John Pfaff

@johnpfaff.bsky.social

4264

Followers

394

Following

4885

Posts

Professor at Fordham Law. Prisons and criminal justice quant. I'm not contrarian, the data are. Author of Locked In. New stuff at johnfpfaff.com.

Posts Replies Media

That a Yale con law person wrote this on July 2 of this year, in the Atlantic, just further confirms for me that the legal academy, or at least its elite Con Law branch, simply does not seem to be up to the task the current political moment demands.

Reposted by

John Pfaff

New post up, on how there was never an actual bipartisan push for decarceration. It's true that red and blue states alike saw prison populations decline. But within those red states, the work was done by the blue counties. The politics of punishment are local, not state, not federal.

The Local, Mono-Partisan Nature of Our Current Decarcerationjohnfpfaff.com While state-level data suggests that red and blue states alike saw prisons declines, county-level numbers indicate that this seeming bipartisanship is deceptive. Even in the red states, the declines a...

Reposted by

John Pfaff

Rick Wilson of The Lincoln Project, former Republican and Republican strategist that I most loved to hate when he was doing political ads against my guy, said the Gop is planting the talking points and we’re just repeating them. You would think we would learn..

"Gorging on Panic." Fantastic band name, but also a perfect summary of things now.

a lot of people are gorging on panic

Decarceration in the US has been almost exclusively a Dem-voting county endeavor, despite rhetoric abt bipartisanship. In a sample of 27 states (holding ~75% of the ppl in prison), Democratic-leaning counties were responsible for ~90% of the decline. And ironically, CA makes the GOP look good:

Reposted by

John Pfaff

Serious question, asking not just for myself: Who out there is actually doing serious work on how other branches of govt, states, or the public more broadly can resist SCOTUS arrogation? I think Keith Whittington has written some stuff, right? But who else? Must be some who have?

It's also a bit breathtaking to see the sheer amount of power the Republican judiciary has arrogated to itself this term, all without a single act of Congress

Agree, but think we can aim higher: put the Court in strip malls in Kansas, not backrooms still in DC.

Move the Supreme Court back to their small old room in the basement of the Capitol, and give the SCOTUS building to DC Public Schools. (the first step in curbing the court is changing the way the public views them, and also the way they view themselves.)

It's also a bit breathtaking to see the sheer amount of power the Republican judiciary has arrogated to itself this term, all without a single act of Congress

The conflict of interest was so glaring, it should have required an acknowledgement in their bios. "This commentator's law school boasts about its SCOTUS clerkships, and profs take pride in `placing' ppl. They will thus be unwilling to bite the hand that feeds them. Judge these takes accordingly."

Congrats to all the profs at elite law schools who loudly vouched for John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch when they were nominated. Hope you placed your students in some nice clerkships.

Yep. Far too often, norms of "collegiality" and "civility" are ways to ensure that those who do terrible things can't be confronted about them. Justices strip women of rights in polite legalese, and it's "rule of law." People protest at those justices' houses, and it's "impolite."

Attorneys in privileged legal positions, i.e Biglaw, also need to stop normalizing authoritarianism in the name of “collegiality.” Name your Federalist Society colleagues. Detail any work they performed to undermine democratic norms and institutions. Normalize the defense of democracy instead.

Shorter Version: Happy Wilhoit Day to all who celebrate.

Homeless people can be arrested for sleeping, Presidents cannot be arrested for rampant graft and corruption done while in office. There is no clearer a summary of "conservative 'law and order'" than this.

I really, really, REALLY hope that there is a large group of Con Law scholars and lawyers working on what a coherent form of resistance to SCOTUS looks like. Something like the Originalist project, which took years, but laid an intellectual groundwork that has worked.

Reposted by

John Pfaff

Reply to

John Pfaff

I suppose a loophole here for lower courts to exploit is "what counts as an official act?" Like, maybe ordering the assassination of your political opponent isn't "an official act." Maybe taking a bribe from Saudi Arabia isn't either. (Obv SCOTUS could say they ARE, but until then....)

My decision to take 95%-social media hiatus def appears to have been the right call (for me! YMMV, etc.). Even if hysteria ever dies down, not sure I'll ever put it back on my phone. Only three days in, and already finding my obsessive need to check non-stop waning... and my blood pressure w it.

it really fucking bothers me that this collective hysteria has me defending joe fucking biden

I will say this, though. It's clear the director grew up near Chicago (he lived in a Cook County suburb), because the opening credits to the second episode were a giant cinematic love-letter to the city that made me really miss it.

