A Vox article cites Professor John Pfaff’s research for an article about Tiffany Cabán’s win in the Democratic primary in the Queens district attorney race and what more progressive prosecutors will mean for criminal justice reform.
Tiffany Cabán seems poised to win in Tuesday’s Democratic primary in the Queens district attorney race — potentially giving a big victory to criminal justice reformers who want to end the war on drugs and mass incarceration.
The Queens race may seem like a small local news story. But it’s not — Queens has more people than 15 states and Washington, DC, so the race is a huge deal to a lot of people. And this is the kind of story that really matters for criminal justice reform, because district attorneys and other prosecutors hold tremendous power over the systems that oversee all incarceration in the US.
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John Pfaff, a criminal justice expert at Fordham University, has found evidence that prosecutors have been the key drivers of mass incarceration in the past couple of decades. Analyzing data from state judiciaries, he compared the number of crimes, arrests, and prosecutions from 1994 to 2008. He found that reported violent and property crime fell, and arrests for almost all crimes also fell. But one thing went up: the number of felony cases filed in court.Prosecutors were filing more charges even as crime and arrests dropped, throwing more people into the prison system. Prosecutors were driving mass incarceration.
