David Dagan and Steven M. Teles, Washington Monthly - American streets are much safer today
than they were thirty years ago, and until recently most conservatives
had a simple explanation: more prison beds equal less crime. This
argument was a fulcrum of Republican politics for decades, boosting
candidates from Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush and scores more in
the states...
Now that crime and the fear of victimization are down, we might
expect Republicans to take a victory lap, casting safer streets as a
vindication of their hard line. Instead, more and more conservatives are
clambering down from the prison ramparts. Take Newt Gingrich, who made a
promise of more incarceration an item of his 1994 Contract with
America. Seventeen years later, he had changed his tune. “There is an
urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population,
with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential,” Gingrich
wrote in 2011. “The criminal-justice system is broken, and conservatives
must lead the way in fixing it.”
None of Gingrich’s rivals in the vicious Republican presidential
primary exploited these statements. If anything, his position is
approaching party orthodoxy. The 2012 Republican platform declares,
“Prisons should do more than punish; they should attempt to rehabilitate
and institute proven prisoner reentry systems to reduce recidivism and
future victimization.” What’s more, a rogue’s gallery of conservative
crime warriors have joined Gingrich’s call for Americans to rethink
their incarceration reflex. They include Ed Meese, Asa Hutchinson,
William Bennett—even the now-infamous American Legislative Exchange
Council. Most importantly, more than a dozen states have launched
serious criminal justice reform efforts in recent years, with
conservatives often in the lead.
Skeptics might conclude that conservatives are only rethinking
criminal justice because lockups have become too expensive. But whether
prison costs too much depends on what you think of incarceration’s
benefits. Change is coming to criminal justice because an alliance of
evangelicals and libertarians have put those benefits on trial.
Discovering that the nation’s prison growth is morally objectionable by
their own, conservative standards, they are beginning to attack it—and
may succeed where liberals, working the issue on their own, have, so
far, failed.
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1 comment:
Remember when the hot tip was privatization of jails & prisons? It defied logic that a corporation could turn a profit while managing a city or county lockup for less money than a non-profit branch of government could, but that was the pitch.
Oh yeah, they'd use modern, streamlined methods to eliminate waste and inefficiency. Not only could a jail run for less, but it could become a better jail in the process! That would be a win-win for everyone, wouldn't it?
Until we found out that when you charge by the inmate per day and make a habit of delaying an end of sentence release you can charge an extra day... Or gin up some alleged infraction that gets an inmate an extra week in lockup... Or hire the absolute bottom of the barrel and call them guards so that when someone has an epileptic seizure they have no clue what happened until the autopsy.
Never was a good idea for neo-cons to set social policy, especially when it comes to punishment and rehabilitation. They're strong on the former but tone deaf on the latter.
Unless it's a drug issue with a well-known radio talk show host gone deaf. They can buy all the counseling they need with no threat of incarceration because, well because they don't look like a criminal. You know... "Ghetto".
As for the rest of us? Not so much... Cop drops a gun or a dime bag on you and you're off the streets for a while. And if the cop does it right they get an atta'boy for the clean bust....
God Bless America and Check Book Justice!
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