Recipe for shrinking U.S. prison population
For the first time since 1972, the number of people behind bars in American prisons and jails in 2015 declined slightly to 2.2 million, down from 2.4 million in 2010. That’s the good news.
Fordham Law School professor John F. Pfaff, however, warns in his new book, “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform,” that continued decline in prison populations will not come easily.
While decreasing drugrelated sentencing accounts for the recent decline, Pfaaf stresses that “focusing on drugs will only work in the short run.”
The drug war, Pfaaf contends, contrary to popular belief, isn’t the primary cause of prison growth: “About 200,000 people in state prisons and another 100,000 in federal institutions are serving time for drug crimes … [and] … Freeing every single person who is in a state prison on a drug charge would only cut state prison populations back to where they were in 1996-1997, well into the ‘mass incarceration’ period.”
Pfaaf’s recipe for a shrinking prison population goes like this.
• The real culprit behind our outof-control prison populations is the 2,000-plus out-of-control state and local prosecutors who are able to coerce plea bargains and avoid trials in more than 95 percent of all cases they decide to prosecute.
“Prosecutors,” Pfaff tells us, “have been and remain the engines driving mass incarceration. Acting with wide discretion and little oversight, they are largely responsible for the staggering rise in admissions since the early 1990s … [and] … no major piece of state-level reform legislation has directly challenged prosecutorial power.”
• Providing qualified public defenders and other counsel for indigent defendants will level the legal playing field
Graduated-release programs and early release for inmates older than 40 or who have served more than 15 years of a sentence are ways to reduce prison populations.
and limit the wide discretion prosecutors now enjoy.
• Voters can’t cast informed ballots to elect local prosecutors in the absence of readily available information concerning the performance of incumbent prosecutors running for reelection. Appointing prosecutors would add professional accountability and lessen tough-on-crime pressures from suburban voters calling for aggressive prosecution of inner-city crimes.
• Incarceration reforms are a state and local, not a federal responsibility. Reforms might include guidelines to help prosecutors decide when to divert an accused person to probationary treatment, or another option, rather than to press charges that could send the defendant to prison.
Pfaff cites research that suggests as inmates convicted of violent crimes grow older they may no longer be a danger to society, that extended prison sentences serve no useful purposes.
Graduated-release programs and early release for inmates older than 40 or who have served more than 15 years of a sentence are ways to reduce prison populations.
The author ends on this hopeful note: “The movement against mass incarceration had no option but to start where it did, focusing on drugs and other nonviolent crimes.” But, he maintains, it is time to move on to the harder cases, and the time to start making that move is now.