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John Pfaff

Professor of Law, Fordham Law School. Criminal justice and mass incarceration quant. Author of Locked In, and usually found on Twitter.

The Perverse Incentives of Punishment

Todd Entrekin, the sheriff of the small Alabama county of Etowah, recently found himself in the national spotlight when an Alabama newspaper discovered that over the course of three years he pocketed at least $750,000budgeted for feeding the people detained in his county jail. While the inmates in his jail ate meat from a package labeled “not fit for human […]

Why Public Defenders Matter More Than Ever in a Time of Reform

In 1963, the Supreme Court handed down Gideon v. Wainwright, which held that the government had to provide a lawyer to any poor defendant facing prison time. While often trumpeted as one of the Court’s greatest modern decisions, it has also been embroiled in controversy from the beginning. Like all Supreme Court opinions that impose new […]