In the latest issue of Social Research (wait! come back!...), Marc Mauer has a very smart essay pointing out that the U.S. prison population grew so rapidly during the 1990s not because people were being thrown in prison at a greater rate, but because the length of time served in prison was increasing so dramatically. This bubbled up briefly in the hearing on penal reform I covered last week, but it still doesn't get nearly enough attention.

By Mauer's calculations, if legislatures had left the length of prison sentences alone during the '90s, and the average time served hadn't increased, there would be about 400,000 fewer prisoners in state prisons today (there are currently 1.2 million). And that's without any change in the actual number of people sentenced to prison--before anyone starts talking about treatment programs as an alternative to jail for drug offenses, or graduated sanctions for parole violations, or other wonky measures to reduce recidivism.

The second striking bit comes when Mauer compares U.S. sentences with those abroad. Burglars now serve an average of 16.2 months in prison in the United States, compared with 5.3 months in Canada and 6.8 months in England. A conviction in a U.S. federal court for selling a kilogram of heroin gets you a mandatory 10-year sentence, versus six months in prison in England. Then, of course, there's the prevalence of "three-strikes" laws here in the United States: Around 4,000 prisoners in California are serving life sentences after committing drug or property crimes as their third strike.

Maybe this would be justified if there was any reason to think that longer sentences actually make a difference. But there's not: As Mauer notes, there's no evidence that longer sentences deter crime ("any deterrent effect... is achieved primarily by certainty of punishment, not severity") or reduce recidivism. In theory, of course, you can lock up a prisoner for five or ten years, until he "ages out" of his prime crime-committing years, and that could reduce recidivism. But doing that for everyone would mean quadrupling our $60 billion-per-year prison system, and I trust no one needs to explain why that would be a horrible idea.

Correction: Sorry, it should be 300,000 fewer, not 400,000. Thanks to James Shearer in comments.

I see Arnold Schwarzenegger has had to declare a state of emergency in California's overcrowded prisons. The government is now shipping inmates to other states in order to alleviate the burden. One could make a couple of obvious points here, either about the draconian drug laws that have created an unsustainable situation, or the iron grip that the prison's guard union has on the state legislature, preventing real changes from taking place. But instead, let's talk about parole reform, the topic all the rage in the California legislature these days.

Nationwide, roughly 51 percent of ex-convicts end up back in prison after three years, according to the Justice Department. Of those, over half are sent back not because they committed a crime, but because they had a "technical" parole violation: missing an appointment, failing to land a job, getting a speeding ticket, flunking a drug test. Parole officers are overworked, and often have to deal with hundreds of cases at a time, so it's usually just easier to send a difficult parolee who misses appointments back to jail. There's less risk that way.

So even setting aside the problems with wildly irrational drug laws and mandatory minimums, that's a huge number of people going back to jail for no good reason. For speeding tickets, in some cases. It's a massive problem in California, where 70 percent of parolees are back in prison in three years, and 67 percent of new admissions to California prisons are parole violators. It's the worst state in the nation on both counts. By comparison, only about 14 percent of new admissions in Mississippi of all places are parole violators.

A working solution won't necessarily involve more funding. California already spends more per parolee than most states. Procedures could change. Most people violate parole in the first few months; so "front-loading" resources to avoid this could pay off. Using insurance-style risk instruments could help parole agencies figure out which ex-convicts require more supervision than others. Incremental sanctions, rather than automatic jail time, for technical parole violations seems sensible. California could also reduce the barriers faced by prisoners when trying to re-enter society. Right now many can't vote, and they're excluded from receiving food stamps or college loans or whatnot. It's a pretty clear recipe for recidivism.

Schwarzenegger entered office with good ideas about parole reform, only to abandon them in the face of carping from victim's rights groups and the prison's guard unions. He also assumed parole reform would lead to instant savings, and required that the changes basically fund themselves, which sabotaged the project from the start. Nowadays, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the governor isn't even "considering alternatives to imprisoning 'technical' parole violators who did not commit new crimes." But other states have tried it, and succeeded: Texas, Ohio, and Kansas especially. Surely it can be done, no?

