Atlantic magazine features an article in which David Frum interviews Steve Teles, a liberal but thoughtful professor of political science at Johns Hopkins. The article encapsulates Teles's new book (with co-author David Dagan) Prison Break, in which Prof. Teles describes "why conservatives have turned against mass incarceration."
It's not mass incarceration (zero point seven percent of the population is imprisoned), and conservatives haven't turned against it (although some prominent and/or libertarian-leaning and/or Beltway-centered conservatives do support sentencing "reform"). Still,the article is worth your time for its delicious insights about how the sentencing reform movement is organized and financed. But the most revealing paragraph, I thought, is this one:
The openness of conservatives to rethinking criminal justice is, to a significant degree, a function of the declining salience of the issue. Voters since the late 1990s simply haven't cared about it as much, as the great crime decline started to register. Voters will still tell you in polls that they think that our criminal laws aren't severe enough, but they also don't care about it as much. And that lack of strong concern creates space for politicians to move without fear of reprisal, and to be more entrepreneurial in their framing of the issue.
That has a bit of academic lingo, so let me try to distill it: "Now that policies of increased incarceration have helped us succeed in reducing crime, we can relax and go back to failure."
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