On par with that of other liberal democracies. However, in the last 40 years weve seen a 7 increase in incarceration here in the land of the free. We now have by far the highest incarceration rate per capita of anywhere in the world other than maybe north korea but theres not enough data coming out to know for sure. So what is to blame for america being number one at locking up its own citizens . Many theories exist and that well be hearing about them from expert in the field, john pfaff has seen, its been 15 your studying data on imprisonment and if you to discuss his book which seeks to debunk some of the more popular theories while providing his own take on this national catastrophe. He is professor of law at Fordham University with a focus in criminal law, since the law and law of economics. He has been published in the journal of criminal law and criminology, american law and economics review, and federal sentencing reporter among others. He was richly written up in Rolling Stone fleet and the new yorker. Please welcome john pfaff. [applause] thank you so much. I want to talk about sort of how we got here and how we can get away from here. With the basic focus on things that are not wrong but much less important than we think they are. They lead us to overtake things really matter. Incarceration in a nutshell. From the 1920s to the 1970s are rate was stable. So stable that in the single worst on academic article ever written published in 1979, one of americas most prominent criminologists said we will never go about 100 per 100,000. If it has real change the laws change a lost to push it back down to 100 per 100,000. No. In 2010 all prison rates reached over 500,000, adding jails. Were technically speaking out number two in the world, not number one. The seychelles population 99,000, prison population 650. Technically slightly above us. If they released 45 people from prison we go back to the bone. In all fairness we are number one. The only countries become close to us are places like russia, kazakhstan and cuba. Places like england which is the highest rate in western europe is about 200 per 100,000 french in germany, 100 or so per 100,000. Nothing close. Since. Since 2010 with seeing a slight decline. Reformers are looking at this as signs may be we have turned a corner. They are putting this remarkable reliance on incarceration behind us. When you look closer its a little less optimistic. That itself is not optimistic. If you look at it by state with states seeing a decline in prison, when you seen increases 2010 can we see is the United States is california, top line. What else not so much. Basic numbers come in 2101. 49 people in prison. Between 222015 that declined by 77,000. A drop of 5. 5 . Not a lot but not nothing. We turned red this giant numbering machine and i think its a present use prison growth exploded. It didnt explode. It rose relentlessly steadily for 40 years. A slow steady rise. At least we stop that. If you take california alone out of the equation, the decline falls to more than half to 35,000. If you take the top five decliners out of the picture, 11,000, basically nothing. The United States is not decarcerated. If you ask him he states that shown prison, probation and parole, its seven, not 25. Jails are completely harder and much different headlines. Its not nothing but its not a lot. Thats a tally because Prison Reform is one of the few truly bipartisan issues at a time with the democratic and republicans debate whether or not the sun came up today. You will see the aclu and the Koch Brothers sitting sidebyside sincerely working to fix this. For all this bipartisan effort theres very little to show for it. The question is white. The argument is we ignore three critical factors of a huge role and get very little attention. The first is prosecutors who are ignored by everyone. They make it into reform bill, wrote discussed. Theres almost singlehandedly the foreskin prison especially since crime started following but we rarely talk about. People are convicted of violence as those in nonviolence crime. Almost all of our reformers focus on that, lowlevel nonviolent drug offenders and they should not be in prison but the fact of matter is in state prisons they held 88 of all present, over half of all people have been convicted of a Violent Crime. If we dont change and we punish people, theres only so far we can go. The third person we ignore is the Public Sector. We complain all the time about the private prison. The private prisons are bit players in the story. What matters are the public prisons that old 92 of all people. Their unions are profoundly powerful. Almost completely unacknowledged. They hav had the ability and capacity and willingness. The prosecutor, the publicsector unions, we will be consistently disappointed in what reforms are accomplished. Start with the prosecutor. The study i did, the years 94 942008, theres almost no date on prosecutors. You take what you can get but thats a time in which crime steadily declined the prison population still kept rising. What happened during the crime rise in prison growth is a complicated story but why do they keep going up even as crime when steadily downward . Heres what happened. Crime goes down. During the same time arrests go down. Over all of us fall by 5 but arrest for serious Violent Crimes drop by 25 . Search property construct 20 and rest for Drug Trafficking dropped by 50 . Those are the crimes you go to prison for and we are arresting you and fewer people for those crimes during that time. We are fewer and fewer people entering the criminal Justice System altogether. Yet during the time of you and your people entering the system, the number of felony cases in state court skyrocketed. Fewer and fewer arrests, more and more felony cases. Once they filled the cases filed against you the probability you get admitted to prison doesnt change. About one in four felony cases goes to prison. About one to four felony cases goes to prison in 2008. Once you go to prison and this is a great myth, the amount of time you spend in prison does not change. There has been no systemic increase in time served in prison. Sentencing loss of content for. Time spent in prison hasnt changed. Its