Pictures please tag the library on social media. Until the last few decades amerigas incarceration rate was on the par with that of other liberal democracies would however in the last 40 years we have seen a 700 increase in incarceration in the land of the free. We have the highest incarceration rate per capita of anywhere in the world under other than north korea but there is not enough data coming out to know for sure. What is to blame for america being number one at locking up its own citizens . Many theories exist. Tonight we will hear about them from an expert in the field, john pfaff has spent 15 years studying data on imprisonment and is here to discuss his book which seeks to debunk some of the more popular theories and providing his own take on this natural catastrophe. He is professor of law with a focusing criminal law, sentencing law and law of economics. He was published in journal of criminology and economics review and federal sentencing reporter among others and was recently written up in Rolling Stone and the new yorker. Please welcome john pfaff. I want to talk about how we get away from here with basic thrust being most of what we focus on, things that are wrong but less important than we think they are. We mustnt overlook the things that matter. Incarceration in a nutshell. In the 1920s, 1970s, so stable, the single worst time, published in 1979, one of the most prominent criminologists said we will never go above this because we will change our law to push it down to 400,000. No. By 2010 our prison rate reached over 500,000, adding jail that 158 we are technically number 2 in the world, not number one. 99,000 prison population 650, technically slightly above us. They released 45 from prison, we go back to number one. In all fairness we are number one. The only country that comes close to us are russia, keswick stan and cuba. England has the highest incarceration rate in western europe at 200 per 100,000. France and germany, 100 . Nothing close. Since 2000 and we have seen a slight decline in reformers are looking that this is a sign that we have turned the corner. Remarkable reliance on incarceration behind us. If you step closer it is less optimistic and that is not very optimistic. If you look at it by state, and increase since 2010, we see the United States and incarceration, california is the top one. Crazy numbers, in 2010, 1. 4 Million People in prison, since 2015 that declined by 77,000, jumping 5. 5 . Not a lot but not nothing. We turned around a giant lumbering machine. Unfair to say it exploded. Didnt explode but it rose relentlessly for 40 years. From 1970 to 1991 prison goes up, 91, prison goes up, slow, steady rise. Take california alone out of the equation the decline falls in more than half. If you take the top five decliners out of the picture, 11,000, basically nothing. The United States one state on the side, and their prison population has grown. Not just prison, but prison, probation and parole is 7. That is before you get to jail, a much harder picture to analyze. It is not nothing but not a lot. That is telling because Prison Reform is one of the truly bipartisan issues at a time when democrats and republicans can debate about whether the sun came up today. The aclu and the Koch Brothers sitting sidebyside working to think of this but for all this bipartisan effort there is very little to show for it. Ignore three critical factors and get very little attention. The first is prosecutors who are ignored by everybody. A reform bill, rarely discussed. Almost singlehandedly the force behind prison level since crime started falling but we never talk about it. And violent as opposed to nonViolent Crimes. Almost all reforms focus on that lowlevel nonviolent drug abuse and that lowlevel nonviolent drug offender should not be in prison but the fact is state prison hold 80 of all prisoners, over half of all people there convicted of a Violent Crime. Changing how we convict people of violence only so far we can go. The third person we ignores the public sector. We complain all the time about private prisons. Private prisons are bit players in this story. What matters are the public prisons that hold 92 of all people in prison. There unions are powerful and completely underground. They have the ability and willingness to reformat every turn. The publicsector unions, consistently in what reforms are accomplishing. I will go through each of these. 94 to 2008, almost no data on prosecutors but a pretty decent time frame. That is a time in which crime steadily declined but what happened, very complicated story. Why did prisons keep going up as crime went downward. Here is what happens. Crime went down. The same time arrests go down. Overall arrests fall 5 , serious Violent Crimes dropped 25 , serious property crimes drop 20 it arrests for Drug Trafficking dropped by 50 . Those are the times you go to prison for and we are resting fewer people for those crimes during that time. Fewer and fewer people entering the criminal Justice Department together yet during time of fewer and fewer people entering the system the number of felony cases skyrockets. Fewer and fewer arrests, more and more felony creatures. Once a case is filed against you the probability of going to prison, one in four felony cases go to prison in 1984, when in four felony cases in 2008. Once you go to prison you can push back again, the amount of time you stay in prison does not change. There has been no systemic increase in time served in prison. Loss of that and overcome actual time spent in prison has changed and it is not that long. I asked undergrads what do you think the median time spent in prison is for someone convicted of violence . Ten use, 12 years, 14 years, 20 years. The actual numbers four convicted of a Violent Crime. One year convicted of drug crime, prison growth is not driven by people spending long time in prison although prison for less but the change was admitting people to prison in the first place, the decision to file the felony arrest charge. That drive prison growth. It is not longer sentence but lots of people serving short time. The