For all our talk about defunding the police (which didn't happen), we ignored how we did in fact significantly reduce local government employment. And an excellent recent article by John Roman suggests this played a big, but underappreciated, role in driving up homicides and shootings in 2020.
While it is true that criminal sentences in the US can often be longer than those in Europe, the numbers here show both that typical sentences, even for violence, are not that long, and that the long tail of punishment is driven primarily by violent crimes.
Most of our discussions of prison populations focus on the one-day count of people in prison. Looking at the types of people we admit can tell a different story, and an important one.
As far as I know, there is no single list of not only all the people who have been elected as reform prosecutor, but also of those who have run and lost. Here I provide my first effort at such a list, which currently runs to 128 current, former, and unsuccessful reformers.
A study tells us that 70% percent of mass shooters have blue eyes. That might not mean that having blue eyes helpfully predicts mass shooters. There's a big, often overlooked, statistical pitfall so many accounts about mass shooters fall into.
The not-unreasonable way we define our incarceration rate actually misses hundreds of thousands of people each year who pass through our prisons, which means we've undercounted the impact of prisons by millions over the years.
My goals for this blog, and why I hope you'll want to read along.
Prisons, Prosecutors, and the Politics of Punishment 