"Criminal Justice: The Real Reasons for Reform"

The title of this post is the headline of this effective new National Review commentary authored by Vikrant Reddy, a senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute. The piece's subheadline highlights its themes: "There’s no reason to exaggerate the need for it; the true state of affairs is bad enough."  And here is how the piece starts and ends:

For all public-policy ideas, there are good arguments and there are bad arguments. The bad arguments sometimes carry flash and sizzle, but they should be resisted. Criminal-justice reform — an issue many prominent conservatives have begun to champion — is particularly rife with bad arguments, but that is no reason to ignore the good ones. In a recent piece in RealClearPolicy, the conservative writer Sean Kennedy expertly filleted some of the worst arguments made by overzealous criminal-justice reformers on both the left and the right.  But his takedown was not an argument against thoughtful reform efforts that have improved public safety, saved taxpayer dollars, and advanced individual dignity....

The broadly accepted view among criminologists is that incarceration does bring down crime rates, but it is a tool with diminishing marginal returns.  At a certain point, if the goal is to decrease crime, each additional tax dollar is better spent on law enforcement and prevention.  Indeed, there is even a point at which incarceration becomes criminogenic, causing more crime than it stops.  This happens because, as noted above, some petty criminals spend lengthy stints in prison and emerge with limited reentry options and having learned more bad habits.

The upshot of all of this is simple. First, whether or not America has the world’s highest incarceration rate, it certainly has a rate vastly higher than that of any comparable Western democracy. Second, a slight majority of the prison population consists of violent offenders, but this is hardly an argument for ignoring criminal-justice reforms that would (1) reduce the number of non-violent offenders behind bars and (2) better direct resources at preventing violent crime.  Finally, reformers should not forget that our high rates of incarceration, in certain ways, make society less safe, and public-safety considerations must be central to any discussion of criminal-justice reform.

Those are the good arguments in support of criminal-justice reform — and they remain good arguments even when some are making weak arguments.

Of course, not everyone who gets published in the National Review is advocating for sentencing reforms, as evidence by these other two notable recent pieces to be found there:

"Why Trump Should Oppose ‘Criminal-Justice Reform’" by Jeffrey Anderson

"Criminals are unicorns: And that’s why it is so difficult to stop them" by Kevin Williamson