Pfaff: Decarceration Requires Tough Decisions - TribPapers
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Opinion

Pfaff: Decarceration Requires Tough Decisions

Buncombe County launched several jail diversion programs in recent years, after then Sheriff Van Duncan broached the subject of siting a second prison.

Asheville – John Pfaff’s Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration – and How to Achieve Real Reform isn’t what one might expect. It’s not an emotional plea to legalize marijuana and stop harassing people of color. The expectation that policy changes like these will significantly slow incarceration rates is part of what Pfaff debunks as the ‘Standard Story.’

The book starts with the usual statistics, showing how America outpaces by far the rest of the civilized world in incarcerations. Pfaff gets off to a good start impressing his reader that he is one of those people who take pains to uncover parameterizations when presented with three values for a single statistic, something that happens a lot with government reports.

Pfaff’s research also disclosed a lot of datasets important for finding out how to end “mass incarceration” don’t exist, simply because nobody is keeping track. Examples of unknowns include the number of persons with criminal records in the United States and the number of persons who have pled guilty to crimes. Pfaff does, however, work impressively with available data.

Significantly, he finds that only 16% of inmates in state prisons are serving time for drug offenses. The number is much higher, about 50 percent, in federal prisons, but 87 percent of all prisoners are in state facilities. What’s more, about 1% of state prisoners and two percent of federal prisoners serving time for drug charges are, “‘nonviolent, first- or second-time drug offenders’ who played minor roles and possessed only small amounts of drugs.” 

These statistics, of course, overshoot the number of nonviolent persons serving time for low-level drug activity because no records are kept of what goes on in plea bargaining. Nobody knows how many of the one and two percent had charges dropped or downgraded with aggravating factors dismissed.

One reason so many people buy into the ‘Standard Story’ may be that they are focusing on numbers from federal penitentiaries without drilling down on the statistics. Another is that different states and different counties have different approaches to dealing with criminals; California is often an outlier that skews national averages. 

A third would be what Pfaff calls a LIHS (low-information, high-salience) public. Most people aren’t criminologists who, like Pfaff, get paid to sort through government statistics. Instead, they only hear sensationalized anecdotes that make headlines because of their outrageousness, and vote accordingly.

Much of the book calls attention to how important prosecutors are in determining the number of people who go to prison, and how almost no data is kept on what they do. Prosecutors, in fact, are essentially accountable only to district attorneys, who are only accountable to voters, who outside some LIHS scandal, overwhelmingly re-elect the incumbent, who normally runs unopposed, anyway.

Many of Pfaff’s recommendations, therefore, are directed toward, “regulating the prosecutor.” One suggestion is to bring compensation for public defendants on a par with that of prosecutors. Not only does public defense, on average, receive 30% less than prosecutors; law enforcement agencies do prosecutors’ investigations “for free.” Since Pfaff doesn’t see counties coming up with the money to do this, he thinks the difference should be funded federally, since, by way of the 6th Amendment, public defense is a Constitutional right.

Among other reforms is the suggestion that persons sentenced for enumerated, low-level crimes would have to serve time in county jails. This would likely cause push back at the county level, since the current system is a moral hazard with prosecutors getting to send as many people as they like to state prisons, where they’re kept at state expense.

Another reform would be to have cities and counties elect separate prosecutors and judges. This is because most crime happens in urban areas, and county wide elections are typically dominated by rural voters. The reform, says Pfaff, would better align voters with the communities reaping the social costs and benefits of crime and incarceration.

Throughout the book, Pfaff sympathizes with promulgators of the Standard Story, as well as all who have been “warehoused,” or even harassed by the system. The book is written to show the well-intended who wish to move away from mass incarceration they’re on the wrong track. Going back to statistics, the clincher Pfaff reveals is prison populations are not going to be reduced substantially until persons serving time for violent crimes are released. Accepting this, reformers may choose to refocus their mission on merely getting nonviolent offenders out of prison.

The book is somewhat dated, having been published in 2017, before prisons started releasing prisoners for COVID. At that time, however, Pfaff observed, “there are almost as many people in prison today just for murder and manslaughter as the total state prison population in 1974.”

Furthermore, “Our current approach to punishing those convicted of violence is almost entirely blind to mountains of sophisticated research about violent behavior. The harsh sentences we impose on people convicted of violent crimes are not buying us the security we think they are: they incapacitate people longer than necessary and provide little deterrence in exchange. It’s a situation that begs for reform.”

Stressing that reforms for a broken system, with interactive, moving parts, will have to be adopted in a package, one idea Pfaff suggests is shortening sentences, since old men tend to be less impulsive than youth, and impulsivity is, “one of the most well documented risk factors for criminal behavior.” Another would be to enhance deterrents, as in hiring more police officers.