsely populated counties saw their admission rates rise. Since 2013, according to Pfaff, Pennsylvania has seen a similar trend.
