Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration-and How to Achieve Real Reform

A groundbreaking reassessment of the American prison system, challenging the widely accepted explanations for our exploding incarceration rates

In Locked In, John Pfaff argues that the factors most commonly cited to explain mass incarceration -- the failed War on Drugs, draconian sentencing laws, an increasing reliance on private prisons -- tell us much less than we think. Instead, Pfaff urges us to look at other factors, especially a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before.

An authoritative, clear-eyed account of a national catastrophe, Locked In is "a must-read for anyone who dreams of an America that is not the world's most imprisoned nation" (Chris Hayes, author of A Colony in a Nation). It transforms our understanding of what ails the American system of punishment and ultimately forces us to reconsider how we can build a more equitable and humane society.

• Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
• Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison
• Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores
• Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration
• From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America
• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
• Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse
• Are Prisons Obsolete?
• Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair
• Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal