The title of this post is the title of this New York Times commentary authored by Tina Rosenberg. Here are excerpts:
Across America, Democrats and Republicans demonize each other — and then sit down to hammer out legislation to reduce mass incarceration. Last December, Congress passed the First Step Act, which applies to federal prisons. It increases opportunities for education and rehabilitation in prison, gives inmates more time off for good behavior, requires prisoners be placed closer to their families, and reduces mandatory minimum sentences for some drug offenses.
But the real progress is in the states — a broad range of them. Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Colorado, California, New Jersey and New York, among others, have all passed major criminal justice reforms. This momentum shows what can be done. At the same time, it highlights the rarity of bipartisan progress.
So what is it about criminal justice? It’s certainly not the case that crime lends itself to dispassionate, rational analysis. In the past, no issue seemed more politicized. Many local politicians won because of 30-second ads showing how tough on crime they were. Lee Atwater’s infamous Willie Horton ad for George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign was perhaps the nadir of American political communication until recently. Democrats also competed to be the toughest on crime and terrified voters — wrongly — with the specter of superpredators.
Creating mass incarceration 30 years ago was a bipartisan project. So it’s fitting that undoing it is as well.
One reason for bipartisanship is that the criminal justice system has affected so many people — 30 percent of American adults have a criminal record, which the F.B.I. defines as an arrest on a felony charge. “Every single American family is impacted by the broken justice system,” said Holly Harris, the executive director of Justice Action Network, which works with Republicans and Democrats at the federal and state level to reform criminal justice....
On criminal justice reforms, the language from left and right seems to be converging. “Originally, conservatives talked about these issues in terms of public safety, recidivism reduction, curbing government spending and big government,” Ms. Harris said. (The prison system is a perfect conservative target: a hugely expensive failure of a government program that deprives people of their freedom.) “And progressives talked in terms of reducing racial disparities and increasing fairness. But I’ve watched that evolve.”
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