Ford: How does the war on drugs play into this? In the standard story, it’s a central feature, but it seems less focal in the view you offer.

Pfaff: If you define the war on drugs as arresting people for drug offenses, then as it stands right now, only about 16 percent of all people in state prison are there on a drug charge. The increase in sending people to prison for drugs explains about 20 percent of all prison growth between 1980 and 2010, so it’s not the dominant driver. What a majority of people are in prison for are for crimes of violence, so at some point we have to start confronting how we punish people for violent crimes.

And I think that does point to one risk of our standard-story approach: By emphasizing the war on drugs and telling people we can accomplish reform by decarcerating people for drug offenses, we don’t encourage them to think about how to punish violence differently. In that same Vox survey that showed a majority of Americans think a majority of prisoners are there for drugs, a more disturbing question they asked was something like, “Are you willing to punish those who are convicted of violence and pose little threat of recidivism, are you willing to punish them less?” And a majority of liberals, moderates, and conservatives said no, that they are unwilling—even for those who pose a low risk of recidivism—they’re unwilling to contemplate punishing those convicted of violence less.

I think we’ve convinced people that we can really impose deep cuts just by focusing on the safe, easy cases of the nonviolent drug offender. And the fact is, any sort of deep cut in our prison population will require us to reduce the number of people in prison for violence. And I think we can do that and maintain public safety. One statistic that doesn’t get enough attention is that our violent crime rate right now is about where it was in 1970—it might be even better than that depending on which numbers you use—but our incarceration rate is five times higher. So unless you think Americans are five times more violent today than in 1970, that’s hard to justify. And if anything, I’d say the crime-age American citizen today is probably less violent than the same person in the 1970s, so it’s even harder to justify that way.

Ford: If I’m a state legislator who’s worried about being painted as soft on crime, and I’m worried about all the traditional political attacks that go with it, what steps could I take to reduce the number of people in prison for violent offenses that would be safe and equitable and just?

Pfaff: One thing they could focus on would be expanding parole options for people convicted of violence. Often when we see states push to expand parole choices, more often than not they explicitly exclude those convicted of a current violent offense, or sometimes even any prior violent offense. And that’s kind of self-defeating, because the fact is our popular model of violent behavior is not really accurate. We tend to use the term “violent offender.” I work very hard to never use it if I can, because it defines someone who commits a violent act as that’s who they are: They are a violent person, it’s a state of being. And violence isn’t a state of being, it’s at most a phase. People also age into and age out of crime. Someone who commits a violent crime when they’re 16 isn’t going to be nearly as violent when they’re 30 or 35. There’s hormonal changes, there’s cultural changes, social changes—you get married, you have a job, and that helps you desist from offending. We tend to lock them up for longer periods of time just as they’re aging out of crime.