not that long. I asked undergrads what do you think the meeting time spent in prison if for some convicted of violence . Ten years, 12 years, 20 years. The actual answer is for. Four years if your convicted of Violent Crime. One year if youre convicted of a drug crime. Prison growth et cetera but people spend long periods in prison although we spent less time but the change was admitting people to prison in the first place here this decision to file the felony arrest charges to start with. Thats what drives are prison growth. Its not longer sentences. Its lots and lots of people serving relatively short sentences. The reason prison population is getting great, all these people growing old in prison, thats a small part of it. The much bigger part is very large cohort of baby boomers are committing offenses much later in life and they keep being admitted to prisons. Very, very few people spend a long time in prison. Its driven by mission. The question is what his mate is prosecutors more aggressive. Why the charging more people even as arrests go down even as crime goes down, widely getting tougher . Really hard to say. You have no data on prosecutors. None. We have decent data on crimes, good data on arrest. A lot of data on prison population but where it really matters with prosecutors we literally have nothing. Just scraps you pick up here and there. My data set come from the court system. When you file a felony case in court the court system. Craddick ms. Shaheen lumbers into play and these are gathering numbers you can use. A couple theories. Some easy to fix, some harder to fix. One is weak public to finish the 80 of defenders qualify for state, qualify for state provide a lawyer. Yet we suspended underfund public. The budget is much smaller. Prosecutors have a tremendous host of Free Services public defenders dont. If the prosecuting something to be investigated, they dont pay for. Its called the police department. The public defendant pays for it outofpocket. The dna labs, the sheriffs, police, a huge array of resources. North carolina, if you look at the budget, public defenders and prosecutors should have the same budget in that state, north carolina. If you account for all the Free Services that the egg gets that the public defender doesnt, once i cant fight it has had the money and no people. Hes a solution, just find indigent defense better but its her. New york state is a blue state. They disagreed aclu to defund because the underfund big yet when that bill hit the governor says, he vetoed it in terms of waste. He didnt loose dates, democratic governors are afraid to add budget to defense. That is something we could do and would be huge step to take. Tougher sentencing laws. Sentencing laws have gotten tougher and maybe it matters because it changes the bargaining. Look along order, in in a beautiful gilded courtroom with lawyers yelling at each other across room. The law in law and order is spot on. The original, no idea about the spinoff. Remember what jack said to the judge and the judge said to jack mccoy, thats my second best in law school. The law in law and order is great but the cases never end and a quarter. 95 of all guilty verdict a result of the plea bargain. We have no idea how the process works. Its a complete black box. It could be the back 15 years ago you said anatol definitively dont take this threeyear deal im going to get you five years at trial. Now if you dont take this threeyear deal im going to get you ten years, 15, 20 to 12. You still getting the threeyear sentence, time served which are plenty of faster because the threat is much more severe. We can fix that. We can cut time served but when they cut the official sanction imposed it works in a complicated unknown plea bargain process. No one is certain that maximum sentence. Much less being hammered out and plea bargain and we dont have the plea bargain process works. In many ways the most boring after i have, and thats the rest of my work is what matters tends to be the most boring. Staffing. Heres to interesting facts. Between 19742008 the number of counties that had a fulltime prosecutor went from 45 to 85 . Thats in the suburban counties. Its not 1996 they got a fulltime dh, one part timer. Rural and suburban counties did. It would for a parttime country fulltime or justified budget and its not a lawyer who prospers on site. He is a prosecuted. In the urban areas, something remarkably perverse. As crime is going up from 19741990 we hire 3000 more trial prosecutors. From 17,00 17,000 to 20,000. From 19912008 as crime drops steadily we hire 10,000 more prosecutors, three times as many, from 20,000 to 30,000. They have to do something. They cant just play minesweeper all day. If you look at what weird measures of productivity, the evidence is consistent. Individual das are no harsher today than they were 20 years ago. Theyrthey are equally harsh ane 10,000 more of them than we did. A significant portion of this that this is we arrest so many people and drops of may cases to start with that you hire 10,000 more das, theres plenty of cases to justify their position. They can do that because who wants to take a job and not do their job . One solution is not hire as many das. That these positions expired but the prosecutors are going to fight that to the nail, how they show the status, their staffing size. Some things really defy solution. Ive seen the enemy and he is us. Prosecutors are tough because way which we vote for them. Americans say we want sort of less punitive approaches a crie but yet we can punish prosecutors for failing. They know we are interested in voters and dont take the stancs to maximize the chance of reelection. We have to take on risk and thats a big thing to ask for. When i say the prosecutors drive, theres good news and bad news. The baggies is is no federal law, no state law will solve this. Its being driven by county elected prosecutors who respond to county level incentives and basically dont do was happen in the state or in the federal system. To solve this county by county by county, to see this next graph shows prison growth or prison shrinkage not by state but by county. Orange counties have fewer people in prison in 2014 than they did