The Adirondack Daily Enterprise just published “Mass Incarceration and Your Local Prosecutor” by DKT’s Ronald Frazier. The article examines the main cause of mass incarceration’s and then lays out some solutions.  Here’s a clip:

The real culprit behind our out-of-control prison populations is our 2,000-plus out-of-control state and local prosecutors — including the Franklin County district attorney — who are able to coerce plea bargains and avoid trials in more than 95 percent of all cases they decide to prosecute.

“Prosecutors,” Pfaff tells us, “have been and remain the engines driving mass incarceration. Acting with wide discretion and little oversight, they are largely responsible for the staggering rise in admissions since the early 1990s … [and] … no major piece of state-level reform legislation has directly challenged prosecutorial power.”

Pfaff suggests a number of needed changes while admitting that they are a hard sell.

For the full article, visit: http://www.adirondackdailyenterprise.com