Essay On Incarceration Reform

779 Words4 Pages
I am pretty tough on the left wing in my approach to incarceration reform, because the fight against "mass incarceration" usually takes on a socialistic, victim-oriented approach. I will try to even things up a bit. Even though I am a lonely conservative prison reform advocate, I will now take the right wing to task on the issues of criminal punishment and incarceration. Before doing so, I'd like to point out that the liberal versus conservative balancing act is not evenly arrayed on the issue of what to do with convicted criminals. Many folks who are liberal on other issues support conservatives on law and order issues. You will recall that the Congressional Black Caucus initially supported super-tough penalties for crack cocaine. Many of…show more content…
Federal courts were required to police prisons and keep them from cruel and unusual punishments. It's not "judicial activism" when federal judges have to enforce the U.S. Constitution. Within conservative ranks, the social conservative law and order crowd completely dominated the libertarians who said illegal drugs should be legalized. For years, not one state stepped forward to give this a chance, nor did the federal government much loosen its grip on all 50 states in this regard. The laboratory of federalism and states' rights had little room to experiment in the face of the all-powerful federal government. While addressing the death penalty, victims' rights and new crimes, abolishing parole in the federal system, and adding years to sentences, crime rates started to decline... but there was no let-up in the pressure to incarcerate for 20 years. Some wrongly calculated the benefit of incapacitation, though I have to admit my own uncertainty as to that calculation. It is very likely that much less than half the crime rate decrease is due to additional
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