On Monday, the FBI released its full crime stats for 2016, which showed violent crime up 4.1 percent in the U.S. over the FBI numbers for 2015.
Pfaff, a Professor of Law at Fordham University Law School, was one of several academic and law enforcement figures who took part in a Monday morning conference call about the FBI stats. The call was sponsored by the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School, and Fair and Just Prosecution, a project that supports and inter-connects recently elected leaders of prosecutors' offices committed to new thinking and innovation.
"One of things we know in New York City, and in Brooklyn where I am the District Attorney, is that we cannot arrest and jail our way out of violence,"Β said Eric Gonzalez, Kings County District Attorney in Brooklyn, New York. (Gonzalez was another of the experts on Monday morning's conference call.) "We need to invest in communities, invest in services, and hold people accountable while also ensuring that we have the respect and trust of the people we serve."
Monday's data "cannot and should not push us back to failed tough on crime policies of past decades that left too many people locked up for too long, too many families and communities fractured, too many lives lost on our street and in our jails, and too much money spent in prisons rather than investing in prevention." said former federal prosecutor Miriam Krinsky, who is the Executive Director of Fair and Just Prosecution.
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