Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration
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AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE PRISON BREAK: WHY CONSERVATIVES TURNED AGAINST MASS INCARCERATION INTRODUCTION AND MODERATOR: SALLY SATEL, AEI PANEL DISCUSSION PANELISTS: HEATHER MACDONALD, MANHATTAN INSTITUTE; HAROLD POLLACK, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO; VIKRANT REDDY, CHARLES KOCH INSTITUTE; STEVEN TELES, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2016 EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/prison-break-why-conservatives-turned- against-mass-incarceration/ TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM SALLY SATEL: Welcome everybody. My name is Sally Satel. I’m a resident scholar at AEI, and very excited today to have our book panel on a fascinating book by Steve Teles and his coauthor, who will join us for Q&A later, David Daga called “Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned against Mass Incarceration.” The book is about the embrace of prison reform by the right and the story really of what Steve and David call trans-partisanship, not quite the same as bipartisanship, as they’ll explain, and how that’s led to new agreements and new legislation regarding who and how to imprison. Also, seductively, the book touches on how to generate policy breakthroughs in a time of a great political polarization — something like we have today. Clearly, it’s a very timely issue of legislation on sentencing reform is winding its way through — tumultuously, through the Hill. And very recently, in fact, FBI Director James Comey made comments that, frankly, strike me as quite accurate but are certainly inflammatory, about the rising crime rates. So all of that’s going on in the backdrop. So today we’re going to start with a presentation by Steve on the book’s major themes, the dynamics of the right on crime movement. Steve is a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, also a fellow at the New America Foundation, authored several books, and is the editor of the Oxford University Press Books series on contemporary American political development. He just did a great Bloggingheads with Glenn Loury on “Prison Break.” The book officially comes out June 1st, although we have some for sale here. And when it comes out, I know there will be fantastic reviews but, right now, there aren’t any yet because of that, otherwise I would tell you about them immediately. But I found the book to be immensely insightful, with lessons that go well beyond criminal justice reform. And I should say these are all very abbreviated biographies I’m giving. You can find much longer credentials online or — I guess you didn’t get a packet but whatever information you have. David Dagan is a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins and Steve’s coauthor. One of his current projects include a study of capital punishment in advanced democracies. And, as I said, he’ll join us for the Q&A. That’s his seat. And then, responding to Steve and, implicitly, David, our three esteemed social scholars who have given a lot of thought to diagnosing and improving our criminal justice system. And they are in order Vikrant Reddy, who is a senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute. Before that, he spent nearly five years at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and had the great foresight to be present at the creation literally of the Right on Crime movement. He was the original manager of that initiative. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Gina M. Benavides of the 13th Court of Appeals in Texas. Harold Pollack is an old friend who puts science in social science. He is the Helen Ross professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, also co-director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Published widely in academic and popular venues on the interface between poverty policy and public health. And Heather MacDonald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a prolific contributor, as many people know, to the City Journal and the Wall Street Journal on topics including higher education, immigration, race relations and policing, which makes her one of the bravest people in the United States. Has a new book coming out next month called The War on Cops and today has a wonderful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that everyone should read. So everyone will speak. We’ll have Q&A and then there are books. Thank you all. Steve. STEVEN TELES: All right. Well, thank you so much, Sally, for inviting me to do this and for — as good a panel as I could ever hope for and in some ways the most terrifying. I think you know what I’m talking about. So I did want to recognize David Dagan, who’s my full co-author in the book. In fact, it has his name first so just to recognize that we should say Dagan and Teles when we talk about the book. So, also, I should say even — I even have like long-lost graduate students who like showed up for this, which is wonderful. So to start out with, I want to kind of put you in a way-back machine. Again, some of you, the younger of you were not even born when I started college in Washington, DC, in 1986. Nineteen eighty-six was also the date, the year that the overdose death of basketball star Len Bias sent Washington into a full-blown drug panic. At the time, Newt Gingrich, a Georgia congressman, was circulating a memo calling for an assault on illegal narcotics on the scale of World War II, literally on the scale of World War II, quote, “A decisive, all-out effort to destroy the underground drug empire.” You can see some elements of Newt Gingrich’s rhetorical style have maintained some stability. “An incremental approach,” Gingrich said, “such as the gradual American escalation in Vietnam would be doomed to failure. Americans would not tolerate another long grind. They would back the drug war only if it was massive and swift, aiming at victory within three years.” Hard even to imagine what that would constitute. His conclusion, quote, “We must focus the total resources necessary to win a decisive victory. One too many won’t be a big waste and one too few will lead to defeat.” This gives you a sense of the kind of rhetoric that was circulating back in 1986. Gingrich’s close ally, Grover Norquist also saw the political potential in waging the crime war. As the Anti-Tanks Act was argued in 1993, the collapse of the Soviet Union had removed a threat that led Americans to crave tough leadership, a key Republican advantage. But Norquist argued as the worldwide struggle against Soviet Imperialism faded, another issue began to emerge that might well replace it in the conservative arsenal — crime. Just as Democrats had been unable to stand up to the Soviets, Norquist wrote they were uncapable of taking a, quote, “Sensible stand on stiff sentencing and more prisons.” Today’s conservative positions could not be more different. Norquist now, quite publicly says that conservatives can no longer afford to direct their critique of government only at their traditional targets. Quote, “Spending more in education doesn’t necessarily get you more education. We know that. That’s obvious. Well, that’s also true about national defense. That’s also true about criminal justice and fighting crime.” At the same time, Gingrich now 25 years removed from his drug war memo was also striking a decidedly new tone. Quote, “There’s an urgent need to address the astronomical growth in the prison population with the huge cost in dollars in lost human potential,” he declared in 2011. The criminal justice system is broken and conservatives must take the lead in fixing it. Activists like Norquist and Gingrich have decided that caging Americans should become a solution of last resort, not the default approach to crime. Stiff sentencing and more prisons has turned into smart sentencing and less incarceration. Conservatives once treated prisons as exempt from their critique of big government. They fell over themselves to defend prison guards and wardens, stripped out services for prisoners and took their cues on sentencing policy from prosecutors. Many of these same conservatives and their successors are now lining up to challenge the people who run prisons and express sympathy for those behind bars. Most important, a large number of conservative states have started to rethink their scale of incarceration — Georgia, Texas, Mississippi, even Alabama. The sluggishness of reform in Congress is now the outlier. The subject of our book, simply put, is how did this shift happen? How did the lead conservatives like Gingrich and Norquist change their tone? How did the reddest of red states moved from jacking up their prison numbers to cutting them down? And, more generally, how do parties change position as a general manner and might there be other opportunities for left-right cooperation in our polarized times? So how did we get into this position in the first place? How did we get into the scale of what some call mass incarceration? Well, the growth of incarceration certainly seems to have generated strong path-dependent dynamics; that is, initial moves toward increasing incarceration only made it easier to keep going further. On this, left authors like Michelle Alexander have gotten it right. What are some of those dynamics? Well, the first thing is politicians learned how to use crime to get elected, right? Once they started building more prisons and then running one having built more prisons and running against their opponents for not putting enough people behind bars, that got sort of hard- wired into how conservatives started to run for office, to the point where political consultants would simply automatically sort of fit that into the box.