John Crowe - Watchdog.org
High incarceration and recidivism rates, expansive corrections budgets and opposition to the "war on drugs" have placed increased pressure on lawmakers to enact changes to the criminal justice system at the federal and state levels. But while public support for reform appears to be growing, experts and politicians have yet to come to a consensus on what policies will reduce prison populations without sparking an increase in crime.
Their dilemma is made clear by interviews Watchdog recently conducted with four experts on the subject who cite facts, figures and philosophy while reaching diametrically opposed conclusions about what to do next.
We talked with two tough-on-crime opponents of reform, Steve Cook, the president of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys and Michael Rushford, the president and CEO of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.
We also spoke with two proponents, Marc Levin, the policy director for Right on Crime, a conservative policy think tank that focuses on criminal justice reform and Sal Nuzzo, the vice president of policy at the James Madison Institute, which commissioned the poll mentioned above that showed strong public support for reforms.
Questioning the narrative
Critics of reform measures -- such as eliminating mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug offenses -- question the narrative that incarcerating nonviolent drug offenders has increased the prison population.
Cook said that only 16 percent of individuals incarcerated in the U.S. are locked up for drug crimes, and the majority of those are traffickers, not casual users.
A comprehensive approach to criminal justice is needed, he said, suggesting that drug treatment programs are important but should be administered in concert with incarceration.
"The mistake is to trade-off incarceration for rehabilitation --- they have to be used together," he said.
Levin suggested there is a false dichotomy between purely voluntary treatment and incarceration.
"Prison is not the best place to administer drug treatment programs," Levin said, arguing that prison isolates individuals from potentially stabilizing influences in their lives such as family and employment and makes it very difficult to regain that stability when they are released.
"What we know is that prison is very good at incapacitating people for a long time," he added. "The idea is if somebody can be rehabilitated in the community, then it is a lot less expensive and if they have a family and a job, then they can keep those things."
He told Watchdog that he advocates the use of supervisory measures such as weekly drug tests, GPS monitoring and parole meetings coupled with the threat of spending the weekend in jail for failing to comply.
Levin pointed out that such "swift and certain" sanctions are demonstrably effective because they "send the message that if you're not going to do your part than there will be a sanction, but it is the certainty and swiftness of that sanction that changes behavior."
While Cook acknowledged the positive impact of rehabilitation programs, he argued the public should recognize that individuals who have engaged in drug trafficking pose a threat and should not be released from prison early as part of rehabilitation programs.
Cook also questioned the effectiveness of eliminating mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Rather, he described those laws as an effective tool for prosecutors trying to reduce crime.
"I started my career as a federal prosecutor in the mid-eighties. About that time Congress gave us mandatory minimum penalties and we started using those to put the most violent offenders in prison," he said. "The idea was you put criminals in jail and the crime rate goes down. It seems simple and it worked."
Cook also pointed to a recent FBI crime report showing that violent crime has increased across all categories in the first six months of 2015 compared with the same period in 2014. That, he said, "should be teaching us we were on the right track, and we are making a mistake going soft on crime."
Rushford echoed these concerns and blamed recent increases in crime in California on the shortcomings of the state's rehabilitation-based programs.
"We’re getting a result from six years of rehabilitation and early release of drug offenders. It's just not the result we wanted," Rushford said.
Levin calls that a bad analysis of what happened in California.
He said the recent uptick in crime is the result of a judicial order that gave the state two years to reduce its prison population and forced rapid changes, rather than gradual reform brought on by legislative action.
Additionally, he argued that it is difficult to draw a correlation between any specific reform and the rise in crime, pointing out that the California counties that released the highest number of inmates actually experienced the lowest increases in crime.
'Walk the walk'
But while experts debate what should and shouldn’t be done, there seems to be considerable public support for criminal justice reform.
That is certainly true in Florida, where a poll released in September by the James Madison Institute, a conservative think tank in Tallahassee, revealed Floridians overwhelmingly support a more treatment-centered approach to criminal justice.
The poll, which surveyed 1,488 Florida residents, found that “72 percent of Floridians agree or strongly agree that it is important to reform the criminal justice system in Florida. Three quarters of respondents felt the state’s prisons should focus more on rehabilitation than punishment and almost two-thirds of Floridians felt there were too many non-violent prisoners currently incarcerated.
“For the past few years as we’ve worked in the criminal justice arena, we have experienced first-hand the changing debate on these issues,” Nuzzo said. “The poll solidified what we’ve come to know – Floridians want criminal justice reform.”
These poll results are indicative of a larger national trend toward support for treatment-centered criminal justice reform designed to reduce incarceration rates.
A national poll from the Pew Charitable Trusts echoed the Florida poll, finding that 61 percent of voters say there are too many drug offenders in prison, and more than three-fourths of respondents said judges should determine sentences using their discretion.
Though disagreement over criminal justice reform is still prevalent, Nuzzo remains hopeful that there will be further progress on issues such as reducing mandatory minimum sentences. So far, he’s pleased with the level of bipartisan support criminal justice reform has received, but says the hard work of enacting reforms lies ahead.
“We’ve been talking the talk and now it is time to walk the walk,” Nuzzo said. “Policymakers should take serious strides toward improving the outcomes of those within the criminal justice system, increasing public safety and continuing to be good stewards of taxpayer dollars.”