Just watched S3E1 of The Bear, and .... I feel like it was less a TV show, more a Culinary Koyaanisqatsi. Not sure if that's a criticism, but not sure if it's a compliment either.

Yeah, in case any additional evidence was needed, this is definitive proof that all these AI things are designed by people who have never genuinely enjoyed things like reading, who see it all as some sort of task to complete, not a pleasure in and of itself.

I can’t think of a clever caption for this. It just breaks my fucking heart.

Which, if IIRC, is what every political scientist who studies polling and presidential elections predicted. Upside of social media is helps experts escape professional bubbles, face ideas and criticisms they might otherwise miss: DEF the case for me w views of activists/abolitionists, etc. But:

I noted it at the time, and I'm going to repeat: There is a lot of posturing around here about How Things Really Are and we're having a several days long freakout about Biden's delivery while voters largely shrug and assume the policy clash is unchanged

Reposted by

John Pfaff

Just finished my first day of not having any social media apps on my phone and ... man. Should have done this sooner! First, made me realize how mindlessly I apparently opened it during the day. Kept going to it and ... it wasn't there. Def addictive behavior that I (YMMV) had to solve directly.

The correlation between a bio that suggests extensive rigorous studying of presidential elections and political communications and confident doomer takes is close to -1. There's a lot to be said, genuinely, for the social flattening of social media. But it has some real costs too.

Super tuned in political partisans need to understand that they dont (& largely cant!) understand the way that undecided voters perceive this sort of stuff, but basically all of our political commentary--both from pundits/reporters & some ppl online--is based entirely on the fallacy that they do.

Like, we all know the stakes are high, we all know the margins are far thinner than they should be. Most every regular poster on here is a high-info voter type. Just constantly yelling "we're all going to die" at each other for weeks seems ... unhealthy. And counterproductive.

But there's a uniquely repetitious, harp-on-the-worst aspect to social media (esp maybe here) that strikes me as uniquely toxic. I'm not closing my account, but I did just delete the app from my phone/iPad. Feel like this place is not going to be all that good for my mental health for a while.

This seems like the best (mini)thread to read. Maybe I'm just looking for copium, but worth remembering it's important to listen to the people who study the stuff most closely. Punditism isn't just limited to the official pundits, and social media def fosters a bad doomerism x punditry interaction.

For very different reasons and different circumstances, by far the most cringe-worthy debate performance I've ever seen is John Fetterman's PA Senate debate. And his polls didn't decline and he won. Just a good warning against overconfidence

Just going to toss this out one more time, then delete Bsky off my phone, throw my phone in the toilet, set the toilet on fire, cover the ashes in concrete, and launch the concrete into the sun. Will buy a new phone tomorrow, when it is safe again.

I don't plan to watch tonight's debate, bc I'm not THAT self-loathing, even tho I'm sure crime and punishment will come up. So figured it couldn't hurt to toss up a short thread to put whatever claims they are likely to make in context. tl;dr: neither did/does/will do much to cause OR stop crime.

This really felt like the “40% of sick days are taken on Mondays and Fridays” failure-to-engage-with-background-rates sort of claim that really rankles me.

Which means fewer ppl die in summer than during the rest of the year. Total deaths in state prisons from 2001-2019? 65,000. That translates into 16,250 every quarter (ie, season). So 13,000 over the summer months is below expectations. *Sadly needed throat-clear*: I AM NOT DEFENDING PRISONS.

Over the past two decades, nearly 13,000 people have perished behind bars during America's summer months. As heat waves have become more common, these deaths have worsened. capitalbnews.org/michael-broa...

The Growing Crisis of Heatwave Deaths in America’s Prisonscapitalbnews.org Over the past two decades, nearly 13,000 people have perished behind bars during America's summer months.

Reposted by

John Pfaff

You don’t even need to make a “Torment Nexus” joke here. We already have the real book—with a movie—that was meant as a warning, not a roadmap.

Oh. My. God. Put aside the nakedly dystopian nature of this. If it were done—and can’t imagine it will—it COMPLETELY GETS THINGS WRONG. The trauma of being a victim is often a major CAUSE of future OFFENDING. And this program aims to TRAUMATIZE MORE!