A Former Law-And-Order Conservative Takes a Lead on Criminal-Justice Reform

For Immediate Release: June 22, 2015 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Adrea Piazza, (212) 286-4255 A Former Law-and-Order Conservative Takes a Lead on Criminal-Justice Reform In the June 29, 2015, issue of The New Yorker, in “Prison Revolt” (p. 22), Bill Keller examines how Patrick J. Nolan, a former staunch law- and-order Republican state assemblyman, became a crusader for criminal-justice reform. In 1993, Nolan, then the leader of the Republican minority in California’s state assembly, was indicted on six counts, including racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, and money laundering, in con- nection with a nineteen-eighties F.B.I. bribery sting. After calculating the lengthy prison sentence he risked if his case went to trial, Nolan quit his seat and admitted to one felony count of racketeering in exchange for a sentence of thirty-three months. “Nolan did not emerge from prison any less conservative, but he says he experienced a profound disillusionment, which has led him to play a central role in a cause that is only now finding its moment,” Keller writes. Since his release from prison in 1996, Nolan, who today is the director of the American Conservative Union Foundation’s Center for Criminal Justice Reform, has been instrumental in pulling together different factions of conservatism on issues rele- vant to the cause. “Our rhetoric helped grow the climate in which the government could overreach,” Nolan says about the “war on drugs” and the ensuing explosion in the prison population. “Prison became the default choice when it should be the last resort. I guess I’m somewhat de- fensive, because a lot of liberals say that this is a way of making up for the wrong things we did. I think that both hands were on the knife.” Nolan is hopeful about the bipartisan efforts, though Keller notes that there is a tendency, on both sides of the aisle, to make ending mass incarcera- tion seem easier than it is. There are areas—like gun control, the legalization of drugs, and the death penalty—where the two sides cannot come to a consensus. However, if the bipartisan movement can accomplish the things it agrees on, Nolan has a wish list of additional reforms that he will pitch to conservatives. In May, he was jubilant to see Nebraska become the first conservative state in four decades to do away with the death penalty. “I think the Nebraska vote is a pivot point,” he e-mailed Keller. “You can’t get more red than Nebraska, and the cooperation of flinty conservatives and urban blacks was unstoppable. I think they really enjoyed working together and finding common ground. That is the experience that I have had as well.” Why the Rise of Green Energy Makes Utility Companies Nervous In “Power to the People” (p. 48), Bill McKibben explores the complicated relationship between electric-utility companies and alternative energy: a pairing that, while environmentally necessary, is not yet harmonious. By next year, solar will be the fastest-growing new source of energy in the country, approaching half of new capacity. Its price has dropped ninety-nine per cent in the past four decades; it now pro- duces power nearly as cheaply as coal or gas. “And because it’s a technology, rather than a fuel, the price should continue to fall, as it has for cell phones,” McKibben writes. But many utilities see residential solar power as an existential threat, with some actively trying to thwart installation efforts by imposing fees that dissuade customers from straying from the grid. Sci- entists insist that in order to forestall global warming we need to quickly change the way we power our lives. For average Americans, the biggest source of carbon emissions is their home. The utilities’ help is crucial in making the transition. According to McKibben, a fair amount of academic research suggests that solar customers save utilities as much money as they cost them, by shaving peak demand and by moving power generation closer to clients, which reduces the electricity lost on power lines. He speaks to leading experts on both sides of the issue, including Mary Powell, the C.E.O. of Green Mountain Power, Vermont’s main electric utility and the only one in the United States that was ready to sell and install the new home battery introduced by Tesla pioneer Elon Musk on the day that it became available. He also speaks to Lyndon Rive, Musk’s cousin and the co-founder and C.E.O. of Arizona-based Solar City, the biggest and the fastest-growing installer of rooftop solar in the country. Rive tells McKibben that his company has faced a crippling amount of