Professor at Fordham Law. Prisons and criminal justice quant. I'm not contrarian, the data are. Author of Locked In. New stuff at johnfpfaff.com.
John Pfaff
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That's not an argument for keeping prisons open. But it's an important reality to acknowledge, and--should US prison populations continue their general post-2010 decline--one whose economic impacts it would be smart to try to prepare for ahead of time.
What the absolute f*** is going on with the comma usage in this brief?!
Looks like Johnny Commaseed just wandered through, scattering commas across the brief at will, just to see which ones took root where.
My GOD. I've never felt like a lawyer should be disbarred over commas until tonight.
So many people talk about prisons as a form of rural white welfare, and there's def truth to that.
But in the South? The black/white racial composition of corrections officers is almost 50-50 (43-47, leaning white).
Which means the economic impact of closing prisons will hit Black communities.
See also: the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which has done 1000x more harm than the damn 1994 Crime Bill, but has done it via technocratic legalisms (like standing rules and pro se filing fees), not the emotionally salient (but oversold) “billions in cash to build prisons!”
John Pfaff
Thinking about this.
Twice CA has successfully produced comparatively HUGE declines in lockups (juvie, then adult), both by focusing not on high-profile sentencing laws, but on far less salient funding choices.
And twice their success has mostly been ignored, even by reformers.
For most of the 2010s, fully 50% of the nation’s decline in prison pops happened in CA. It happened bc of one specific law targeting a huge local budget incentive to lock ppl up.
It was a simple causal story to tell.
And no one really caree, and no other state tried.
I don’t have some big point here, except that all sorts of in-the-weeds stuff can do a lot of good, but clickbait politics based on shocking exceptions (which politics has always been), and a media that thrives off the same (ditto), really gets in the way.
John Pfaff
I get that the shocking salient injustices are easy to mobilize ppl around.
But one of the things that makes mass incarceration MASS is that most of it is not happening via shocking stuff.
It’s routine and bureaucratized. Which means the fixes are often not sexy … and hard to rally around.
