And it’s not just the Left’s sweeping indictment of our system that’s unappealing to conservatives. Many of the so-called reforms offered by progressives seem more concerned with lowering the incarceration rate than lowering the actual crime rate.
.. Respect for the equal dignity of all human life—no matter how small or weak—and for the redemptive capacity of all sinners—no matter how calloused—is the foundation for everything that conservatives stand for. Our approach to policing and punishment should be no different.
.. Just as the government has the power to punish those who break the law, it has a corresponding duty to use its coercive powers responsibly—to sentence offenders on an individualized basis and no longer than necessary.
.. The real problem today is not simply that penalties are too harsh or sentences too long—though in many cases they are. The problem is that, over the past several decades, we have industrialized and bureaucratized our criminal, judicial, and penal systems. Which is to say, we’ve turned them into large, unaccountable, short-sighted, self-interested institutions that often treat offenders as statistical units, instead of human beings.
.. And we have a penal system that isolates offenders from the only people and responsibilities in their life that have the power to facilitate true rehabilitation and redemption.
.. With more than 2 million Americans behind bars today, and one in every 28 American children with an incarcerated parent, the figures are truly startling.
.. All told, between 1960 and 1991 violent crime rates increased by a factor of four, and homicide rates almost doubled across the country.
.. Yet the traditional penitentiary approach to punishment severs the offender’s ties to their family and work life. To make matters worse, prison doesn’t just isolate offenders from networks of trust—it plugs them into networks of distrust.
.. This history shows that criminal justice reform can be, and traditionally has been, a conservative project that accomplishes conservative goals—of balancing retribution and rehabilitation, justice and mercy, the rights of victims and of perpetrators.
.. But the reality is that almost every offender who goes to prison will one day get out. We do ourselves a disservice when an offender’s punishment does more to promote criminality than penitence.
The Biggest Questions Awaiting the Supreme Court
The legal principle of “one person, one vote” got its fullest expression in the 1964 case Reynolds v. Sims, which ruled that state legislative districts must contain roughly equal numbers of people. Before then, district populations varied widely, an intentional practice that gave more power to rural white voters than those in the more diverse cities.
The Second Amendment is a Gun Control Amendment
if the Founders hadn’t wanted guns to be regulated, and thoroughly, they would not have put the phrase “well regulated” in the amendment. (A quick thought experiment: What if those words were not in the preamble to the amendment and a gun-sanity group wanted to insert them? Would the National Rifle Association be for or against this change? It’s obvious, isn’t it?)
The Prison Problem
Leon Neyfakh emphasized that if you released every drug offender from state prison today, you’d reduce the population only to 1.2 million from 1.5 million.
.. So what does explain it? Pfaff’s theory is that it’s the prosecutors. District attorneys and their assistants have gotten a lot more aggressive in bringing felony charges. Twenty years ago they brought felony charges against about one in three arrestees. Now it’s something like two in three. That produces a lot more plea bargains and a lot more prison terms.
.. Additionally, prosecutors are usually paid by the county but prisons by the state, so prosecutors tend not to have to worry about the financial costs of what they do.
.. Some politicians and activists suggest that solving this problem will be easy — just release the pot smokers and the low-level dealers. In reality, reducing mass incarceration means releasing a lot of once-violent offenders. That may be the right thing to do in individual cases, but it’s a knotty problem.