An argument I had with the Washington Examiner's J.P. Friere about conservatives and crime prompted this blog post from Tim Carney:
On Twitter, our J.P. Freire and the American Prospect's Adam Serwer had a little spat today about conservatives and overcriminalization. Serwer had made what I thought was a good blog post, sort of applauding the idea of Christian conservative audiences hearing arguments about overcriminalization.
But on Twitter, Serwer repeatedly characterized the "conservative approach to crime" and claimed the "conservative record on crime is clear and easy to evaluate," dismissing Freire's objections that such a record might b emore complex than he thinks because, well, different conservatives have different views.
Carney goes on to give an example where he was asked to come on TV and represent a "conservative viewpoint" he didn't actually hold. Obviously that's silly. And part of the disagreement here may just be that Freire and Carney represent a younger generation of conservatives that don't have the same ideological commitments to this issue.
The ideology that lead to the U.S. having a more than $50 billion prison system that imprisons about 1 out of every 100 Americans though, is anything but "faceless." When I say "conservative approach to crime," I'm talking about the actual record of governance of presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush--add Bill Clinton and you've got a veritable Mount Rushmore for the War on Drugs. Their approach to crime was based on the belief, articulated by conservative intellectuals like James Q. Wilson and Gary Becker, that crime was not the result of poverty but of criminals making a rational decision that the likelihood of being punished was lower than the benefit gained from offending. The solution was harsh punishment--not government programs to alleviate poverty. The former, in their view, had already clearly failed. Democrats learned their lesson from the shellacking Bush gave Michael Dukakis in 1988, and when Clinton ran against the elder Bush in 1992, he made a concerted effort to outflank him on crime--going as far to personally attend the execution of Ricky Ray Rector.
Crime isn't as big of an issue now as it used to be, but the high crime rates of previous decades, as well as overblown fears associated with drug use, were leveraged to devastating effect against liberalism and the political coalition of the Democratic Party. Crime was a proxy for the eternal ideological argument between liberals and conservatives about the merits of government intervention. When Charles Krauthammer wrote that crack was creating a "bio-underclass," he wasn't simply passing on a warning about the dangers of drug use that would later turn out to be nonsense. He was trying to say that drugs had created a group of people who would be beyond the scope of any conceivable government aid, because drugs had made them biologically inferior.
That more elements of the conservative movement are beginning to get excited about corrections reform, and some have been for years, doesn't change the history of mass incarceration. Democrats have been full partners in instituting "tough on crime" policies, but that's because Republicans won the argument. Mass incarceration lead to lower crime, the associated consequences of which are now causing conservatives to rethink their approach. Ideas have consequences, and the presence of a few conservative dissenters and the acquiescence of Democrats doesn't mean the ideas and policies that lead to the U.S. imprisoning about 1% of its population didn't come out of the conservative movement.
I don't think it's reductive to refer to the actual record of Republican governance as the "conservative approach to crime" because a small minority may have disagreed at the time and many are starting to now. It makes more sense to identify those dissenters as individual exceptions and acknowledge a growing and important shift in how conservatives look at the issue, than it does to avoid attributing the "tough on crime" approach to the conservative movement and pretend we have no idea how we ended up here.
Look, I'm happy that conservatives are starting to take mass incarceration seriously as a problem. It's the only way enough people are going to care about it enough to make a difference. But conservatives can't disown "tough on crime" anymore than liberals can disown the Great Society.
