Criminal justice reform was raised for a few minutes during last night’s main debate. There was a spirited and fairly lengthy exchange involving Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush about marijuana use, states’ rights, racial disparities in drug sentencing and the war on drugs.
“New Jersey is the first state in the nation that now says if you are nonviolent, nondealing drug user, that you don’t go to jail for your first offense. You go to mandatory treatment.” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said. “I’m for rehabilitation, why I think the war on drugs has been a failure.”
To which former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina responded, “My husband Frank and I buried a child to drug addiction. So, we must invest more in the treatment of drugs.”
Fiorina continued, “We do need criminal justice reform. We have the highest incarceration rates in the world. Two-thirds of the people in our prisons are there for nonviolent offenses, mostly drug-related. It is clearly not working.”
Fiorina was right that the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. But she was wrong about the proportion of prisoners incarcerated for nonviolent drug crimes. In fact, only about 20 percent of the 1.5 million or so people in state or federal prisons are there for drug offenses, according the bureau of Justice Statistics. As I’ve written here, a majority of prisoners doing time in state prisons (where 86 percent of prisoners are housed) are there for violent crimes.
That said, Fiorina and the others deserve credit for raising criminal justice reform.
For another take, I reached out to Marc Levin, policy director of Right on Crime, which bills itself as “the one-stop source for conservative ideas on criminal justice.” In an email, he told the Washington Examiner that he was “very pleased” criminal justice reform was raised and that “the candidates agreed that treatment for nonviolent drug offenders is better than prison.”
Levin wrote, “Paul, Christie, and Bush all endorsed drug courts, a proven solution that many of our state reform efforts have expanded. As Senator Paul and Ms. Fiorina stated, we have too many low-level drug offenders behind bars at a great cost to human potential and taxpayers.”
Levin feels that the candidates’ remarks “will add momentum to reforms such as drug sentencing reductions, expansion of drug and other problem-solving courts, medication-assisted treatment for opiate addiction, and good Samaritan laws to encourage calling 911 when overdoses occur that are being considered at the federal and state levels.”
Most significantly, Levin wrote, none of the candidates “defended the status quo or argued that putting more drug offenders behind bars is the answer.”
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
