newyorker | Criminal-justice reformers like to
say that if a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal
is a conservative who has served time. Nolan did not emerge from prison
any less conservative, but he says he experienced a profound
disillusionment, which has led him to play a central role in a cause
that is only now finding its moment. These days, it is hard to ignore a
rising conservative clamor to rehabilitate the criminal-justice system.
Conservatives are as quick as liberals to note that the United States, a
country with less than five per cent of the world’s population, houses
nearly twenty-five per cent of the world’s prisoners. Some 2.2 million
Americans are now incarcerated—about triple the number locked up in the
nineteen-eighties, when, in a panic over drugs and urban crime,
conservative legislators demanded tougher policies, and liberals who
feared being portrayed as weak went along with them. African-Americans
are nearly six times as likely as whites to be incarcerated, and Latinos
are more than twice as likely. More than forty per cent of released
offenders return to prison within three years.
Several
Republican Presidential candidates—Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and
Ted Cruz—have been embraced by Right on Crime, a campaign to promote
“successful, conservative solutions” to the punitive excesses of
American law and order. In February, the American Conservative Union’s
Conservative Political Action Conference, which serves as an audition
for right-wing Presidential aspirants, featured three panels on
criminal-justice reform, including one called Prosecutors Gone Wild.
Bernard Kerik, who was Rudolph Giuliani’s police commissioner and served
three years in prison for tax fraud and other crimes, now promotes an
agenda of reforms, including voting rights for ex-felons. The
libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch are donating money to
the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, to help insure
that indigent defendants get competent legal representation, and they
are co-sponsoring conferences on judicial reform with the American Civil
Liberties Union.
In
Congress and the states, conservatives and liberals have found common
ground on such issues as cutting back mandatory-minimum sentences; using
probation, treatment, and community service as alternatives to prison
for low-level crimes; raising the age of juvenile-court jurisdictions;
limiting solitary confinement; curtailing the practice of confiscating
assets; rewriting the rules of probation and parole to avoid sending
offenders back to jail on technicalities; restoring education and job
training in prisons; allowing prisoners time off for rehabilitation; and
easing the reëntry of those who have served time by expunging some
criminal records and by lowering barriers to employment, education, and
housing. As David Dagan and Steven M. Teles write, in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
“Retrenching the carceral state is becoming as orthodox on the Right as
building it was just a few short years ago.” They conclude that this
has created a “Nixon goes to China” opportunity to reverse decades of
overkill.
This conservative transformation is
often portrayed in the media as a novelty, and some progressives regard
it as a ploy to cut taxes and turn prisons over to the private
corrections industry. Yet it has deep roots and a tangle of motives, one
of which is indeed a belief that downsizing prisons promises taxpayers
some relief. (Locking up an inmate for a year can cost as much as
tuition at a good college.) But for many conservatives, Nolan says,
reducing spending is “ancillary.” “It’s human dignity that really
motivates us.”
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