Most of the major players seem to be on board. Will prison reform succeed where other big ideas have failed?
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The Good Men Project has recently been aiming our sights on prison reform, with a live Twitter chat in February and a guest article by activist Ken Hartman on promoting positive change in a system that has been politically untouchable for as long as anyone can remember. “Soft on crime” sunk Michael Dukakis’ campaign in 1988, and in the 26 years since, not much has changed.
It looks like we picked a good time to talk about this. A new article by Buzzfeed’s Evan McMorris-Santoro is uncovering the irony that now, in the most dysfunctional Congress in recent memory, one of the federal government’s most overlooked problems is producing a shared optimism among policy wonks and activists, and a working relationship between the unlikeliest of legislative allies:
The biggest reason for the optimism is, after decades of tough-on-crime politicians from both parties, the groups behind the push for new prison policies are unusually bipartisan.
Not that they’ll admit to that just yet — there’s still a lot of wariness, especially on the conservative side. But behind the caution is a real sense of movement with ideologically divergent politicians like Sens. Rand Paul and Patrick Leahy working together on legislation and groups like the conservative Right on Crime quietly taking meetings with the NAACP and ACLU on the issue of criminal justice.
“I’ve been working this field since 1990 and this is certainly the most hopeful time I’ve seen in that 25-year period,” said David Fathi, ACLU National Prison Project director. “There is an openness to fundamentally rethinking our approach to crime and deviant behavior in a way that I’ve never seen before.”
McMorris-Santoro goes onto write that Sen. Rand Paul, the Senate’s self-appointed libertarian conscience, has reached out to Obama administration, and Republicans from the Senate and House have met with Attorney General Eric Holder; even Raul Labrador, the Idaho Congressman who “once demanded Holder’s resignation over the botched trafficking case known as Operation Fast and Furious”, is on board.
Theses few bits of good news raise a few solid questions. First: Is this actually going to happen? And second: why is it so weird that it could?
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Obviously, it’s way too early to tell if this is a case of the media hyping “bipartisanship” in an era where Mitch McConnell famously said that the single most important job for Republicans was making Obama a one term president. In the past couple of years, we’ve seen this same trajectory with issues like climate change, half-assed gun control, and repeatedly, over and over again, immigration reform; one Democrat/Republican has a good start for an idea, someone from the other party picks up on it and tries to work with it, the proposal is discussed, and at some point, the House shoots it down. Done. Onto the next one.
If there’s anything this Congress has proven, it’s that so far, they’ve been utterly incapable of taking on anything remotely close to a “big idea”. There are, however, some good signs: liberal and conservative think tanks alike, such as the ACLU and Right on Crime, want this to happen. It also helps that there’s obvious benefits for nearly all sides involved: progressives have wanted to tackle this kind of reform for a long time, budget hawks want to save money, and this is the perfect uncontroversial socially liberal stance that the libertarians in Congress need to show they aren’t just Republicans who love guns and freedom more. Still, I’m holding my breath for meaningful legislation.
So why is this weird? Why is the tone of the Buzzfeed article, “You’ll never guess what’s going on in Washington right now! We’ve got Republicans working with Democrats and some of these guys are even eating breakfast with Eric Holder”? Because after four years, fifty votes to repeal Obamacare, one disastorous attempt to convince Americans that Obamacare was worth shutting the government down over, the Tea Party Caucus is finally starting to learn from their failures. I mean, Steve Stockman is still an abject moron, and I fully expect those political posturing votes to keep coming on through the House, but that’s besides the point – these “Washington outsiders” who vowed to “clean up Washington” in 2010 and 2012 have finally realized that in order to get anything done while being the minority party in a divided government, they’re going to have to find some allies in the Democratic Party, and come to the table ready to negotiate with the Obama administration and the Senate leadership. And the language is even more telling: Paul, widely considered to be a 2016 frontrunner, was quick to say:
“This is the definition of how you get bipartisan agreement,” Mr. Paul said in an interview. “It’s not splitting the difference. It’s finding areas of common interest.”
What the hell is the difference between “splitting the difference” and “finding areas of common interest”? Easy: one sounds less like “we’re agreeing with Democrats” in an election year. So if this mythical “bipartisan agreement” actually does happen, and we see the first real attempt at eliminating the prison industrial complex, it will be extremely telling who votes for it. And it will guarantee the Tea Party is going to inch closer to that equally mythical crossroads with its base: what happens when they actually try to govern?
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