Traditionally, the Republican Party has espoused a hard-line view on crime, and criminals. “Lock ‘em up, and throw away the key” has long been the “solution” proposed, and enacted, by conservative politicians. Now this traditional view is slowly being buried, as more and more right-leaning politicians see how the tough-on-crime stance has hurt, not helped, the country.
While the U.S. crime rate has been dropping, the cost of incarceration has been rising, causing fiscal conservatives to examine new ways to save taxpayers money. This approach has produced some strange bedfellows, as parties from both sides of the aisle join together to come up with a better solution to fix America’s failed criminal justice system.
One of the Right’s most vocal supporters of criminal justice reform is Grover Norquist, whom P.J. O’Rourke once described as “… Tom Paine crossed with Lee Atwater plus just a soupcon of Madame Defarge.” Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, is also heavily involved in the organization Right on Crime, the conservatives organization founded to reduce incarceration for fiscal, but, some liberals say, not necessarily humanitarian, reasons. When Norquist declares that American must do something to improve the criminal justice system, Republicans listen.
Over the past few years, Republican led states have made serious efforts to depart from the old way of dealing with criminals. According to the Economist, in the twenty year period between 1989 and 2009, Kentucky’s prison spending jumped 340%. Georgia now spends $1 billion annually on incarceration.
Kentucky’s newly nominated candidate for governor, David Williams, who also happens to be the president of the state’s senate, supported a new a bill designed to save over $422 million over a ten-year period by providing drug treatment, instead of prison, to non-violent drug abusers. Some money saved would be poured into treatment, parole and probation programs.
Two other Republican governors, Nathan Deal, of Georgia, and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, have attempted to bring about sentencing reform. Deal and Fallin are following in the footsteps of Republican governors in South Carolina and Texas, both of whom have also implemented changes in the criminal justice systems of their states, including offering alternatives to incarceration.
Texas, which many supporters of criminal justice reform have previously viewed as the toughest on the tough-on-crime states, has seen a 4.5% drop in its incarceration rate between 2007 - 2008. The drop is attributed to using funds for treatment programs, instead of building new prisons. Instead of spending $2.63 billion to build and operate prisons housing 17,000 more prisoners, the state wisely opted to spend $241 million on substance abuse treatment.
Prison Ministry Vice-president Patrick Nolan, the conservative former California legislator who spent time behind bars on charges of racketeering, once said, “We build jails for people we’re afraid of, and fill them with people we’re mad at.” While some may have once attributed this sentiment to right-wing conservatives, the Grand Old Party can now be thought of as being cautiously progressive with its criminal justice policy.
Source: The Economist 5/31/11
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