Professor John Pfaff wrote an op-ed published in The Appeal about Attorney General William Barr’s opposition to reforms by progressive prosecutors.
Barr’s speech was standard tough-on-crime fare: He argued that anything that scaled back mass incarceration would inevitably lead to more crime. It cannot be stressed enough that a wealth of data disproves that. Longer prison sentences provide little to no additional deterrence, often incapacitate beyond what public safety requires, and can actually increasethe risk of reoffending upon release. Rehabilitation efforts are consistently more effective outside prisons than inside them, and victims increasingly indicate that they prefer a focus on rehabilitation and reintegration instead of punitiveness.
…Why does this matter? Barr’s speech is not just an attack on reform of the criminal legal system. Instead, it reflects the Trump administration’s deeper antipathy to instilling greater accountability for our nation’s police forces. The Rollins policy that Barr mischaracterized and attacked is a small step forward in trying to rein in one source of excessive police enforcement, and even that strikes him as too much.
This is important, because unlike with mass incarceration, there is much less of a national consensus about how to reform policing—or whether to reform it at all. Contra the endless debates about Joe Biden’s role in mass incarceration, the White House’s bully pulpit matters far more in shaping police policy than it does incarceration policy. And people are far more likely to interact with the police than with the prison system: We admit about 600,000 people to prison each year, but our country’s more than 18,0000 federal, state, county and local law enforcement agencies arrest over 10 million, and that doesn’t count the stops and interactions that don’t result in arrest.
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