Hm, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes that many states are facing looming fiscal shortfalls in the coming year. This reminds me of something I've wanted to talk about for awhile: prison policy on the state level. (Whoo!)

You'd never know it from the Bush-Dukakis debates of yore, but prison policy is essentially a state concern: of the 2,000,000 people incarcerated nationwide, less than 160,000 are federal prisoners. The rest manage to swell state budgets. Nosing around in this report, meanwhile, it appears that corrections is the only state function that has consistently grown as a percentage of state budgets since 1987 (excluding Medicaid, whose expenditures are set by the federal government). The good news, however, is that a lot of smart, sensible changes to the system—like adequately funding parole programs to reduce recidivism rates—can be handled entirely by the state executive branch. Did everyone get the unilateralism memo? Good. (Unfortunately, sentencing laws are a lot harder to fix--thanks to both federal guidelines and punitive-minded state legislatures.)

Anyways, I don't know what particular advances have been made state to state thus far, but Democratic governors could quite easily get together and focus on a party-wide effort to decrease prison populations in their blue-governed states, via parole reform, community policing, or whatever else governors can get away with, and academic experts can agree on. (Surprisingly, experts can agree on a lot when it comes to reforming prisons; unfortunately no one listens to them.) It's true that crime control is no longer the national concern it was in, say, 1988 or 1992. But popular opinion has very much shifted away from harsher sentencing, and if the Democrats want to keep the mantle of reform, this is as good a place as any to start reforming things. The party's not going to get much of a chance to do stuff on the national level for at least two years, so the states are a good place to coordinate these sorts of efforts.

Speaking of prison, a few years ago I reviewed a book by Michael Jacobson, a former corrections commissioner for New York City, who argued that one of the easiest (and politically realistic) ways to downsize prisons was simply to fix the parole system. That argument still makes a lot of sense to me. A 2002 Justice Department study on recidivism found that 52 percent of criminals end up back in prison after three years, and of those, over half are sent back not for committing real crimes, but merely for technical violations of their parole. Most parole officers are under-funded and overworked, and it's easier (and safer) simply to send violators back to prison.

Angela Hawken and Mark Kleiman reported on a variation of this theme in TAP a few months ago, discussing a new probation program for drug users in Hawaii that "cuts recidivism and curbs [the flow of probationers] to over-crowded jails and prisons." The idea is that quick, mild sanctions for probationers work better than sporadic, draconian punishments. It's not an ultraliberal program (that label goes to the treatment-diversion program passed in 2001), but the early reports are encouraging. It does require more money upfront--to pay for the extra probation officers--but saves money in the long run.

I'm not sure we'll see more than scattered efforts along these lines, though. There have been a few stories lately about how even conservative Republicans are now thinking about ways to reduce the U.S. prison population. And a Pew survey in 2005 suggested that crime had largely disappeared as a top voter concern, suggesting the frenzy has subsided (or found other targets). But progress seemed more likely a few years ago, when state deficits were exploding, and that momentum seems to have waned. Jacobson points out that many governors can unilaterally change their states' parole policies, so that seems like the most fruitful path, but the trouble is that all it takes are one or two high-profile crimes by parolees and, voila, reform is dead.

Over at Brookings, Tamara Cofman Wittes' has a lot to say in her latest, long-ish essay about joint Euro-American efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East. Here are some of the best points:

1) The various Middle East Initiatives now underway do a lot of good, but one thing they don't do is provide security guarantees to various Arab states, like the Helsinki accords did. So Arab leaders are understandably a bit cagey about the whole thing.

2) Western governments need to make economic aid conditional on political reform somehow. They haven't really figured this out yet. Arab leaders, hence, can get away with "controlled liberalization" and not much reform. This will continue on indefinitely until the U.S. and Europe get their shit figured out.

3) "The West" is not all of one mind on Arab reform. Europeans, for instance, worry mostly about poor and uneducated Arabs migrating to Europe and stirring up trouble. The U.S. worries mostly about terrorism. But those two concerns aren't at all the same. Economic development alone can help stem the former, but the latter problem really requires the spread of actual democracy and better human rights.

