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On By John PfaffIn Uncategorized

I realize that 2023 may be a little late to decide to start blogging, but I am also suddenly appreciating the extent to which I used to use the late, lamented, and now lamentable Twitter to work out new ideas, and to try to share new empirical findings quickly and in an aggressively non-academic way. With the collapse of Twitter, and feeling some FOMO from watching everyone launch Substacks,1 I figured it was probably time.

My goals here are three-fold:

1. The politics of prosecutors. Inspired by a fairly racist tweet fired off by a Carlos Vega supporter the night Larry Krasner won the 2021 primary, I’ve started looking much more closely at the politics of prosecutors, especially the intersection of race and crime, producing numerous precinct-level maps of who votes for reformers and who favors the status quo. I’ve written one skimming-the-surface article on this topic so far, but using only four cities as examples. As I keep examining the elections in more and more places, I’ll keep posting all the various maps here, along with some thoughts on what they mean.

The racist tweet. The text, which I intentionally cut off, said “The definition of insanity!”

2. The National Corrections Reporting Program. The NCRP is an amazingly detailed, and criminally underused, dataset on over 20,000,000 people who have been admitted to prisons in most states of the US since 2000, and currently up through the end of 2020. It allows for remarkably granular takes on what exactly prison populations look like, and how they’ve changed over the 2000s (with a few states going back to the 1990s, and Georgia back to the 1970s). Who, exactly, are the old people in prison and how long have they been there? In what way–and due to what crimes, or races, or ages, or sexes–did prison populations drop during Covid? How exactly are prison populations shrinking in the states seeing declines: everywhere, just in urban counties, just in Democratic-led (or perhaps just Republican-led??2) counties? As I crawl through the NCRP in the months ahead, I hope to lay out one of the most detailed pictures of prison growth (and decline) that’s out there.

Old people in prison: each blue dot is a person over 50 in prison in 2019 who was admitted before age 50; each orange dot a person over 50 in prison in 2019 who was admitted after they were 50. Most older people in prison for homicide are growing old in prison. But a lot of people are entering prison when old, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

3. Twitter Refugee Posts. I realize now that I actually posted a lot of original work over at Twitter and then didn’t send it elsewhere. Often, there was no need: I had one graph that showed up as a screenshot on All In With Chris Hayes, and there’s absolutely no way I could have gotten greater reach anywhere else. But with Twitter dying off, I should move some of that research over here, so it has a new, not-racist-supporting home.

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  1. Technically, this is a WordPress, not a Substack. I’m just hoping that the owners of WordPress aren’t going to get milkshake ducked like the owner of Substack. ↩︎
  2. No, it’s just Democratic-led ones. Conservative reform groups like to point to places like Texas for proof that the GOP can cut prison populations, but even there most of the heavy lifting is being done in Dem-led areas. ↩︎

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