A groundbreaking reassessment of the American prison system, challenging the widely accepted explanations for our exploding incarceration rates
In
Locked In
, John Pfaff argues that the factors most commonly cited to explain mass incarceration — the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons — tell us much less than we think. Instead, Pfaff urges us to look at other factors, especially a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before.
An authoritative, clear-eyed account of a national catastrophe,
is "a must-read for anyone who dreams of an America that is not the world's most imprisoned nation" (Chris Hayes, author of
A Colony in a Nation
). It transforms our understanding of what ails the American system of punishment and ultimately forces us to reconsider how we can build a more equitable and humane society.