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John Pfaff Profile picture
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9 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Is there any reason Apple moved the address bar on the iPhone’s Safari from the top of the page—where it has been since Mosaic crawled out of the primordial Internet sludge in 1993—to the bottom, where it makes no sense and completely baffles me?
Feels SO MUCH like “… well, we have to change SOMETHING, so… move that from here to there for no reason?”
Ok, so this, annoyingly, makes a lot of sense.

I can’t type one-handed, bc I’m old and my fingers are apparently fat and mobile keyboards are just typo-machines, but … get it.
And for those who still yearn to send email via pine and read the news via TurboGopher, here’s how to fix:

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John Pfaff Profile picture
10 Dec
Also worth breaking this out just by those who DO get charged, helps see no increase in serious violence post-reform.

Of course, two important caveats to keep in mind when looking at simple time graphs like these:
1. Bail reform goes into effect in 2020 (and gets mailed in 2020). So goes into effect right as Covid hits, which clearly impacted behavior, but also policing and arrests, in ways that may be complicated to untangle.
And 2. In LA, there was anecdotal evidence that police stopped making a lot of low-level drug arrests when lower weights went from felony to misdemeanor.

They didn’t see any point given the lack of real sanction.

So, here?
Read 5 tweets
John Pfaff Profile picture
7 Dec
This.

But also: this highlights how hard it is to interpret a poll like this, which forces people (by saying "pick the ONE most important") to THINK of "economic development" as something in a zero-sum challenge with "fighting crime."
I feel like polls are almost more informative for what their framing tells us about how we think of/choose to frame things rather than the results say.

Like this poll reflects how we think "crime is a criminal legal system issue," which... it's SO much more complex.
And we know that polls are SO sensitive to the order of questions, to the way questions are phrased, to the number of choices, to how the choices are phrased, etc., etc.

Yet our coverage is mostly just "LOOK AT THIS NUMBER. IT'S BIGGER THAN THAT ONE."
Read 5 tweets
John Pfaff Profile picture
9 Nov
Far more ppl will die this year in our prisons and jails due to inadequate health care, violence, and suicide than executions.

Yet SCOTUS limits itself to tinkering w the machine of the death penalty, ignoring the massive machine of mortality and morbidity that is gen-pop.
If (a big “if”) we have a death penalty, it should be regulated.

But we should not pretend it is the main way the state kills people held in its prisons.

For most of the 2000-10s, for ex, CA alone killed more ppl per yr from inadequate care than all executions nationwide.
The death penalty is shocking and gripping and emotionally powerful and salient.

The Prison Litigation Reform Act, which allows states to avoid federal oversight for awful conditions, is hypertechical and legalistic.

But far more deadly—because of that.
Read 4 tweets
John Pfaff Profile picture
4 Nov
A few final thoughts (for now) on what the NCRP says about age.

Decided to compare the picture from 2019 to that from 2009, and... it looks basically the same. Total prison pops are down, but the older pop looks roughly the same.

In fact, worse:
My NCRP sample oversamples declining states, but even in that the total number of elderly people rose.

Over 2009-19, in my 24-state sample over-50s rose ~50K, over-65s ~15K.

Some of this was aging-in-place, as percent-admitted-when-old fell. But most remain older admits.
In fact, of the ~60K people in prison in my sample in 2009 who had been admitted when over 50, only ~7K remained in prison in 2019.

Aging-in-place matters, but older people being admitted is a huge issue.
Read 4 tweets
John Pfaff Profile picture
3 Nov
Interesting picture on older people in prison from the NCRP.

Basic story: for property, drugs, and public order, the older people in prison tend to be ... older admits. Even for homicide, the oldest are increasingly older admits, some seemingly quite old.
This is not an argument in favor of locking up elderly people.

But an important corrective to the conventional wisdom that most people aging in prison are long-serving people admitted when young.

A lot are! But there's a large number who are later-in-life admits.
This is a graph that complicates--doesn't undermine, but complicates--one of the more trusted arguments in reform, one I myself frequently make: that releasing older inmates is low-risk bc people age out of violence.

In general, they do! But some... don't.

Now, to be clear:
Read 6 tweets
John Pfaff Profile picture
3 Nov
The political story:

When I look at county changes over 2009-19 and compare to a rough left-v-right measure, the story is... sometimes just what I'd expect, sometimes not so.

Take TN. It's a simple story: the state decline is driven by Dem counties with big prison populations.
Texas, on the other hand? It's a story of local changes, but in a far more complicated bi-partisan sort of way.

The small GOP counties are fairly split, and while the Dem counties favor declines, not all do... tho as you get solid D, get solid decline.
There are some patterns here, though, it seems like. The most conservative counties are getting harsher. Solid Dem places tend to be solid decliners.

But after that? It's actually a lot messier than I expected.
Read 4 tweets

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