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"Conservatives latch onto prison reform"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the headline of this terrific article in today's Los Angeles Times.  Here are excerpts: Reduced sentences for drug crimes.  More job training and rehabilitation programs for nonviolent offenders.  Expanded alternatives to doing hard time. In the not-too-distant past, conservatives might have derided those concepts as mushy-headed liberalism ? the essence of "soft on crime."  Nowadays, these same ideas are central to a strategy being packaged as "conservative criminal justice reform," and have rolled out in right-leaning states around the country in an effort to rein in budget-busting corrections costs. Encouraged by the recent success of reform efforts in Republican-dominated Texas ? where prison population growth has slowed and crime is down ? conservative leaders elsewhere have embraced their own versions of the strategy...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on January 29, 2011 (boomark / email).