pushback from utility companies—both in the marketplace and in the state government. McKibben notes that most utilities are neither as innovative as Vermont’s nor as scared as Arizo- na’s; most are simply waiting for guidance. “There are no thirty-year-old C.E.O.s of electric utilities, no Zuckerbergs,” David Crane, the C.E.O. of NRG, the country’s biggest provider of inde- pendent power, says. “You have to pay your dues, come up through the ranks. You become C.E.O. BLITT BARRY when you have five years, max, left. Some of them are just not worrying about ten, fifteen years in the future.” Technological change will fun- damentally transform the power industry. The question is whether that transformation can happen fast enough to matter, either for the survival of the utilities or, more important, for the preservation of the climate. Matteo Renzi Is on a Mission to Remake Italy In “The Demolition Man” (p. 36), Jane Kramer, through a series of in-depth interviews with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, examines his ambitious plans for his country’s future. According to Kramer, there is no doubt that Renzi—who, at thirty-nine, is the youngest Prime Minister in Italy’s history—wants to save the country from itself, or that he considers himself the only person who can do that. His enemies call him il rottamatore, the demolition man. Renzi tells Kramer he agrees with the moniker. “I’m the scrapper,” he says, adding, “I’m cleaning up the swamp.” He means the waste, the deadly bureaucracy, the notoriously padded ranks of Italy’s public administration, the unemployment rate now at forty per cent among the country’s youth, the culture of cronyism, and the casual everyday criminality, among other issues. In the time since Renzi was elected last year, he and his youthful cabinet have been striving to effect substantial change. He has been working closely with Angela Merkel—Kramer notes that the pair are “the European Union’s odd couple”—and is seeking to fund sweeping infrastructural, technological, and economic innovations in order to create new jobs and generate enough investment and enthusiasm to put Italy, the third-largest economy in the euro zone, back into what he calls the “European conversation.” Italians “love their past, their present, but they need a vision and an explanation of their future—in the possibility of a future,” Renzi tells Kramer, adding, “The mentality of Italy has to change, because reforms aren’t possible without everybody’s participation.” Franco Bernabe, the chairman of the Italian financial-advisory boutique FB Group, tells Kramer that Renzi, who was formerly the mayor of Florence, “is a pure politician, one of the toughest I’ve seen in years.” He continues: “He’s not very deep intellectually, but he has a fantastic ability to take up and absorb good ideas. He had only local experience when he came to Rome, but he already had a European agenda, he understood completely the problems of Italy, and he could get that message across.” At the begin- ning of this year, Italy’s sovereign debt—moneys owed by the state to all public and private lenders—was 2.16 trillion euros. According to Kramer, none of his other reforms will mean much unless he can turn around the fiscal and economic crises he inherited. “This year, I will change Italy or change jobs,” Renzi says. Elizabeth Streb’s Daredevil Dances In “Rough and Tumble” (p. 48), Alec Wilkinson profiles the radical choreographer Elizabeth Streb, founder of the Extreme Action dance method. “Streb’s dances don’t tell stories; they aren’t made to be beautiful or to illustrate an emotion, an event, or a conceit,” Wilkinson writes. “They mean what they appear to mean, and they aren’t set to music.” Streb, who has won a MacArthur award and has been a Guggen- heim Fellow, tells Wilkinson that music “is the enemy of dance.” Her work, which represents the pursuit of what Streb calls a “real move,” such as a fall, in which dancers would hurt themselves trying to stop, has been seen all over the world. Streb is sixty-five, and has been retired from dancing since 1998, but there is nothing she asks her dancers to do that she hasn’t done herself, or wouldn’t do. “I put in my thirty years,” she tells Wilkinson. “I don’t want to say I have a completely broken body, because I’m still walking and talking, but I am the person who has won twenty wars, and I am now sending you out there, and, live or die, it’s time to fly. I am rough like that, and I don’t apologize.” Critics who aren’t sympathetic to Streb’s methods or don’t understand them usually conclude that her dances are made of feats and tricks.

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