4) In fact, economic reform alone might actually produce more international terrorism in the short term, by creating "economic dislocation and exaggerated income disparity." That seems about right. I'd add that one of the most striking features of both the 9/11 terrorists and the bulk of Palestinians who joined the two intifadas was that they weren't poor, or uneducated, or backwards in any relevant social sense. Most of them, though, shared a sense of relative poverty—the sense that their talents were under-appreciated or under-deployed. In many ways, it's the white-collar victims of outsourcing who start blowing stuff up. Not a great analogy, but still.

5) Here's a Catch-22. Arab despots tend to restrict all forums for political organization but one: mosques. So naturally, Islamists are the best-developed political groups in the Arab world. Those same Arab despots then use this fact to argue against free elections, lest the Islamists take power. Sneaky bastards.

6) There are really two types of Arab liberals. First, those who protest and clamor for attention and swell the hearts of bloggers everywhere and usually get thrown in prison. These are a minority in the Arab world, though still a potential catalyst for change. Second, there are those pragmatic professionals—doctors, businessmen, lawyers—who try to effect change within civil society itself. Wittes argues that the challenge here is for the West to "support those liberals who are working for change within their existing systems, but in a way that doesn't end up legitimizing the system itself." Conversely, the West will want to support liberal activists, but not to the point where they simply oppose the regime and end up in jail. It's delicate.

7) Both the United States and Europe could use its own assimilated Muslim immigrants as a voice for moderation. But obviously that means not pissing off those constituencies at home.

The Los Angeles Times reports on a growing backlash against mandatory minimum sentencing laws, which, of course, can lead to absurdly long prison sentences in cases where they clearly aren't warranted. One example: A 52-year-old woman with a history of mental illness was recently sentenced to 159 years in prison as an "accomplice" after her live-in boyfriend pleaded guilty to a series of armed robberies in Montana. Then there are all of the absurdly steep "minimum" sentences for non-violent drug crimes, and so on.

Judges are getting even more vocal about the need for more leeway. As best I can tell, United States v. Booker, in which the Supreme Court ruled that sentencing guidelines should only be "advisory," didn't change much. But the Court's hearing two new cases on Tuesday: one dealing with how closely judges have to follow the guidelines, the other dealing with the 100-to-1 disparity in punishments for crack and powder cocaine, a disparity that hits poor black Americans hardest. (The United States Sentencing Commission has just proposed to reduce the penalties for crack offenses, though Congress can still veto the proposal.)

We'll see if things actually change. Somehow I can't see the Roberts Court going all mushy. But it's hard to imagine that anyone's still unaware of the problems with having a massive prison state. Just read any of the dozens of new books on the subject. Even some hardcore Republicans like Jeff Sessions support reform. It was also nice to see Barack Obama outline some semi-concrete proposals last week, such as a promise to "review mandatory minimum drug sentencing." But, all that said, there are still plenty of Democrats wary of doing anything that could get them tagged as "soft on crime," and two decades of sentencing policies certainly aren't going to be reversed overnight.

Over at TPMCafe, Petey brings up my favorite pasttime—hammering away at just how un-democratic the electoral institutions of the United States really are—and points out that these un-democratic institutions also happen to be hurting the large-d Democrats. "Red" states, for instance, get disproportionate representation in the Senate, the electoral college, etc. etc. Yes it's a real shame, though believe me, the fortunes of the Democratic Party is not what keeps me up at night. Nevertheless, Petey also notes that the likelihood of real electoral reform, which would include: abolishing the Electoral College, experimenting with proportional representation, giving the hundreds of thousands of citizens living in our nation's capital some sort of political standing, maybe even passing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing—oh I dunno—the right to vote, maybe... sadly, the likelihood of those sorts of major changes happening is nil.

