Justin Fox, Columnist

Jeff Sessions Probably Can't Restart the Incarceration Boom

Reducing prison populations is mostly in the hands of state and local governments.

February 9, 2017 at 7:14 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

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Over the past few years, a bipartisan coalition of reformers has been arguing that the U.S. imprisons too many people, especially drug offenders, and leaves them behind bars for too long. Their efforts even seem to have had some effect, with the incarceration rate declining every year since 2008.

On Wednesday night, the Senate confirmed a new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who seems to disagree pretty strongly with those assessments. So is the whole criminal-justice-reform movement dead, or at least on hold? Is the incarceration rate about to start rising again?

Probably not. At least, that's the message of a new book out this week, John Pfaff's "Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform." It's also more or less what Pfaff, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law in New York, replied when I e-mailed him this morning: