After decades of locking up lowly drug offenders, throwing away the key and flushing billions of dollars down the jailhouse shitter to build bigger, badder prisons that return bigger, badder criminals to our streets,
conservatives have finally been rehabilitated. They've seen the light! No more demagoguing about getting tough on crime, no sir. They're going straight and getting
smart on crime! Why? Because they blew all our money and they're afraid to raise our taxes. Better late than never, I guess:
In Kansas, faced with the need to build $15 million worth of prisons, the Legislature passed a law this year mandating treatment instead of incarceration for first-time drug offenders who did not commit a crime involving violence. The law is expected to divert 1,400 offenders a year, a significant proportion of Kansas' 9,000 inmates.
"I think we are realizing that there is a smarter way to deal with criminals, rather than just being tough on them and putting them away for the rest of their lives," said John Vratil, a Republican who is chairman of the State Senate Judiciary Committee.
"Even those people who favor being tough on crime don't want to find the money to build more prisons and go back on their pledge of no new taxes," Mr. Vratil said. "So they are choosing between the lesser of two evils." Will this new approach last when the economy recovers? Mr. Vratil thinks it will.
"What started out as an effort to save money has evolved into an appreciation for good public policy, and this has enabled legislators who were initially reluctant about it to support it," he said.
And so another great triumph of conservative policymaking quietly crumbles, having served its purpose and been laid low by the larcenous whimsy of Wall Street, and these square-jawed pols, the chief beneficiaries apart from an army of politically-connected contractors, shuffle hurriedly to reposition their bright idea. Now, it'd be nice if someone were to ask these knuckleheads just why they couldn't get smart on crime all through the `80s and `90s, because I reckon getting tough on crime was pretty tough on our wallets and not smart at all. But we won't, because the liberal lions who once talked sense on crime and punishment were long ago vanquished by St. Rushbo of Oxycontin.
Thinking about this, I wonder if the cons -- all their money, mouthpieces and think tanks aside -- aren't right when they argue that libs lost the battle of ideas because they simply failed to produce. Of course, "Tough on crime" is one of the oldest and most reliable refrains of American politics - right up there with immigrant-bashing and tax-baiting. It's a tough one to counter, particularly given the culture of paranoia and retribution bestowed upon us by the Puritans. But way back when, in the years Before Clinton, a time when there were Dems with souls and brains who actually occasionally picked fights and formulated policy based on the public interest, they failed to make this a pocketbook issue. Simple as that. And so we had the prison boom, and all the silly draconian sentencing laws which have now been repealed because they're completely unsustainable, and the GOP cast the Dems as soft and squishy, and Willy Horton heard a who, and a thousand Republican dingleberries bloomed.