For the most part I agree, although I still intend to clamor for this stuff at every turn. One should also note that not all electoral reform is out of reach; smaller stuff at the margins is certainly possible. For example, if we can just disabuse little states of the notion that they benefit from the Electoral College (they don't), maybe we can get that monstrosity abolished. Meanwhile, it's often forgotten that single-member House districts didn't become a federal requirement until the 1960s—there's no reason we can't reverse the trend and start electing representatives on a statewide basis. And some state -level experiments—like doing away with bicameral legislatures, which are really quite ridiculous when you think about it—could be tried. Heck, one day liberals might even get to install a few Supreme Court Justices who don't believe that the whole purpose of Equal Protection Clause is to deny minorities political representation. One can hope! So yeah, there are incremental things to be done, although I agree, even those aren't easy.

Nevertheless, there's one major blight to our democratic system that is both entirely shameful and easy to fix. It has to do with prisoners and voting rights. Ideally, one day I'd like to see all prisoners given the right to vote—yes, even while they're in prison. (The picture on the right is a Canadian prisoner voting in 2004.) But that's so whoppingly pie-in-the-sky that I'll settle for a constitutional amendment that guarantees ex-felons, at least, the right to vote. That 1.4 million Americans who have repaid their debt to society cannot vote is not something that should stand.

Nevertheless, many people are opposed to even that, and while I think they're wrong, I don't think they're unreasonable. What is unreasonable, however, is this: despite the fact that prisoners can't vote, they are still counted for census and reapportionment purposes to swell and fatten House districts. Going back to the partisan theme here, since prisoners are usually shipped from heavily minority urban areas to prisons located in overwhelmingly white rural areas, this, shall we say, benefits one party more than the other. Republican State Sen. Dale Volker in New York, for instance, gets to count the 11,000 Attica prisoners as part of his district, despite the fact that they certainly aren't allowed to vote for him, or anyone else for that matter. Effectively, the whole scam redistributes power away from urban communities.

This sort of practice, of course, isn't new. It's exactly what Southerners did with slaves prior to emancipation—the slaves would be counted in the census as part of the population (each slave counted as three-fifths of a person), so as to give Southern stats more House seats and more Electoral College votes, but those slaves could not, of course cast a vote. Now regardless of how you feel about giving prisoners the right to vote, there is nothing even remotely approaching a principled argument in favor of counting the 2.5 million disenfranchised prisoners for census and reapportionment purposes. It has to end. And just this one tiny, simple, wholly defensible reform would make the United States at least a wee bit more democratic. Hey, change has to start somewhere.

The Times has a long piece on crime in New York City today, noting that Mayor Bloomberg is pushing to take credit for the massive—and mostly mysterious—20 percent drop in citywide crime since 2001, a decline that has outpaced the rest of the nation. Only towards the end does the piece give a sense that no one really knows why crime has been declining. A few years ago, Andrew Karmen wrote an important book on the decrease in New York City's homicide rate during the 1990s, arguing that neither more effective police measures, nor greater incarceration rates, nor economic development had a decisive effect on crime rates. (Nor was it due to the bold, manly resolve of Rudy Giuliani; see Stephanie Mencimer's review for a summary.) Karmen ended up pointing to four possible explanations: better education, an influx of immigrants (who commit less crime), demographics (criminals getting older), and death (criminals dying out).

Case closed? Not quite. It's not clear that these four factors applied to, for instance, San Diego or Washington D.C., two other cities that saw a jaw-dropping decrease in homicides during the 1990s. (San Diego tends to get feted often by liberals, who point to its success with community policing.) Nor is it clear that the New York City factors can be extrapolated nationwide. For that, you have Steve Leavitt famously arguing that legalized abortion caused the national crime drop—by leading to fewer unwanted pregnancies, and hence the depletion of a demographic at greater risk of growing up and committing crimes—although his theory isn't, as far as I know, entirely conclusive. Basically, no one really knows what makes crime go away, and the safe, namby-pamby answer is that it seems like you need a whole confluence of factors to cause a decrease; none of which can necessarily trace back to one mayor or set of urban policies. No one will hire me to write campaign slogans for a mayoral race, but there you go.