in 2010. Blue counties have more people in prison by 2014 than 2010. When you see this map, except for california, mississippi, vermont and kansas, you wont be able to get by states on this map. Some of these dates are grew, somma shrink but the amount of variation is pretty big. Its a county by county process. You have to go county by county by county using da after da at the da not to be harsh impunity. Thats exhausted. Theres about 2500 different offices nationwide. Safety of all cases are filed in counties that we live in very densely packed counties. Theres not a lot of prisoners into either. You saw this added more local level budget of the thing to keep in mind about this is the das dont care. They ignore trans. With the rhetoric shifting in d. C. From Prison Reform to american carnage, i felt optimistic prison growth will continue on however if what you for good or for bad independent of rhetoric coming out of d. C. This is about the local da. A lot of pleasure to go but federalism is a shield. No law in d. C. Will change what local das do. Its very hard to make a local da Pay Attention to think outside the county. Those who want to reform would be allowed to continue to reform and it will continue to reform regards of what rhetoric of crime and punishment is coming at a d. C. There is a fair amount of good news though have to Pay Attention to the prosecutor and we dont. When Hillary Clinton rolled out her reform proposal she talked about policing as you talk about parole. That was end to end. Its not end to end. She missed the middle. She never talked about das and she died alone. No one does that theyre the ones we have to start focusing on and change their incentive and behavior to get them to stop being less punitive. We have fewer people in prison for longer senses are driving growth. That means prosecutors are driving. The second and most common approach is the war on drugs. It was funny at first and now its also funny that usually go, i stead study prison go and tryo understand. They look to me like you pour mr. Scott academic throwing her life away. Its just the war on drugs like i never heard of this war on drug. I should write this down. War on how do you spell that . No. I get it. People talk about it but its impact is far less than people think. Its true between 19801990 the number of people in prison for drug rose sharply. From a 6 to 22 . From 1990 onward state prison system shrank and shrank and shrank to about 50 today. The fed to 50 . The witness of federal jurisdiction. The fed is like 12 in the state 80 , drug people make only about 15 . 85 of all people in prison are not there for drugs. What are they therefore . Violence. Between 19802009 we added 1. 1 thousand nine we added 1. 1 Million People in prison, state prison. That number is staggering. But who were those 1. 1 million additional people are sent to prison . 223,000 or 21 seven convicted of a drug offense. 5,501,000 or 51 were victim of violence offense. Violence drove the growth. About 53 of all people in state prison had a primary offense a crime of violence. Almost anyone serving a long sentence is there for violence. The data looked at have all the people admitted to prison in 2003, how many still in prison 11 years later, 75 , 3 of those admitted in 2003 were still in prison 11 years later. Of the 3 threequarters had been convicted over index on a crime, murder, manslaughter, rate, i could assault or robbery. 83 some Violent Crime or separate kind of less a crime like assault. Long serving people are there for violence but most people who are there for violence are still serving short terms based on a majority prisoners. If we dont change and we punish people convicted of violence will not cut our prison population. There are rebuttals that come up one for the left one for the right completely valid questions are raised both are not nearly as devastated by the pills for argument is people raising often. The first is maybe im undercutting what the war on drugs is. Im counting people do for drug crimes. What about the person councilmae in a drug deal gone bad . Thats a not a final time, drug crime. As they go to the war on drugs . Maybe. What about the person who stole from a store to fund the drug habit . Thats a property crime not a drug crime. Should captain as well . Yes, but. So first violence. A lot of evidence not so much of the war on drugs that prohibition cause of violence but prohibition causes drugs to go where the violent already is. She points out the fact theres this anthropological evidence showing him in the world and income in the world if you take young men and deny them upward mobility and the state that affords logic and violence they will kill each other, fight each other in death rates will be high. Just as true in 19 century czarist russia as it is where she doesnt work as an l. A. Times reporter in southcentral los angeles in 2010. Its true in 2010, the 90s and 80, place like southcentral get a large group of young men who are denied upward mobility, underfunded schools, all the other no racist berries that deny employment to young black men, and the state is not renounce its control of violence. The murder rate for ellie can as well is 60 . 60 of all murders in l. A. County result in arrest. That alone is shockingly low. Almost onethird of all murders in l. A. Dont result in arrest. Twothirds of all black members result in no arrest. The state is not enforcing the laws of murder. When the state doesnt enforce the laws against murder, young men turn to violence. That brings the drugs. There is already despair and a lack of hopeful upward as. Thats what drugs will come to. Take drugs out of the picture but dont result in underlying structural problem, that deny these young men belief in the future in the state doesnt prevent them from the able to kill each other, the cause of violence and death will shift from drugs to Something Else. You dont want to oversell this point. There was a distinct spike in murders tied to the crack but a very real level the causal link flits around. Think about people stealing stuff. Why are people in reason for drugs . Is for trafficking, in opposition. Its a distribution to why people selling drugs . Same reason. Crea