Professor John Pfaff wrote an opinion piece for Alabama Media Group about mass incarceration and criminal justice reform in the state of Alabama.
Over the past ten years, states across the country, including Alabama, have been working to rein in their excessive reliance on incarceration and to search for ways to respond to crime that are simultaneously less costly and more effective.
While most reform efforts in Alabama and elsewhere have focused on legislative fixes, it’s worth noting that perhaps the most powerful person in criminal justice policy, and criminal justice reform, gets very little attention: the local county prosecutor.
Prosecutors have almost complete control over how a case is handled. They can decide whether to drop the charges altogether or move the case forward, to charge someone with a felony or a misdemeanor, to charge someone with a crime that carries a mandatory minimum or not, to push hard to keep someone in jail pre-trial or let them remain free while the case moves forward, and so on.
All these decisions have profound impacts on prison and jail populations and on how the criminal justice system functions. And prosecutors–who are directly elected by the people in their district–make all these decisions subject to little oversight and no legal review.