On the other hand, the widespread drop in the crime rate does mean two important things, politically. First, crime as an issue, both in urban areas and nationally, has been plummeting lately. A Pew poll way back in January showed that "crime" basically dropped off the map dramatically as a political issue after 9/11, which didn't really spell the death of "law and order" Republicans nationwide—see Jerry Kilgore's campaign in Virginia for an example—but somewhat lessened their influence, which, I think, can only be a good thing. (Indeed, among conservatives, Harriet Miers' bleeding heart views on criminal justice seem to be the least offensive thing about her.)

More to the point, it can potentially help rally public support around sensible measures to roll back the prison-industrial complex in this country—a complex that has played at most a supporting role in the great crime drop of the 1990s, but brings fairly obvious budgetary and societal costs. Especially with state budget crunches, there's some evidence that voters have had enough. Here in California, opposition to the "Three Strikes" rule nearly passed last fall until Schwarzenegger unleashed his multi-million dollar crusade against Prop. 66. Still, the vote was close. My preferred idea would be to start with parole reform, since, according to a 2002 Justice Department study, of the 51.8 percent of ex-convicts returned to prison, more than half (26.8 percent) are sent back not for committing a new crime, but for violating conditions of their parole (many of which are mere technical violations). That shit ain't right, and the happy part here is that it's not at all impossible to fix some of the most senseless aspects of parole. But one should note that the national homicide rate could just as mysteriously start ticking up again sometime in the near future, provoking an irrational public to support ineffectual "tough on crime" policies once again, so the time to change things is really right now.

Two demographic trends, side by side. Leonard Steinhorn has a Salon piece suggesting that the conservative "moral majority" is dwindling, with young voters more racially tolerant and more sexually liberal than the country as a whole. (Via Matthew Yglesias.) Bad for the Republicans, eh? Perhaps not: In the Economist, Adrian Woolridge observes that the number of voters favoring the "pro-growth" message of the Republican party are rapidly growing. So what happens when these two trends collide?

It's not enough, I think, to argue that the emergence of a culturally liberal set will automatically augur well for the future of the Democrats. Political parties are all about coalition-building, and those sexually liberated young'uns still have a lot of incentive to join up with the Republican coalition so long as that party has a monopoly on the "pro-growth" economic message.

This is a trickier problem than it looks. From where I stand, the Republicans have nothing at all to do with pro-growth policies—DeLay-style cronyism actually hinders economic growth, as does the refusal to invest publicly in research and development, the pseudo-injunction against stem-cell research, and the dominance of vested corporate interests against various paths to economic growth. (The 2004 corporate tax bill, for instance.) But that's merely the perspective of one partisan hack who follows these issues daily. On the wider electoral stage, once the Democrats start railing against corporate excess, it's very easy for them to get painted into an "anti-growth" corner. Resistance to private savings accounts and tax reform, however well-intentioned, will only make this situation worse.

That means that so long as sex and cultural liberalism does not appear too imperiled—so long as the Republicans aren't actually banning abortion outright (which they probably won't) or sending gay people off too prison (which they definitely won't)—the balance of considerations will throw these pro-growth young cultural liberals back into the Republican coalition. Furthermore, so long as the religious right is part of this coalition, they'll appear to be part of the mainstream, regardless of how much Steinhorn thinks they should be marginalized.

The way out, I think, involves actually understanding tensions within the GOP coalition. One of the less-noted facts about the religious right is that it has a fairly natural antipathy to the "pro-growth" vision of America. I'm not just talking about the poor in the religious right, but the whole nine yards. The idea of a tight-knit "Christian community" that you find across the Baptist South is very much at odds with the radical egalitarianism you find in, say, Silicon Valley. Now Tom Frank would say that the way to exploit this divide is to appeal to the former—via economic populism—in order to crack up the coalition. That seems dubious to me, though there's some evidence that it could work (namely, Stan Greenberg's contention that Bush won in 2004 because economic issues faded in the last few days of the campaign, allowing cultural issues came back to the fore). Personally, I'm more partial to figuring out a message of "economic dynamism" that appeals to Woolridge's rapidly-growing exurbs and pro-growth voters—and by extension, utterly marginalizes what we consider the far-right. The Naderite criticism here is that doing so only pushes the Democrats further into corporate arms. But I don't think it has to. More later...