Conservative Activists to the GOP: We Don't Need More Prisons

For a minute, I thought maybe I'd accidentally walked into the Institute for Policy Studies and was listening to a bunch of Chomsky-quoting – but rather conservatively dressed – lefties.

“Conservatives to date have completely missed the boat on criminal justice,” said one panelist. “All [the right] has ever talked about is building more prisons and throwing in the offender and locking him up and throwing away the key.”

Looking around only confirmed my suspicions: over there were the good folks from Families Against Mandatory Minimums, over there a guy from the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance. And the panelists – the panelists! – talking about prisoners almost as if they were … people, and that we were putting entirely too many of them behind bars for things that shouldn't even be crimes.

Then I remembered no do-gooding lefty think tank would have the money to outfit a room with a half-dozen 50” HDTVs – and I looked at the panelists' name tags. That conservative-bashing hippie? Brooke Rollins, president of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, and one of a group of right-wingers – including former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese and, gulp, Newt Gingrich – that has come to believe the “tough on crime” mentality responsible for roughly 2.4 million Americans being incarcerated doesn't make us any safer. And not only that: it costs a whole lot of money, “second only to Medicaid in the increase in spending in the last number of years in the states,” as Rollins pointed out.

Rollins was part of a panel assembled to mark the launch of the Right on Crime campaign, which is demanding that the Republicans who just took over the House of Representatives pursue more “cost-effective approaches” to public safety than the current love affair with incarceration, with organizers pointing out that prisons “are not the solution for every type of offender. And in some instances, they have the unintended consequence of hardening nonviolent, low-risk offenders – making them a greater risk to the public than when they entered.” Though somewhat lacking in details, the group plans to assist both state and national efforts to enact reform by showing conservatives too believe the system today has gotten out of hand. But first and foremost, they're aiming to reframe the debate.

Criminal justice has typically been treated as a partisan issue, with Republicans attacking Democrats as being soft on crime -- and Democrats overcompensating by passing the toughest, most draconian bills they could find, like the 1986 law that treated crack cocaine possession 100 times as harshly as powder cocaine (recently somewhat reduced), disproportionately imprisoning the poor and minorities. But the

But some fiscal conservatives say they've seen the light -- and that they're just sorry it took so damn long.

“Shame on us for being late,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, which hosted the campaign kickoff in Washington, DC. “The old paradigm has broken down. What's happening isn't working – and it's expensive.” Indeed, earlier this year the Obama administration requested nearly $7 billion for the federal Bureau of Prisons. In California, meanwhile, the state's ongoing budget crisis has been driven in large part by the massive expansion in its prison population -- driven largely by the federally subsidized war on drugs -- to the point that it now spends 10 percent of its general fund on incarceration, compared to 7 percent on education.

Pat Nolan of Prison Fellowship Ministries, which works to rehabilitate the incarcerated, described the change in the way the conservative, activist right views the criminal justice system as a “seismic shift” – and explained how we got to a point where one out of every hundred Americans is behind bars. “First of all, we criminalize a lot of activities that frankly [are] not inherently bad, they're just bad because the government says they don't like it,” Nolan said. “That's very different from the crimes that traditionally people have viewed in all societies as crime, as morally reprehensible: murder, rape, robbery, arson.”

And for conservatives who preach the virtues of low taxes and rugged individualism, Nolan said it's about time they extend their critique of government overreach to the criminal justice system. “The greatest power we give government is the ability to take away somebody's freedom: to lock them up and control their life,” Nolan said. “That's a very serious sanction, and traditionally in society it's reserved for those things that are evil, that are morally reprehensible, not just a judgment call that 'this would be good for society.'”

“It's too easy to demagogue crime issues,” added David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union and a major figure on the activist right, having worked on the Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidential campaigns. “The fact is that with the proliferation of laws, with the overcriminalization of things that can be better handled elsewhere, most citizens should be concerned about the criminal justice system as it could affect them and the people that they know and love.”

But it's not just the focus on criminalizing behaviors they personally don't like that conservatives need to move away from, Keene said, it's the notion that prison should only be about punishment, not rehabilitation. “We can't lock people up forever,” he noted, “and they ultimately come back onto the street. And if we haven't done anything to help them change their ways, then all we're doing is postponing a problem until they're released.”

If Republicans are serious about cutting spending -- the presidency of George W. Bush and the rubber-stamping, budget-busting behavior of the GOP Congress during the 2000s puts the party leadership's claims in serious doubt -- they would do well to do consider cuts to the nation's bloated prison rolls. Incarcerating people costs a ton of money and it destroys a hell of a lot of lives, all for a false sense of security. Yeah, Nancy Grace and her fellow blowhards might raise hell, but as speakers at the Right on Crime campaign launch pointed out, what're they gonna say -- that Newt Gingrich and Ed Meese are soft on crime?

Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk