June 29, 2015 Issue Prison Revolt: A former law-and-order conservative takes a lead on criminal-justice reform. By Bill Keller Patrick J. Nolan’s own experience led him to challenge decades of conservative policy. Illustration by Stanley Chow n the mid-nineteen-eighties, shortly after the convictions of six members of the House of Representatives and one senator in the IF.B.I. bribery sting code-named Abscam, one of the bureau’s anticorruption units turned its attention to the California legislature, where an informant had reported that lawmakers were on the take. Agents posing as representatives of a shrimp-processing company announced plans to build a plant near Sacramento, provided that a state-loan guarantee could be procured. They offered to reward legislators who would help secure their financing. The operation, inevitably, was known as Shrimpscam. Patrick J. Nolan, an earnest law-and-order conservative representing Glendale and Burbank, was the leader of the Republican minority in the assembly. He had already voted for a bill making the company eligible for the guarantee, but Governor George Deukmejian, who was aware of the sting, had vetoed it. Now one of the agents wanted to meet Nolan to entice him to intercede with Deukmejian. On June 29, 1988, Nolan and a legislative aide, Karin Watson, arrived at a bugged suite in the Sacramento Hyatt Regency, across from the Capitol. They declined the agent’s offer of champagne (it was not yet noon) in favor of Diet Pepsi, admired the view, engaged in some awkward small talk, and left twenty minutes later, with two five-thousand-dollar checks. One was made out to a Republican campaign committee. The other was left blank, apparently to see if Nolan would pocket the money. He filled in the name of a Party PAC. Pat Nolan now lives outside today like an outtake from “Ameri- a dozen indictments, but it took five Washington, D.C., in Leesburg, can Hustle,” is explicitly trans- years, and Karin Watson’s coöper- Virginia. Recently, he rummaged in actional, but the agent presses for ation, for prosecutors to file charges his basement for a copy of the F.B.I. help in changing the Governor’s against Nolan. On April 27, 1993, audiotape of the meeting. (There mind, and Nolan explains that it he was indicted on six counts, in- was a video, but Nolan’s copy would be beneficial for business in cluding racketeering, conspiracy, seems to have got lost when he general if Republicans could capture extortion, and money laundering. moved east, in 1996.) Nothing on a majority in the assembly. Nolan insists that he voted for the the muddy soundtrack, which plays The sting eventually resulted in loan because the fictional venture promised jobs, and that he took the twice as likely. More than forty per ing education and job training in contributions because that’s how cent of released offenders return to prisons; allowing prisoners time off people help elect legislators who see prison within three years. for rehabilitation; and easing the things their way. But Nolan’s law- Several Republican Presidential reëntry of those who have served yers concluded that a public that had candidates—Rand Paul, Jeb Bush, time by expunging some criminal recently endured the scandals of Rick Perry, and Ted Cruz—have records and by lowering barriers to Watergate, Abscam, and been embraced by Right on Crime, employment, education, and hous- Iran-Contra would not be sympa- a campaign to promote “successful, ing. As David Dagan and Steven M. thetic to a politician’s claim that he conservative solutions” to the puni- Teles write, in the Annals of the was just doing his job. Nolan calcu- tive excesses of American law and American Academy of Political and lated that, if found guilty, he could order. In February, the American Social Science, “Retrenching the be in prison until his young children Conservative Union’s Conservative carceral state is becoming as ortho- were in their twenties. So he quit his Political Action Conference, which dox on the Right as building it was seat and admitted to one felony serves as an audition for right-wing just a few short years ago.” They count of racketeering in exchange Presidential aspirants, featured three conclude that this has created a for a sentence of thirty-three month- panels on criminal-justice reform, “Nixon goes to China” opportunity s. including one called Prosecutors to reverse decades of overkill. Criminal-justice reformers like Gone Wild. Bernard Kerik, who was This conservative transforma- to say that if a conservative is a Rudolph Giuliani’s police commis- tion is often portrayed in the media liberal who has been mugged, a sioner and served three years in as a novelty, and some progressives liberal is a conservative who has prison for tax fraud and other regard it as a ploy to cut taxes and served time. Nolan did not emerge crimes, now