reason is we hear all these people going to prison, that is a small part of it. Much bigger part is a large cohort of baby boomers committing offenses later in life than we expect and keep being admitted to prison. Older offenders not aging in prison, very few people. Driven by initiatives. The question is what made prosecutors more aggressive, why are they charging more people as crime goes down. Why are they getting covered . Really hard to say. We have decent data on crime and good data on arrests, the prison population, where it really matters, didnt have nothing, scratch. My data set, the prosecutors gather no data. Filing a case in court the court system lumbers into play and they gather numbers. A couple theories, some are easy to fix and some are harder. When his public defenders, 80 of all defenders, 80 , prison or jail term. We systematically underfund Public Defense compared to prosecutors. Budgets are smaller, 4. 5 billion compared to 6 billion for the year but prosecutors have a tremendous host of Free Services public defenders dont. If the prosecutor needs something to be investigated they dont pay for it. The investigative arm is called the police department, public defender pay for it outofpocket. The sheriff, the police, choose your resources, North Carolina figured out the budget of public defenders and prosecutors had the same budget in North Carolina. The Free Services, public defenders dont, three times, it is adversarial, one side cant fight because they have no money. Easy solution, just fund defense better but that is hard. New york state disagreed in upstate new york because it is underfunded, and he vetoed it, in terms of weight. Even blue states, democratic governors are afraid to add the budget to defense. That is something we could do. A huge step to take. Tough spending laws. People are not spending more time in prison and they are not. Something has gotten tougher because it changes the bargaining. Look at law and order. Every case ends in a beautiful gilded court with the lawyers yelling at each other and the law in law and order is spot on in the original, have no idea of the spinoffs. The original, remember what jack mccoy says, that was admitted and the second best possible so the law is great but the cases never end in the courtroom. 95 of all give the vertex we have no idea how the process works. Complete blackbox but it could be the fact 15 years ago you sat down and said if you dont take the 3year deal i will get you 5 years at trial. Now you dont take a 3year deal i will get you 10 years at trial, 50 years at trial, youre getting the three year sentence, time served, but pleading out faster. The threat is more severe. We can fix that, cut for time served by the official thank you as opposed. It works to this replicated unknown process, serving maximum sentence and hammered out during the plea bargain and no idea how that happens. Perhaps being explained the most is in many ways the most boring answer i have, what matters is boring and the more boring stuff. Here are two interesting facts. Between 1974, and 2008 the number of counties of fulltime prosecutor, 45 , 85 , clearly in the world in the suburban house, in 1996 finally got a fulltime da, taking place with one parttime are handling all this but rural and suburban counties did. A parttime guy, a fulltime are justified the budget imbues himself now, a lawyer prosecutes on the fight is the prosecutor, changing how we handle the case. In the urban areas something remarkably perverse. As crime is going up, 19741990 you hire 3000 more trial prosecutors. From 1991 to 2008 as crime drops steadily we hire 10,000 more prosecutors, three times as many, 20,000 to 30,000. They have to do something. If you look at what weird measures of productivity i can back out that is consistent. Individual das are no harsher today than they were 20 years ago, they are equally harsh and we have 10,000 more of them that we do. A significant portion of this is the we arrest so many people and drop so many cases to start with that you hire 10,000 more das there are plenty of cases to justify their position. Who wants to take a job and not do their job . Let these positions expire but prosecutors fight that, that is how they show their status. These are cutting back. Some things d5 solution. I see an enemy and he is us. Prosecutors are tough, away we vote for them. Americans consistently say we want the left punitive approach to crime but we dont punish prosecutors for this failing. One bad ordinance and we will vote you out and they know that, we are inconsistent voters. To take on risks is a big thing to ask for. Emission driven prosecutor driven, good news and bad news, the bad news is no federal law, no state law, driven by elected prosecutors, dont care what is happening in the states, to solve this county by county, the next graph shows prison growth or prison shrinkage not by state but by county. Orange counties have fewer people in 2014 than they did in 2010. Blue counties have more in prison by 2014 in 2010. You see this map, california, vermont, kansas, you wont identify states on this map. The variation with any state is pretty big. County by county process. County by county by county using da after da after da, not to be harsh and punitive. On the one hand it is fair, 60 of all cases are filed, we live in those big broad swaths of the midlevel west, dont have any people, not a lot of prisoners in the me there. You can solve this at the local level. The other thing to keep in mind, they dont care about outside the county. The rhetoric shifted in dc from Prison Reform to american carnage. Prison growth will continue on. For good or for bad independent of rhetoric, the local da, it is a shield. Change what local das do, hard to make it pay outside that. We will continue to reform. Overheated rhetoric about crime and punishment. We have to Pay Attention to prosecutors and we dont. We have a crust Justice Reform proposal. She missed the middle and never talked da. And their incentive and behavior to rain this in. Our sensors are long. And prosecutors are ignoring the problem. The second and most common approach, funny at first, years ago, prison growth, going to prison, you poor misguided academic throwing your life away, i never heard of this war on drugs, never thought about the war on drugs, war on how do you spell that . I get it, people talk about it. Between 1980, and 1990, rose sharply, 22 . It shrank. It shrank. 