Law Commons^™

Decarceration’S Blindspots, John F. Pfaff

Faculty Scholarship

For over a decade, my research has focused on trying to answer one simple question: how did the United States, home to about 5% of the world’s population, come to house nearly 25% of its prisoners?1 We were not always the world’s largest jailer; as recently as the 1970s, our incarceration rate was largely indistinguishable from those in other liberal democracies. Yet starting in the mid-1970s, as Figure 1 shows, that rate started to slowly—but steadily and relentlessly—grow, until by the late 2000s it rivaled and then surpassed even the rates seen in autocratic countries like Cuba and Belarus and …