Washington Monthly - September/October 2016 - 124

charges-to the organization. Beginning in the mid-1990s, they slowly began to build a conservative "reform cadre" through their personal networks, including former Republican Congressman Frank Wolf, former George W. Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, Brown University economist and conservative activist Glenn Loury, and Texas philanthropist Tim Dunn. While their motivation for reform is based in the Christian belief that all people deserve a second chance, they found allies in libertarian-leaning conservatives, such as David Keene, former American Conservative Union president and current Washington Times opinion editor, who see expansive surveillance as a violation of civil liberties. They also drew in a few influential fiscal conservatives, such as antitax activist Grover Norquist, who began to view criminal justice as another example of state spending run amok. In 2011, Nolan formed a new elite conservative movement for reform, aptly named "Right on Crime." In a frequently cited Washington Post op-ed, he and Newt Gingrich called on "conservative legislators to lead the way" in fixing "the astronomical growth in the prison population, with its huge costs in dollars and lost human potential." While Gingrich and Nolan were the conservative public anchors of the movement, the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts became its hidden captain. In 2007, Pew, one of the world's wealthiest charitable foundations, established the Public Safety and Performance Project, with the goal of "protecting public safety, holding offenders accountable, and controlling corrections costs." Almost "obsessively bipartisan," Pew provides technocratic expertise to policymakers, but behind the scenes it works to create "political space" for reform by funding and strategizing the dissemination of the conservative prison reform gospel. Adam Gelb, director of Pew's Public Safety Performance Project, deliberately framed the problem of mass incarceration for state legislators as a lack of "return on investment." And after helping Texas legislators pass a reform package in 2007, Pew provided platforms and resources for reformers to proselytize the "Texas Model" and launch Right on Crime. Arguably the biggest success of the Pew reform model 124 September/October 2016 was the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, a series of reforms that have passed in Georgia since 2012. The key to Pew and Right on Crime's success (as measured by the diﬀusion of the JRI model) was their decision to work with Republican "politicians' existing preferences, rather than organizing to try to fundamentally change them." As Dagan and Teles explain, conservatives have argued for decades that government functions . . . should be judged by "outputs" . . . and that generating results required applying strict accountability measures to generally untrustworthy public servants. . . . The innovation of Right on Crime and its allies is extending this critique to the criminal-justice system. Along these lines, reformers argue that past support for prison expansion was not consistent with conservative ideology, allowing politicians to embrace reform with their conservative identity intact. The political traction of these framings, however, depended on a changing political environment. Dagan and Teles argue that the decline in crime rates and in the public salience of domestic crime (compared to terrorism) and Democrats' embrace of tough justice in the 1990s weakened the political purchase of Republicans' previous hardline position. And a new generation of ideological conservatives deeply hostile to government (even if that government is locking up the bad guys) amplified the political price of continuing to let imprisonment costs soar. Dagan and Teles recognize that this let-the-conservatives-lead reform strategy could encounter stumbling blocks. For instance, alternatives to incarceration, such as drug treatment, job training, and more intensive parole and probation operations, might not actually save money or, if poorly implemented, reduce recidivism. They are optimistic, however, that the political benefits of staking reform positions and the dynamics of policy diffusion will sustain reform. For a diﬀerent assessment of the prospects of reform, readers should look to Marie Gottschalk's Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics. Gott- schalk argues that the current focus on costs is unlikely to create enough momentum for significant decarceration. As I read Prison Break, I too was more doubtful. I couldn't help but notice the repetition of arguments reformers have used since the mid-twentieth century, such as that "prisons should be reserved for violent oﬀenders," or that we send people to prison as punishment, not to get "beat up" while there. Furthermore, having mainly spoken to conservatives who have come to believe that sustaining current incarceration policies is not consistent with conservative principles, Dagan and Teles's interview sample might bias their interpretation. My own research on decarceration eﬀorts in Florida suggests that the new conservative orthodoxy on incarceration has not spread evenly across states. Recent eﬀorts by GOP Senators Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz to block the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (Cotton argues that we have too few people locked up, not too many) further suggest that not all conservative elected officials have gotten the memo. Moreover, as Dagan and Teles allude to, the conservative framing of prison reform creates a real dilemma for liberals. By taking out the progressive moral and humanitarian motivation for reform, the dominant conservative discourse absolves Republicans (and Democrats) of the harm caused by their policy choices, relegating them instead to bad "investments." Embracing the reform movement, as the NAACP and the ACLU have done, may help reduce the number of people behind bars, but it risks further entrenching an antiregulation and public spending political culture that will tug against enacting policies that proactively address the harm that mass incarceration has wrought on individuals, families, and communities (who are, of course, disproportionately black and brown). Prison Break doesn't necessarily lay out a path forward, but interested parties of all political stripes will find plenty of fodder for thinking about the positions they might take as the politics of the carceral state shifts beneath our feet. Heather Schoenfeld is an assistant professor of legal studies and education and social policy at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2016