Earlier this week I mentioned I’m something of a lukewarmer on justice reform. Now that the FIRST STEP Act is poised to become law, I’ll admit for the record that I’ve also been highly critical of the idea that — whatever the policy merits — there’s a “bipartisan consensus” on the topic that conservatives are “leading.” (If you have never heard this idea and think it just seems kind of odd, you don’t spend much time inside the Beltway.)
For RealClearPolicy in 2013, I noted public-opinion data showing that more than half of Americans still thought courts were “not harsh enough” with criminals. For The American Conservative in 2016, I pulled together a bunch of numbers indicating that conservative states were more punitive than liberal states; that incarceration had actually fallen less in conservative states than in liberal states since the tough-on-crime era; that the general population is about as lukewarm as I am about letting criminals out of prison; and that, far from leading the charge for sentencing reform, conservatives were far more skeptical than liberals, even when answering generic questions about whether it’s important to reduce the prison population. I added, and reiterated later that year, that even tepid justice-reform bills were falling flat on their face at the federal level.
I’m not going to retract my previous writings; all the data analysis remains sound, and yesterday’s 87–12 Senate passage of the FIRST STEP Act is a fairly mild piece of evidence against my primary contention. As I’ve pointed out, the bill is expected to reduce the federal-prison population somewhere in the ballpark of 3 percent, and only about 13 percent of the U.S. prison population is in the federal system to begin with. Further, all of the “No” votes came from Republicans, so not too much “leading” going on there.
But still, I should sit down and eat whatever serving of crow my old pieces obligate me to. The Senate overwhelmingly passed a truly bipartisan justice-reform bill. Serve it up!