George Will highlights bipartisan congressional efforts to reform America’s criminal justice system in his March 17 syndicated column.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator writes that changing how, and for how long, offenders are sentenced to prison is an important facet of reform efforts. “Too many people are in prison for too long, and too often, at a financial cost disproportionate to the enhancement of public safety. Texas has used alternatives to imprisonment to save $3 billion while crime rates have declined,” Will writes. Reformers in Congress are negotiating selective reductions in the severity of some mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent offenders.
Will quotes John Cornyn, the Texas senator and former Texas Supreme Court justice, who told him that America’s prison system is trying to do too much — teach literacy, job skills and address the mental illness that is strongly correlated with criminal behavior. “The criminal justice system,” Cornyn says, “has become by default a social services provider.”
Will also argues that the criminal code is too big and costly. Congress, he writes, “should stop promiscuously multiplying federal crimes.” He quotes a Heritage Foundation scholar who has noted that between 2000 and 2007, Congress legislated more than 450 new crimes — “more than one a week.” Will asks, “Has there really been a sudden multiplication of behaviors meriting society’s severe disapproval?”
Will notes that the federal prison population eats up a quarter of the Justice Department’s budget and has increased 300 percent in less than a generation.
One of the biggest problems with the criminal justice system is that it doesn’t prepare offenders for life after prison, even though the vast majority of them do eventually return to their communities, often without job prospects, which perpetuates the “crime-incarceration-crime cycle.”
“Old theories about the causes of crime need to be rethought,” Will writes. It is commonly thought that crime increases during times of unemployment. But this wasn’t true in many cities during the Great Depression or the Great Recession. Why? Because the crime rate calculus is complicated.
Will quotes the social scientist James Q. Wilson, who estimated that incarceration explains “one-quarter or more of the crime decline” in the 1990s. But Wilson says that the removal since the 1970s of lead from gasoline and paint may also be an explanation. Studies show that children with lead in their blood are much more likely to be aggressive, violent and delinquent. Wilson cited one study showing that most of the drop in crime in the 1990s was due to the reduction in gasoline lead.
Criminal justice reform, Will concludes, is a complex puzzle in which sentencing reform is just one piece.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
