This paper explores both "who" has driven up US prison populations in recent years and "why" this growth has occurred. At least since the early 1990s, the "who" appears to primarily be prosecutors. Crime and arrests have fallen, and the percent of felony cases resulting in admissions and time...

Though the growth in US prison populations over the past three decades - from 300,000 inmates in the 1970s to 1.6 million today - is well known, its causes are not. This paper examines one potential source of growth that has received surprisingly little rigorous attention: changes in time...

The forces driving U.S. prison growth are poorly understood. This article examines one factor that has received insufficient attention: changes in time served. It demonstrates that time served has not risen dramatically in recent years, even declining in some jurisdictions. It also shows that...

Empirical scholarship in the social sciences and the law stands at a critical threshold. As the volume of statistical analysis grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to assess what we actually know about a particular phenomenon. Contradictory findings abound, and the social sciences and...

Given the undeniable role that prosecutorial discretion has played in driving mass incarceration, it makes sense to turn to them to scale it back as well. This has certainly been a central motivation of the progressive/reform prosecutor movement that started in the late 2000s. And while this...