Conservatives And The Prison Problem

David Frum, guest-blogging for Andrew Sullivan, mulls the problem posed by the American penal system, noting that although it has helped to achieve lower crime rates over the past few decades, those gains have come at enormous social and financial costs. He wonders if there might be any way to rehabilitate some offenders so that we don't need to keep them locked up.

Not necessary, I say. We can vastly reduce our incarceration rate by making just a few simple changes to the way we punish certain crimes. First, we can end the War on Drugs, with its draconian policy of mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. Long prison sentences for small-time dealers don't reduce the amount of narcotics that get sold in the U.S., but they do put plenty of relatively harmless people (small-time dealers, addicts and the like) in jail for years at a time. I'm not saying we need to totally decriminalize drug use - with the exception of marijuana, I think that's a problematic proposition with most drugs - but we don't need to punish someone who's caught with a few grams of meth or crack cocaine by locking them up for 20 years at a stretch. Second, we can reduce the use of prison time as our preferred method of punishment. The primary advantage of prison is that it isolates convicted criminals from society and prevents them form perpetrating more crime. When dealing with genuine psycopaths like rapists, murderers, and armed robbers, this is a necessity, but for many non-violent offenders, the benefit gained from doing so may not be worth the costs. A more efficient probation system, better manner of house arrest, etc. may work just as well, at lower cost. UCLA public policy professor Mark Kleiman, who has spent much of his career studying this problem and recently wrote a well-reviewed book on the topic, has many interesting suggestions along these lines, some of which he outlines in this article.

When it comes to crime policy, I don't think "lock 'em up and throw away the key" is a sufficient philosophy for conservatives to have; it permits both of too much potential for abuse of government power and an outrageous amount of wasteful spending. Enforcing the laws of society is a necessary duty of the government under anyone's conception, but I don't see why so many on the right remain committed to a simplistic, grossly inefficient, and costly way of doing so. I hope that the fact that serious right-of-center thinkers like Frum are considering the question means that mainstream conservatism may start moving off its dogma on this issue - but the fact that the Palinites have denounced him as a pointy-headed intellectual only one step removed from a liberal makes me doubt it.

Finally, A Sensible Political Development To Write About

With the health care debate sucking up most of the political oxygen, one positive development from the standpoint of personal freedom has gone a bit under the radar - in November, voters in California will get a chance to vote to legalize marijuana. No absurd fig leaves about medical use either - just straight legalization.

I am hoping this is an indication that America is finally ready to move in the direction of a saner drug policy. I'm not a big fan of pot myself, as I dislike anything that enters the body in the form of inhaled smoke, but I've never seen any evidence that it is any more dangerous or socially harmful than alcohol (in fact, what evidence there is appears to indicate just the opposite). As any Econ 101 student can tell you, banning a product which is relatively easy and cheap to produce and for which there is high demand is likely to result not in reduced demand for that product, but in a large black market for it, and you don't need to conduct field research to see that that's exactly what has happened in the case of marijuana. Anyone who's been to a music festival or a lived in a dorm room in the last twenty years can tell you.

Forcing this black market above ground will result in tangible benefits for California - firstly, it will undermine one of the major sources of revenue for the violent Mexican drug cartels that continue to terrorize the U.S.-Mexico border region, and secondly, it provides a major new potential revenue source for the state government, which God only knows is in need of some of those at the moment. At least as far as marijuana goes, I don't find the argument that legalization would encourage people to experiment more than they already do particularly persuasive, and even if it did, I don't think this would be particularly harmful, so these benefits are likely to come at very little tradeoff.

I remain uneasy with proposals to legalize harder drugs - heroin, methamphetamines, and the like are nasty, nasty chemicals with nasty, nasty effects on the human body and on society, and abstract arguments in favor of personal freedom do have to grapple with the fact that people who choose to use these drugs are likely to create huge societal problems by doing so. With marijuana, however, it's likely the most serious problem we'll have to contend with is a shortage of frozen pizzas. So Californians - pass the referendum, then if you so choose, pass the bong.