Right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools:
hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform. Is
this how progress will happen in a hyper-polarized world?
American streets are much safer today
than they were thirty years ago, and until recently most conservatives
had a simple explanation: more prison beds equal less crime. This
argument was a fulcrum of Republican politics for decades, boosting
candidates from Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush and scores more in
the states. Once elected, these Republicans (and their Democratic
imitators) built prisons on a scale that now exceeds such formidable
police states as Russia and Iran, with 3 percent of the American
population behind bars or on parole and probation.
Now that crime and the fear of victimization are down, we might
expect Republicans to take a victory lap, casting safer streets as a
vindication of their hard line. Instead, more and more conservatives are
clambering down from the prison ramparts. Take Newt Gingrich, who made a
promise of more incarceration an item of his 1994 Contract with
America. Seventeen years later, he had changed his tune. “There is an
urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population,
with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential,” Gingrich
wrote in 2011. “The criminal-justice system is broken, and conservatives
must lead the way in fixing it.”
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