The problem with Slaughter's vision, which I generally found myself in enthusiastic agreement with, is that the only one I trust to carry it out is, well, Slaughter. And possibly me. It is not a durable framework that could withstand the ascension of another Bush administration. Indeed, while her interpretation of the values that guide America would lead to a very different foreign policy than that carried out by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, her focus on the ideals animating our foreign policy, rather than the consequences of our actions abroad, leaves a vessel that could easily be filled with noxious policies ...Read the whole thing here. Also, Beth Schwartzapfel reports on the increasing role played by former inmates in correctional reform policy:To convince the country that we need a foreign policy that serves those concepts is to cede the ground to those with the most compellingly idealistic narrative. Those concepts do not, themselves, suggest a foreign policy. While Slaughter states that democratization by force is a "contradiction in terms," it is the acceptance of idealism as a viable rhetorical basis for foreign policy that will allow the next set of overconfident liberalizers to wrap their wars in an agreeably gauzy cloud of paeans to democracy and calls for liberty. When the conversation rests on who is more faithful to liberty, and democracy, and tolerance, those cautioning restraint will always be at a disadvantage to those dreamily promising utopias.
We have seen this before: The language of idealism enabled what my friend Chris Hayes refers to as the "moral blackmail" of the Iraq war: How could anyone who professes to believe in freedom and democracy refuse to devote a couple of tax dollars to freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny? And many of the after-the-fact apologetics for the disaster are no better. We get Roger Cohen explaining that "[t]otalitarian hell -- malign stability -- holds no hope. Violent instability is unacceptable but not hopeless." Hope may not be a plan, but it is a value. And are you really against hope for the oppressed?
What I want is not a foreign policy vision that builds from a foundation of values, but from one of consequences. Whether a policy is concordant with America's view of itself is less important than its likely outcomes.
The U.S. prison system is in the midst of a unique historical moment. Federal "Truth in Sentencing" laws and mandatory minimums have recently turned 20, and the stringent state laws which followed suit -- California's 1994 'three strikes' law, for instance -- are coming of age, such that the first generation of people who have served 10- and 20-year sentences under these laws are re-joining their communities in record numbers. They're arriving home at a time of increasing political consciousness about incarceration -- the term "prison-industrial complex" was coined only a decade ago, by activist and historian Mike Davis in a 1995 article in The Nation -- as well as a growing awareness on both sides of the political spectrum that the current system is not sustainable. More than 2 million people are incarcerated in U.S. jails and prisons. If you include people on probation and parole, that number jumps to over 7 million, or 1 in every 32 adults, according to the Bureau for Justice Statistics. At least 95 percent of them will come back home: 1700 people a day are released from state and federal prison.Take a look. And comment on the articles.The staggering numbers of people being released are, at least in part, at the root of this new trend towards a larger role for formerly incarcerated people in the criminal justice policy discussion. In 1999, Jeremy Travis was director of the National Institute of Justice when then-Attorney General Janet Reno asked him what was happening to all the people coming out of prison. The answer was Travis's 2005 book, But They All Come Back, and a shift in the conversation from its previous focus, rehabilitation to the new buzz-word: re-entry.
--The Editors