15 . The fed that 50 . A few cases they are allowed to handle. 88 , drug people make up 15 . 85 are not there for drugs. What are they therefore, violence. Between 1980, and 2009 we added 1. 1 Million People. That is staggering. 223,000, 21 , the drug offense, 551 convicted of violent offense, violence drove the growth, 53 of all people in state prison had their primary offense is a crime of violence. Is everyone serving long sentences there for violence, the data looked at half of all people in prison in 2003, 75 , were still in prison, 3 , and index Violent Crime, rape, aggravated assault, and index Violent Crime and lesser assault. And they are serving short term, a majority of prisons, if we dont change how we punish people, and one is on the right, and nearly as devastating to look elsewhere, the first is counting what the war on drugs is, people there for drug crimes, what about the person who killed someone in a drug deal gone bad, that is a Violent Crime, not a drug crime, does that go to the war on drugs . What about the person who stole from a store to fund their drug habit . That is a property crime, not a drug crime, should i count them as well . Yes. So first there is a lot of evidence now, not so much the prohibition causes violence and prohibition causes drugs you go where the violence already is. This book, talking about other books, mind first and read hers. She points out, anthropological evidence showing anywhere in the world or any time in the world you take younger men and denied the upper mobility and state doesnt do that, they will fight each other and death rates will be high. Just as true in 19th century czarist russia where she does her work as la times reporter in los angeles. It is true in 2010, the 90s and 80s, a large group of young men, underfunded, no racist barriers that deny employment a young black men, the state does not renounce this control of violence, the murder rate for la county as a whole is 60 . 60 of all murders in la county result in arrest, that shocked me. Almost 1 3 dont produce and arrest but a plaque mail, it dropped 60 to 30 . Two thirds of all of them result in arrest, the state is not enforcing laws. The state doesnt enforce the law, young men despairs every mobility and return to violence. That brings drugs. There is already despair and lack of hopeful upward that is where drugs come to. Take drugs out of the picture, dont result in the structural problem, the state doesnt prevent them, drugs to Something Else. The distinct spike in murders rolling on. At a very real level, and if you are in prison, wire people selling drugs, legal opportunities to do something different. It is a blow minimum wage job. If you legalize drugs, and in the private sector. Seeing this in new york, it is less probable in turning to identity theft. I am thinking of this, if you take drug enforcement, a broad drug to those areas where they are sold openly, the underlying social stress to go down as much. To the right, violent people should be in prison. Anytime i write an article thank maybe not a guarantee you the first comment on everything, doesnt matter if it is the wall street journal or the boston globe, this is great, you can hear the scorn in the way they write about it. You can hear the contempt. You talk about violent offenders, you should never use the word someone convicted of a crime of violence, heres why it matters. The violent offender, depends who they are. You are a violent person. Violence is not a state. You age into and age out of violence. Acknowledge aging in part, kids are crazy, as much as possible, we should treat them less severely because it is just a kid. In new york, 24. This is how long it takes to start being a lunatic child. The other side of the curve, you age out, people will systematically stop being violent in their 30s and 40s, some hang off, most age out. We are going to throw the key away. Your serotonin level shifts, there are social reasons, get married, have a job, youre not around your friends doing stupid stuff. My favorite example, an amazing caper showing what a terrible horror movie comes out that friday Violent Crime plummets. Violence young men go to the theater instead of the bar. Then they go home, doing stupid young man stuff. I find the saw movies horrible, they are the cheapest frontline on the war against violence, they should release that every 5 nights, great for our overall nation. You dont hang out with your friends, hang out at bars friday night. I would say you should do it that way. Keeps you from doing dumb stuff. We should let people out of prison earlier with no law. We are not there is no evidence a long sentence works. They over incapacitate because there lots of long after they age out. There were citizen rates. 5 versus 50 . Big part of that, 45 to 50. And going to lose, 41 down. I might 41. And the policy, we let people out of prison, crime goes up because less people are in prison, that might be okay because there are huge costs. Going to prison is a huge victory for tuberculosis and hiv, going to prison cuts your income going forward. One year in prison in the short term, by two years, drug overdose, in prison taking lower drugs at a higher price, Higher Quality drugs at a cheaper price, you forget to send you die. Someone dying of a drug overdose, there is a stigma and shame that bankrupted them in prison. In new york state half of our prisons are 200 miles from new york city. They come from the city. The financial process making contact with loved ones. It cuts into the income of the people left behind. It reduces the tax base and increases healthcare costs and imposes misery, throws dating markets off, dating functions, 50 , some highly placed neighborhood, 60 male, it is hard for families to form so