Indiana is just the latest conservative leaning state to recognize the downsides to mass incarceration. Orrin Kerr writes:
Indiana's prison population has spiked in recent years, and state officials realized that they were going to have to spend about $1 billion in new prisons over the next 7 years to fit all the prisoners in the state prison system. In response, Governor [Mitch] Daniels announced a plan to study the State’s sentencing laws, together with two non-profit groups, the Pew Center on the States and the Council of State Governments Justice Center, to see if the state’s criminal sentences had become too punitive. The groups published their report, which found that the drug laws had become too draconian and “one size fits all,” and that there wasn’t enough support for substance abuse treatment. The report recommended less punitive and more nuanced sentencing laws for nonviolent drug offenses as well as better substance abuse counseling as a way to lessen the prison population and avoid having to build new prisons. Last week, Daniels endorsed the report. Now the attention will turn to translating the report’s recommendations to statutory language, and Daniels will then have to get those recommendations through the state legislature.
Reihan Salam responds by blaming over-incarceration on corrections unions, but that's simplistic, to say the least.
Waste is waste is waste. Just as teachers unions opportunistically advance ideas that serve their interests and not those of the public (the push for shrinking class sizes despite evidence that doing so dilutes the teacher talent pool is a great example), the correctional unions have been pushing for mandatory minimums and three-strikes laws for years. It's not a contradiction to get tough on crime and to get smart about how taxpayer dollars are being spent.
This is like blaming the Iraq War on Halliburton. While certainly corrections unions and private prison companies have played a role in influencing politicians to adopt "Tough on Crime policies," Republican politicians have spent a good portion of the last 50 years attacking Democrats for being soft on crime and drugs, and Democrats have responded by becoming equal partners in adopting counterproductive corrections policies.
The "Tough on Crime" movement and its associated policies -- mandatory minimums, three strikes laws, a militarized "War on Drugs" -- are fundamentally conservative in origin. They're a response to liberals' failure in attempting to address crime through social welfare policies -- Richard Nixon's "Law and Order" answer to the failure of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society." As Nixon put it during the 1968 presidential campaign, "doubling the conviction rate in this country ... would do far more to cure crime in America than quadrupling the funds for Mr. Humphrey's war on poverty." That was the argument. Conservatives won it.
While mass incarceration has reduced crime, it's now clear the diminishing returns and associated social impacts outweigh its benefits, and that there are other things we could be doing to reduce crime that don't. We can only hope that the realization that mass incarceration is counterproductive becomes as bipartisan as the "Tough on Crime" approach seems to be today, and hopefully Indiana, like Kansas, is a harbinger of that. I suppose it's ultimately a promising sign that the conservative movement's most talented writers are simply disavowing their intellectual heritage. But it's unnecessary--there's no hypocrisy for conservatives in acknowledging the movement's role in establishing "Tough on Crime" policies and agreeing that mass incarceration is a problem that needs to be solved.
