Will Tanner takes a look at the Republicans who are applying fiscal responsibility to America’s unsustainable prison population – and calls on Tories to copy them
America has long been the poster child for lock ‘em up justice. The US imprisons more people in both proportionate and absolute terms than any country on Earth. The Land of the Free holds 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. Decades of prison-happy policies at both state and federal level made jail the default rather than the last resort: between 1990 and 2005 the prison population doubled even as crime fell by nearly a third. The Republican heartlands, from Texas to Oklahoma, were the worst offenders.
Yet as austerity has bitten, it is not reformist Democrats but the Red States of the right which have broken the cycle of imprisonment.
In 2007, the Texas State Legislature was faced with a $523 million bill to build and operate the 17,000 new prison places needed to meet rising demand – on top of the existing $2 billion budget. In an unprecedented move, tough fiscal reality beat tough on crime ideology. Lawmakers voted down the proposals and instead introduced radical reforms: drug-related
offenders were diverted into healthcare treatment, alternatives to custody were introduced for non-violent prisoners and the future savings reinvested in specialist courts and mentoring programmes. Similar reforms, trumpeted by the high profile campaign, Right on Crime, have flourished in Republican states elsewhere.
The results have confounded critics. Between 2006 and 2011, the Texas prison population fell by 7%, a far cry from the 9% increase projected previously. Juvenile incarceration has fallen 52% in the last 5 years. Contrary to expectations, crime has not skyrocketed. In 2011 violent crime fell by more than double the national average and property crime more than ten times the national rate.
Blindsided on penal reform, Democrats are now playing catch up. Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder relaxed sentencing guidance to curb the use of federal prison for non-violent offenders, declaring that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no truly good law enforcement reason” and branding America’s levels of imprisonment “ineffective and unsustainable”. After decades of heightened rhetoric on crime, and in particular drugs policy, the once unthinkable prospect of bilateral reform is fast becoming a reality.
This seismic shift has profound lessons for Conservatives this side of the pond. This Government, particularly through the former Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, has made great strides in championing rehabilitation in response to shamefully high reoffending rates. Ministers have successfully cut crime in a time of fiscal restraint. Yet Michael Howard’s 1993 “prison works” speech still resonates for many on the right and the biggest justice reforms of this Parliament have eschewed alternatives to custody in favour of payment by results and harder prison regimes. Further, the US experience shows that smart on crime policies can also be smart politics: in 2010, a poll by the Pew Centre found that 87% of Americans supported reducing the use of prison for non-violent offenders in favour of less expensive alternatives. Cheerleaders are already agitating for a similar strategy in the UK. The Conservative MP for Ipswich, Ben Gummer called for a British Right on Crime campaign in The Telegraph last year, praising “the Right in America that has been questioning the wisdom of imprisoning a huge numbers of people at enormous cost and negligible return”. Cross-party consensus might even emerge. The Shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, last year called the shifts in the US criminal justice debate “a watershed” moment and hailed the Youth Justice Board’s work to reduce the juvenile prison population in the UK. The groundwork has already
been laid.
America may seem an unlikely case study in effective justice reform. But modern Republicans have shown that fiscal pressure can prompt smarter policies that cut prison places, crime and budgets at the same time. If Conservatives this side of the Atlantic are serious about modernising the justice system, they should follow suit.
