The

The Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman.

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My guest today is John Faf.

John Faf is a professor of law at Fordham Law School.

His work has been covered in The Economist, New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, National Review, Slate, and Vox, among others.

And he has a JD and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

John, thanks for coming on my podcast.

Thanks so much.

Before we get into your book, which is excellent,

and it's called Locked In, Subtitled the True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to

Achieve Real Reform. Is that right? It is. I can never keep true and real straight. I think

that's right. Yes. Just give us a little bit of your background. How did you get into studying

criminal justice? Yeah, I don't have a great, like, origin story for how I ended up here. I was, you know, always sort of, I think it's sort of that always sort of fast by criminal justice just in general for reasons. There's no clear reason. It's not good, no. I grew up as a, you know, in a middle-class home, sort of the kind of place to sort of completely remove

for any sort of real criminal justice contacts. I don't have any personal experience with it. I just found it always sort of interesting. I remember in grad school, what you went to prisons at least was when I was in grad school sort of trying to figure out what I wanted to write about. And you something about criminal justice didn't know what. And I was reading Chicago Tribune one day. was like, some like, you know, two-paragraph article in page B-74,

where it was just after the dot-com bubble had popped and said how the governor was going to close all these state prisons, but it wasn't going to fire any prison guards. And that just sort of struck me. There was just something interesting about that, but sort of just from a, like, what exactly is the policy there? And so I started digging into it.

And once you start, and realize there's a really fascinating sort of empirical question there and so i started digging into it and once you start

and realize there's a really fascinating sort of empirical question there sort of how did prisons

...