My colleague Paul Waldman lashes Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels for being a proponent of harsh drug laws in the 1980s despite receiving, as a Princeton student, the kind of mild sanctions the average white kid of means usually gets for drug possession:
But his logic seems be this: When the police found me with a huge amount of drugs, I was given a slap on the wrist, and I then went on to a productive life. Which shows that kids today who did what I did ought to have to leave school and get chucked in jail with murderers and rapists. Perhaps Daniels has changed his position on this issue since 1989 -- lots of other people have. But it's worth asking, particularly since he's probably going to run for president, if not next year then in 2016.
Luckily for the state of Indiana, Daniels has changed. Last year he commissioned a study from the Justice Center and the Pew Center on the States, two forward-minded think tanks on the subject of criminal justice reform, that recommended changes to Indiana's criminal justice system in order to reduce the size of the prison population and its cost to the state. Indiana's prison population had grown by 48 percent between 2000 and 2008. The report recommended the use of graduated sanctions, community supervision, dispensing with the state's more draconian penalties for certain kinds of crimes (particularly low-level and nonviolent drug offenses), and giving judges more discretion in sentencing. Daniels endorsed its findings.
In short, pretty promising stuff. Unfortunately, he's been stymied by his own party, and the bill has been watered down by legislators who accused Daniels of trying to save money by letting dangerous people out onto the street. That's disappointing and probably inevitable, but also potentially a consequence of emphasizing mostly the monetary, rather than moral and social costs, of mass incarceration to the state of Indiana.
Anyway, the point is in that, despite Daniels jumping on the tough on crime bandwagon back in the 1980s, he's part of a very positive vanguard of criminal justice reform on the right. Ultimately, what he's trying to do in Indiana could have a much greater impact on mass incarceration, and on the ability of the people to lead productive lives post-incarceration, than his own personal hypocrisy from 20 years ago. I hope more of his former drug warriors follow his lead.
