The focus of the NAACP's report, Misplaced Priorities, is that government spending on prisons and incarceration is growing faster than every other category other than health care, to which it still remains a distant second. This spending, the NAACP argues, is sucking dollars away that would be better spent on education, and facilitating a vicious cycle by making residents harder to employ and local investment less attractive.
The immediate connection between education spending and spending on corrections is necessarily a direct one -- it's not clear you can improve education outcomes simply by spending money. But the report makes good recommendations about how to reduce the size of the prison system without endangering public safety -- namely by following what forward thinking states like Kansas, New York, and New Jersey have done, including getting rid of mandatory minimums, shifting to treatment options rather than prison time for drug offenses, and instituting policies that reduce parole revocations. The report is a little weak on the latter point, but the former are well taken.
The hook to the NAACP's new report on criminal justice reform is the fact that it's being introduced alongside arch-conservative Grover Norquist, and endorsed by the increasingly silly but still arch-conservative Newt Gingrich. But the real story here is that the NAACP is growing more comfortable with the role of a civil rights organization in an era where racial discrimination is fueled more by the inertia of entrenched institutional inequities than the political power of segregationists. For the national organization, that means high-profile public events and protests, and more use of empiricism to influence policy at the federal level. This report is an excellent start. Teaming with Norquist is also a nice move, reminiscent of the bipartisan influence the NAACP had when the parties themselves were more ideologically heterodox.
