Mixed Martial Messages

FOR ROUGHLY HALF a decade, a small contingent of criminal justice reformers has beseeched Americans to divert some of our attention from opposition to the drug war to mercy for violent offenders.

“We can’t get from where we are to where we need to be just by releasing the innocent and harmless,” the late criminologist Mark Kleiman wrote in 2015. “More than half of today’s prisoners are serving time for violent offenses, and even those now in prison for nonviolent crimes often have violent histories. Solving mass incarceration requires releasing some seriously guilty and dangerous people. The problem is how to do that while also protecting public safety by turning ex-criminals into productive, free citizens.” The Fordham law professor John Pfaff made a similar argument in 2017’s (Basic Books), which rejected what Pfaff calls the “standard story” blaming the drug war for mass incarceration.