If Adam Liptak is right, liberals, conservatives and libertarians have come to distrust our criminal justice system.  Liberals think it’s unfair; conservatives think it’s too expensive; libertarians think it’s too intrusive. 

Liptak was in Tulia, Texas for the evendentiary hearings that exposed Tom Coleman’s racist brand of idiocy back in 2003.  Does the meeting of the minds Liptak describes in the New York Times portend an end to the drug war?  Will the Tom Coleman’s of this world soon be looking for legitimate employment?

Don’t hold your breath.  True, we didn’t hear much tough-on-crime rhetoric during the last general election.  And mass incarceration certainly carries a stiff price tag.  According to Dr. Glen Loury of Brown University and Dr. Bruce Western of Harvard, “Spending on law enforcement and corrections at all levels of government now totals roughly a fifth of a trillion dollars per year. In constant dollars, this spending has more than quadrupled over the last quarter century.”  Spending has quadrupled because the prison population has quadrupled.  And perhaps, as Liptak’s piece suggests, even Republican incarceration buffs like former AG Edwin Meese are undergoing a change of heart.

But there are two problems with this argument.  For one thing, conservative hand-wringing over the justice system has been prompted primarily by federal laws impinging on white collar criminals.  As Liptak acknowledges, “So-called overcriminalization is at the heart of the conservative critique of crime policy. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce made the point in a recent friend-of-the-court brief about a federal law often used to prosecute corporate executives and politicians. The law, which makes it a crime for officials to defraud their employers of ‘honest services,’ is, the brief said, both ‘unintelligible’ and “used to target a staggeringly broad swath of behavior.”

That’s not going to help Tulia victims like Joe Moore and Freddie Brookins Jr. 

Secondly, as I have noted elsewhere, mass incarceration is far more than the consequence of tough-on-crime demagoguery; it was America’s response to a surplus population created by the neo-liberal economic policies of the late 1970s.  Sure, politicians demagogued the crime issue to win election; but the real issue was economic.  When you put the squeeze on the middle and working classes, the folks in the hood don’t stand a chance.  The war on drugs and mass incarceration should be understood as a policy response to the disappearance of meaningful work in poor, economically isolated neighborhoods. 

Until we create decent jobs for poor people, mass incarceration will remain a fact of American life.  If we back away from the war on drugs we will have to find other ways to transfer poor folks from the hood to the prison and back again.  We simply don’t have enough good jobs to go around, and that means that between 15% of the population (in good times) and 30% (in bad times) will find it painfully difficult to (a) find a job, (b) maintain a marriage or (c) finance a college education.  The standard of life in poor, economically isolated neighborhoods will continue to deteriorate, law enforcement will clamp down on the resulting chaos and the prisons will remain full-to-overflowing.

Can America afford to shut down half its prisons?  Only if we are serious about creating jobs.  The free market cannot produce enough work to employ every able-bodied American and give every family a decent standard of living.  Therefore, the government must pay people to rebuild their own blighted neighborhoods.  A crazy idea, you say.  No crazier (and far less expensive)  than incarcerating over two million Americans.