Two overlooked areas that explain the rise of the high-throughput prosecutor:

1. The war on drugs

If you look at the statistics, the biggest surprise is how many offenders aren't in prison for drugs, and how many of them are in for violent offenses. It doesn't square with the romanticism that most prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders.

We saw a similar spike in crime during prohibition, where alcohol wasn't obviously involved, but the fact it was illegal gave rise to the violent crime. The overlooked fact is that the drug war makes for a lot of violent crime, even though "drugs" never shows up on the police report or indictment.

2. Plea bargaining, or how to be a used car salesman

Picture yourself in trouble. Maybe you robbed somebody or killed somebody. And now the system has you. You face up to life in prison. With anticipation, the prosecutor gives you a plea offer. Plead guilty, you get 15-20 years. Plead not guilty, she'll add in more charges to put you away for good.

Or at least that's what she says will happen. If you're like 99% of people in that boat, you'll never find out, because that 15-20 sounds a helluva lot better than life.

But no one ever studies that 1% of the population that tells the prosecutor to pound sand with her deal. For this edge case, there's a nonzero chance the prosecutor will dismiss the counts the day right before the trial begins because the evidence or witnesses didn't materialize. Or even if you're found guilty, and the prosecutor is livid they had to spend 3 weeks in court convincing a jury you're guilty on all counts, the judge might see some mitigating circumstances or simply be in a good mood when it's time for you to be sentenced. Maybe you'll get life, or maybe you'll only get 5 years because the victim was unsympathetic and there were mitigating circumstances.

When plea bargaining was a novelty, prosecutors didn't know about demand-based pricing. They'd handicap the most likely outcome and discount it in order to save themselves the work.

Nowadays, they're just like used car salespeople. What they'd get at trial no longer factors into their offers. Like any other monopoly, the highest offer you'd take is what you'll have to pay in order to avoid trial.

The information asymmetry makes it all possible. If a disinterested professional, not a prosecutor, not a defense attorney, appraised your case at 12.3 years if taken to trial, you'd tell the prosecutor to take her 20 year offer and shove it.

But no disinterested professionals exist. So we send people away for longer and longer periods, swelling our prison population.

Behold the unreasonable effectiveness of information asymmetry.

This doesn't explain the full effect- we're not just seeing longer sentences but more prisoners. Here's how this happens: the prisoner boom comes from the increased idle time prosecutors can achieve through ubiquitous plea bargaining. No longer having to triage which cases they have time to take to trial, they can write 100 plea deals in the time it takes to get one trial done. If society were to curtail plea deals, even some minor aspect like refusing to allow bargainers to waive appellate rights, the numbers would start reverting to lower levels immediately.

If you think everybody accused deserves to be punished harshly, you'd probably think this system works well. If you think the lowest quality cases ought not be prosecuted and we should have fewer prisoners serving less time, then it thus becomes an act of altruism for a guilty individual to plead not guilty and take it to trial.