. >> guest: well, there's an interesting book in political science could locked in by john fath who's a law professor/criminologies and a statistician which is about why we struggle so much in america with mass incarceration and how everything you think you know about mass be incarceration is wrong. it's not about the war on drugs, it's not about private prisons, it's really about the role of prosecutors in our criminal justice system which i think a lot of people haven't really acknowledged as the major factor behind these very high levels of imprisonment in the united states. and, i mean, one of the things that's fascinating about this book is he shows at the very time the crime rate is dropping, there's a surge in the number of prosecutors who are working for the u.s. government. and as a consequence, you just start seeing in and around sort of 1990 this incredible surge in prosecutorial zeal, asking for much longer sentences, prosecuting at a much higher level than they would have before. and this is actually the crucial factor in creating what we call the carceral state now, not