"Take a Nibble Out of Crime"

The title of this post is the title of this reaction over at The New Republic to Senator Clinton's recently announced crime-fighting proposals.  Here are parts of the commentary:

Hillary Clinton gave a major policy speech on crime in Philadelphia one week ago.... Clinton's views on sentencing retroactivity, for the tens of thousands who have been locked up under the current cocaine guidelines, are of equal importance.  Commuting prisoner sentences to terms they would have served under the new law is, of course, the right thing to do.  But in Iowa, Clinton told viewers of the Black/Brown debate: "In principle I have problems with retroactivity," she said. "It's something a lot of communities will be concerned about as well." Which communities?  Why?

The drug wars, addressed intelligently on our site by former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, are not a by-the-wayside policy issue on which Clinton can smudge her former stances without scrutiny.  What's more, this anti-crime gambit looks to be an attempt to reverse a monthslong pattern of tacking rightward on criminal justice policy (back when Clinton still had a "general election strategy").  In New Hampshire, for example, Clinton tweaked Barack Obama for his liberal stance on "criminal defendants' rights" and his "extremely progressive record" in Chicago. Who knows to what that refers.

By the Philly address — never having answered that important question on retroactivity — Clinton was putting $1 billion up for grabs among states that want to commit resources to lowering rates of recidivism.  But being unjustly punished and backsliding into crime are not totally unrelated issues; longer jail terms erode workplace skills, fossilize social attitudes and drain meaningful support systems — all of which are critical to the well-being of a sucessful parolee.  That she would pay for her ambitious $4 billion plan by identifying "unnecessary and outdated corporate subsidies for elimination" (rather than housing and processing costs for thousands of crack offenders) only spotlights the blinders that make real reform in government seem like make-believe.

Some posts on crime and punishment and the 2008 campaign:

• Senator Clinton making a campaign offensive on crime
• So much in (and missing from) Senator Clinton's anti-crime proposal
• How the media can do better: ask the candidates tough crime and punishment questions
• "Where candidates stand on crime, death penalty"
• Interesting commentary on 2008 politics of death
• Clinton and Obama, crime and punishment
• A retroactive litmus test on leading Democratic candidates
• Is Senator Clinton to the right of Justice Scalia on sentencing issues?
• Race, class and criminal justice in campaign 2008
• Politics and the war on drugs 
• Should criminal justice reform be the new civil rights movement?   
• Aren't extreme sentences and mass incarceration a "tired philosophy that trusts in government more than people"?