Tell the Tea Party's 'Liberty Central' That Prison Reform Matters, Too

A group founded by the spouse of a Supreme Court justice to advance individual liberty and limited government — seems like a great vehicle to end America's mass incarceration problem, right? Unfortunately, if their list of top issues is any guide, Virginia 'Ginni' Thomas' Liberty Central completely overlooks criminal justice issues and the prison-industrial complex.

Ms. Thomas made quite a stir launching Liberty Central, which the Los Angeles Times describes as "a tea-party-linked group that could test the traditional notions of political impartiality for the [high] court." Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, is a long-time conservative operative with ties to the extreme right.

As Doug Berman at Sentencing Law & Policy observes,the group's new "Founding Principles" webpage declares that Liberty Central identifies "limited government, individual liberty, free enterprise, national security, and personal responsibility" as their top principles. Those principles, too, underline the drug reform movement. Doug, for one, writes that they "greatly inform my own deep concern with the huge growth of government and restrictions on individual liberty that result from modern US criminal justice policies, especially with respect to the war on drugs and mass incarceration."

Despite Liberty Central's stated abhorrence for how government deprives individuals of liberty, the group's site makes no mention of the millions incarcerated in our expensive and ineffective criminal justice system. The nine "Hot Issues" listed on the group's new site include what Liberty Central calls "dangerous" health care reform, government spending and how our children are being raised to "disdain free enterprise," whatever that means. But what about government over-spending on a prison system that actually deprives individuals of liberty — most of them for non-violent offenses?

Liberty Central's failure to even mention the criminal justice system — the source of so much wasteful government spending — is revealing. Such an oversight suggests that Liberty Central's commitment to anti-government principles is more rhetoric than principle. Like the originalist theory of constitutional interpretation espoused by Justice Thomas and other far-right jurists, it appears that when it comes to traditionally progressive issues like prison reform, Liberty Central's devotion to limited government is a commitment that gets conveniently set aside.

But conservatives do exist who recognize that our nation's boneheaded "tough-on-crime" policies are inconsistent with conservative principles. Bold Republicans like Steve Cooley — a candidate for California's Attorney General — and Edwin Meese III, U.S. Attorney General under President Reagan, deserve credit for sticking to their dedication to small government and endorsing criminal justice reform. Sadly, Ginni Thomas found no such courage when she wrote Liberty Central's lobbying platform.

Let's help Ginni Thomas and Liberty Central find that courage. Tell them that endorsing criminal justice reforms — like abolishing mandatory minimum sentences, ending the War on Drugs, abandoning the powder/crack cocaine sentencing disparity and leaving the death penalty for dead — would reduce government spending. In other words, criminal justice reform is an idea libertarians at Liberty Central should be able to get behind. If they are willing to stick to their principles, that is. As Change.org's Te-Ping Chen wrote recently, "Criminal justice reform is good policy, no matter the cut of your political cloth."

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