By Alan Bean
Sure, we can save a pile of money by cutting back on the size of our military and our prison system; but if we don’t reinvest that money in the lives of our most desperate citizens we are only sewing the wind.
Newt Gingrich and Pat Nolan have published a surprising op-ed in the Washington Post asserting that our criminal justice system is broken and needs to be fixed.
Here’s the heart of their argument:
The Right on Crime Campaign represents a seismic shift in the legislative landscape. And it opens the way for a common-sense left-right agreement on an issue that has kept the parties apart for decades.
There is an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential. We spent $68 billion in 2010 on corrections – 300 percent more than 25 years ago. The prison population is growing 13 times faster than the general population. These facts should trouble every American.
Our prisons might be worth the current cost if the recidivism rate were not so high, but, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, half of the prisoners released this year are expected to be back in prison within three years. If our prison policies are failing half of the time, and we know that there are more humane, effective alternatives, it is time to fundamentally rethink how we treat and rehabilitate our prisoners.
We can no longer afford business as usual with prisons. The criminal justice system is broken, and conservatives must lead the way in fixing it.
Gingrich and Nolan present themselves as representatives of the recently launched Right on Crime Campaign.
For three decades, most leading conservatives have exempted the military, law enforcement and the criminal justice system from their critique of big government. In fact, national security and public safety were high on a very short list of l government’s legitimate functions. The military, law enforcement and the prison system should be privatized whenever possible, conservatives asserted, but nobody wanted to entrust national security and criminal justice entirely into private hands.
The net result was soaring military, criminal justice and prison costs. Small government conservatives knew this trend was inconsistent with their core principles, but talking tough on militarism, prisons and the death penalty helped elect conservative Republicans, so the disconnect was simply ignored.
The Right on Crime Campaign suggests that some leading conservatives are beginning to rethink this position.
Why, and why now?
There are several reasons. At the bottom of the WP op-ed, Pat Nolan is introduced as “a Republican leader of the California State Assembly from 1984 to 1988” and “a vice president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian ministry to prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families that also works on justice reform.” Prison Fellowship was founded by reformed Nixon hatchet-man, Chuck Colson. During the tough-on-crime years, Colson largely restricted his efforts to prison evangelism work, but his groups’ close contact with the prison system made it impossible to ignore widespread institutional dysfunction and routine waste of human life. Now, it appears, Colson’s group is starting to pound the prison reform drum.
Which returns us to our earlier question, why now?
Doug Berman sees this development “as a direct result of the recent election of lots of new Republican governors facing lots of overcrowded prisons and budget deficits.”
Unlike the federal government, state legislatures must balance their budgets. Texas, despite Rick Perry’s Texas exceptionalism blather, is facing a 25 billion deficit and has already made the hard decision to stop building new prisons. True, this hasn’t lowered the incarceration rate significantly, but the cost of the state prison system is beginning to drop and the state’s mental health and drug rehab systems have been improved modestly.
Card-carrying movement conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist (another Right on Crime signatory) provide much-needed political cover for Republican governors intent on reducing corrections budgets. “I know this sounds like we’re capitulating to the liberal agenda,” the argument goes, “but if Newt and Grover are on board, this ‘right on crime’ deal must be the conservative way to go.”
The collapse of public support for the war on drugs is another factor contributing to the Right on Crime phenomenon. According to a new Angus Reid poll, “Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe their country has a serious drug abuse problem, but 65 percent think the federal government’s “War on Drugs” has been a failure . . . with 63 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Independents picking the option of failure. Just 8 percent believe the anti-drug war is a success.”
The drug war is by far the largest factor driving mass incarceration. When 52% of the public favors the legalization of marijuana, the drug war has become a much tougher sell for conservatives. Small government conservatism has always had a strongly libertarian flavor and think tanks like the Cato Institute are beginning to influence mainstream conservative policy analysis.
So, what’s the deal here? Will the halcyon days of mass incarceration soon be over?
Don’t bet the farm on it.
There has always been a good reason why free market conservatives exempted law enforcement and prisons from their assault on government. The conservative movement has always been an awkward compromise between small government purists, Southern white folks, the Religious Right, corporate America, Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, and blue-collar Reagan Democrats. At least half the members of this unwieldy coalition embraced small-government rhetoric because it provided a tacitly non-racial vocabulary for venting civil rights resentment.
Southern evangelicalism evolved in a social environment dominated by, first, slavery and then Jim Crow. This explains why southern evangelicals believe in individual morality but have no use for social ethics.
This view meshes nicely with the conservative conviction that government attempts to solve social problems always make things worse.
Armed with these arguments, movement conservatives were able to slash job-creation programs, welfare payments, mental health services and affirmative action programs while allowing the infrastructure of poor, inner city neighborhoods to disintegrate, without the slightest hint of moral anxiety.
Why pump money into social programs guaranteed to make the lives of the intended beneficiaries much worse?
Since nothing could be done to better the lot of the poor; nothing should be done.
Democrats have spent the last three decades in a rearguard action designed to protect the remnants of Great Society programs. In the process, liberals have lost whatever vision for the common good they once possessed.
The war on drugs was launched to deal with the consequences of small government retrenchment. With manufacturing jobs fleeing the inner city, those with social and financial resources moved to the suburbs. The folks left behind were left to fend for themselves.
When liberal politicians appealed to the traditional American values of compassion and fairness, conservatives countered with the argument that folks were poor and uneducated by personal choice. According to this colorblind, level-playing-field logic, every American citizen had the same opportunities. If poor black folks decided (for whatever perverse reason) not to better themselves, they should be made to live with the consequences.
As Michelle Alexander has persuasively argued, the war on drugs was launched before the arrival of the crack epidemic of the mid-1980s. Drug war policies focused obsessively on desperate neighborhoods with brutal rates of unemployment. With few legitimate job prospects, a significant slice of the uneducated, poor residents of economically blighted communities gravitated to the underground economy. The war on drugs was predicated on the small-government argument that those who can’t adapt to the economic realities of the new economy Monopoly game should go to jail, should go immediately to jail, and should not pass go.
Here’s the question: if we decide we can no longer afford our vast gulag of prisons what do we intend to do about the social despair in the small towns and inner-city neighborhoods of America?
Rest assured, Newt and Grover have no answer for that question.
Crime is not the direct consequence of poverty, per se; crime is a consequence of ignorance and despair.
The only rational response to the nexus of poverty, unemployment and crime is a national jobs program modelled after the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA). Those who cannot work must be cared for. Potential workers who are sound of mind and body should be given work that is directly related to fixing the crumbling infrastructure of neglected inner-city neighborhoods and abandoned small towns across America.
Ultimately, this policy will pay for itself, but in the short-term it will be extremely expensive.
Sure, we can save a pile of money by cutting back on the size of our military and our prison system; but if we don’t reinvest that money in the lives of our most desperate citizens we are only sewing the wind.
For thirty years, poor folks have had two options presented to them: join the armed forces or go to jail. Remove both options and you better have a third alternative.
Friends of Justice 
I have some “credentials” in this area because I was not criminally charged but spent 5 months in three different county jails as a federal prisoner anyway.
One thing that has not been tried is to turn prisoners into intellectuals who have respect for the law.
Long term BOP prisons may have decent law libraries but county jails don’t. That is where practically all unsentenced prisoners are held and they are generally prisoners without private attorneys. I spent 4 months at Clear Creek Jail in Georgetown CO where about 30% of prisoners are federal holds. I can tell you for a fact that I eventually got extensive access to a room with books but that there was not a single copy of Title 18, not a single book on criminal procedure, and nothing on habeas corpus. The only law book there besides the Colorado Revised Statutes and some books on divorce was American Jurisprudence. Personally I think AJ is great but it was published in 1965 and their copy was missing the volume on motions.
We should show enough respect for prisoners to give them legal authorities. They are interested in law and have all day to read. If we convince them that we respect and abide by law, then they are more likely to learn, respect and abide by law themselves.
Prisoners need to learn to intellectualize and to respond in words.
Jail presents a huge opportunity to advance literacy that we are not using.
It is well documented in medicine that the best outcomes come when patients learn about their condition and can then help to monitor their treatment. The same should be true in criminal procedure.
Prisoners’ time is “free” and a substantial number of them can help their lawyer, help with their defense if they are only given the materials.
The Government Printing Office must still have many big web presses. They should just run them and mail prisoners personal copies of legal authorities.
Alan, thank you for your broad analysis. But, I am still having problems with the solution end of this issue. I don’t think that the Democrats and Republicans have any intent to address the “root causes” of the problem. A depression style public works program seems highly unlikely. The political establishment is in denial about the state of the American economy and keep predicting a slow recovery. This happening, in light of the fact that American labor has priced itself out of the global labor market and, industrial production is relocating overseas (China, India, Asia, etc.), a comeback in America for American labor is remote. Unemployment in the communities of color, from which the victims of “mass incarceration” come from, is far above the national average. Reducing prison populations by returning the prison populations back to their “broken communities” hardly seems to me to be a viable solution for unemployment and its consequences in communities of color. Also, the “prison industrial complex” is a giant jobs program that employs surplus labor in the rural and urban communities of the country. Closing them exacerbates the unemployment problem. In this context, the only thing that Republicans, Democrats, and those impacted by mass incarceration seem to have in common is that the status quo is no longer viable. None seem to have a vision of what do we replace this New Jim Crow system of mass incarceration of poor people of color.
Jazz: I suspect you are right on all counts. I’m not saying that Republicans are likely to embrace the solution I have outlined; I am saying that any attempt at prison reform that doesn’t address the fate of the unemployed and the disenfranchised will ultimately fail. The vast majority of prison inmates don’t make money for private industry, but many do. The central problem is that our economy doesn’t need very many unskilled and uneducated workers. That’s one reason why mass incarceration has been so popular; it provides a “solution” to the surplus population problem. Of course, in the long run, it only makes things worse. But whether or not a jobs program is realistic; any purported solution that ignores the plight of the urban poor will run against the jagged rocks of reality sooner or later.
Thanks for this article Alan, and your strong and poignant analysis.
Newt is really a smart guy, which is why it’s so unfortunate that acts like such a creation, pushing hyper partisan nonsense so often just for political gain.
With moments like this, and his teaming up with Al Sharpton on education reform he could be a powerful advocate to usher real and needed social and political change. But next week he’ll say something outrageous and patently false to further the false dichotomy left-right political wars.
But maybe common sense, and actually effective practices can win yet.
The poor, the disenfranchised, the ignorant and the marginalized have never been a target for rehabilitation by conservative pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps Republicans. Without a comprehensive re-entry strategy, we can be assured that rudderless former offenders on the streets will ultimately be blamed on progressive social activists.
If the Contract With America was all about a $4.5 million book deal and the power to live the jetset life, prison reform will be nothing if it does not inure solely to the benefit of these sound-bite wizards.
Beware Greeks bearing gifts!