promotes an agenda of turn prisons over to the private cor- from prison any less conservative, reforms, including voting rights for rections industry. Yet it has deep but he says he experienced a pro- ex-felons. The libertarian billion- roots and a tangle of motives, one of found disillusionment, which has aires Charles and David Koch are which is indeed a belief that down- led him to play a central role in a donating money to the National sizing prisons promises taxpayers cause that is only now finding its Association of Criminal Defense some relief. (Locking up an inmate moment. These days, it is hard to Lawyers, to help insure that indigent for a year can cost as much as tui- ignore a rising conservative clamor defendants get competent legal rep- tion at a good college.) But for to rehabilitate the criminal-justice resentation, and they are many conservatives, Nolan says, system. Conservatives are as quick co-sponsoring conferences on judi- reducing spending is “ancillary.” as liberals to note that the United cial reform with the American Civil “It’s human dignity that really moti- States, a country with less than five Liberties Union. vates us.” per cent of the world’s population, In Congress and the states, con- In September, I met Nolan in houses nearly twenty-five per cent servatives and liberals have found Washington, D.C., at a German deli of the world’s prisoners. Some 2.2 common ground on such issues as downstairs from his office at the million Americans are now incar- cutting back mandatory-minimum American Conservative Union cerated—about triple the number sentences; using probation, treat- Foundation, where he is the director locked up in the nineteen-eighties, ment, and community service as of the new Center for Criminal Jus- when, in a panic over drugs and alternatives to prison for low-level tice Reform. At sixty-five, he is tall urban crime, conservative legislators crimes; raising the age of juve- and rotund, with a round, amiable demanded tougher policies, and nile-court jurisdictions; limiting face and a thatch of gray-white hair. liberals who feared being portrayed solitary confinement; curtailing the Since 2011, he has suffered from as weak went along with them. Afri- practice of confiscating assets; re- restricted lung capacity, complicated can-Americans are nearly six times writing the rules of probation and by a lingering case of Lyme disease, as likely as whites to be incarcer- parole to avoid sending offenders and he uses a portable oxygen tank. ated, and Latinos are more than back to jail on technicalities; restor- But he still works full time, tracking Page -2- the progress of reforms state by widely viewed as a potential speaker By the standards of American state, drafting op-eds for fel- of the assembly, even a plausible incarceration, Nolan had it easy. He low-conservatives, planning confer- candidate for governor or for the served twenty-five months in two ences, rallying state legislators by Senate. prisons that housed the least menac- phone, and firing off volleys on “I went to the legislature very ing felons. The Federal Prison Camp Twitter. pro cop and with a get-tough-on- at Dublin, near San Francisco, was a There are two main styles of crime attitude,” Nolan told me. He compound of former Army barracks Southern California Republicanism: wanted to reinstate the death pen- surrounded by landscaped flower the home-spun anecdotal optimism alty, which the Supreme Court had gardens. There was a small coterie of Ronald Reagan and the uneasy temporarily suspended. He believed of white-collar criminals, but the conspiratorial resentment of Richard that the exclusionary rule, which majority of the inmates were blacks Nixon. Nolan is in the Reagan mold, disallows evidence improperly ob- and Latinos serving time for rela- upbeat and engaging even when he tained by the police, had become a tively minor drug convictions. is describing what he regards as the loophole that lawyers exploited to Nolan helped organize reli- transformative injustice of his life. allow guilty clients to go free. He gious-study groups, and—to judge He grew up on Crenshaw Boulevard excoriated a colleague in the assem- by his accounts in an unpublished in Los Angeles; his father was an bly for proposing a law that would memoir—he treated his fel- accountant, and his mother, he said, extend workers’ compensation to low-inmates as a constituency to be “majored in raising kids”—nine of inmates injured in prison labor pro- charmed. (He still corresponds with them. By the time he was old grams. And he was a leading spon- some of them.) From prison, Nolan enough to have a paper route, the sor of a prison-building boom in the produced a chatty newsletter that his integrated middle-class neighbor- state, which included, to his even- wife, Gail, distributed to some two hood had turned rough.