IN A NEWSLETTER ARTICLE, Jim Liske, the director of Prison Fellowship, recounted the difficulty that researchers faced when they tried to statistically measure the intrinsic motivation for someone in prison to change. “They were having a hard time,” according to Liske, “because they were trying to analyze the supernatural—the unique power of God’s Holy Spirit to transform hearts [and renew] the spirits of men and women from the inside out.”1 Faith-based ministries serve the age-old Christian purpose of rebirthing the self and they save money for the prison system. They use empirical arguments about heart change to say that faith-based programming reduces recidivism and use supernatural arguments to say that prison ministry enacts a more profound change than anything else.
When I visited Lawtey Correctional Institution in Florida, a group of around two hundred men gathered in the prison chapel to see their fellow prisoners enact this very idea. Everyone watched raptly as the Christian-based drama group His Majesty’s Ministries performed One Thing. The stage set looked like the prison yard, where three groups of men bantered with one another. As one group began speaking, the other two froze into tableaus. In the first exchange, the character Buster says to Jim that when he gets out, he’s never coming back. “Yeah, how do you know that?” Jim asks skeptically. “Because I’m smarter now.” “Oh, really?” “Yep, I’ve learned all kinds of new things in here. Ways to buy and sell dope without getting caught. Can’t miss.” Jim replies, “Uh-huh, that’s what they all say, but they end up right back here anyway.” “Not me, I’m too smart now.” “Tell me about it,” Jim asks, and they huddle together and freeze. The next pair, playing Butch and Mickey, repeats the conversation, except Butch declares that he is smarter because he has learned how to rob banks without getting caught. The final two men, Tony and Jack, again repeat the conversation verbatim, until its end, when Tony explains, “I’ve learned all kinds of new things in here. Things I never knew before.” Jack retorts that they all say the same thing and they all end up back in prison. Tony replies, “Not me. I met this man named Jesus and I don’t even want to do the things I used to do.” “Tell me about it,” says Jack.
Measuring heart change empirically has proved elusive and contested. Byron Johnson, a professor at Baylor University, has conducted studies of the Prison Fellowship InnerChange program and Humaita Prison in Brazil, and is currently conducting a study at Louisiana State Penitentiary and Darrington in Texas over time to determine prisoners’ transformation through the seminary programs.2 In his book, More God, Less Crime, Johnson, a strong proponent of Christian ministries, argues that “the conversion experience in and of itself is not enough to protect ex-prisoners from all manner of missteps they might take following release from prison.” He goes on to say that in-prison programs are a start but that ex-prisoners need “significantly more support” in order for there to be an impact on recidivism.3 Johnson contends that even if spiritual or religious conversions do not necessarily relate to reduced reincarceration and arrests, and that more research is needed, “I do believe that ‘finding God’ or becoming a born-again Christian can play a critically important role as a starting point in the process of long-term change and reform.”4 Whatever the data may reveal, Johnson wants to make the case that the effect of prison ministries is still profound. The issue with evaluation of prison ministry relates to broader questions of how we define what it is to “become a new person” and what metrics determine that transformation.5 Similarly, if recidivism is the sole measure of a program’s impact, someone could be homeless on the outside, lacking a job or struggling with mental health issues, but still be considered a success.
In fact, studies on the effect of faith-based prison programs are inconclusive and often show no correlation between participation in faith-based programs and recidivism. Mark Kleiman, at New York University’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, analyzed a study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society reporting that InnerChange graduates had been rearrested and reimprisoned at dramatically lower rates than a matched control group in 2003.6 He found that the study showed selection bias: it focused on graduates who kept a job after release, while ignoring those who didn’t finish the program.7 The InnerChange study started with 177 volunteer prisoners; 75 graduated. A graduate was defined as someone who found a job upon release. Getting a job is one of the best predictors of who stays out of prison. Thus, the study focused on the success of the successes, according to Kleiman and ignored those who dropped out, were kicked out, or received early parole and thus didn’t finish the program. A 2007 study of Florida’s faith-based prisons by the Urban Institute presented similar problems.8
Since then, Alexander Volokh, a law professor, has undertaken a comprehensive evaluation of all the studies that claim faith-based groups reduce recidivism and compared them with similar studies on private education.9 Volokh examined studies of Humaita Prison in Brazil, the Florida faith-based prison programs, Life Horizons in the federal system, Prison Fellowship InnerChange and Discipleship programs, Kairos Horizons in two prisons, a religious program at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, and a religious group at Lieber Correctional Institute in South Carolina. All, he found, lacked validity because of selection bias. The studies simply compared faith-based participants with nonparticipants, and the former skew results because the programs are voluntary and volunteers are more likely to be motivated to change. The only credible studies, Volokh argues, are comparisons of participants with nonparticipants who volunteered for the same programs but were rejected, which would eliminate selection bias. “After discarding the faith-based prison studies tainted by self-selection bias,” he says, “we’re left with two studies that find no effect of faith-based programs, one study that’s too small to be meaningful, and three studies that find some effect, even if the effect is quite weak.” Of the three that found some effect, two were after-care release programs rather than programs in prisons. The third didn’t show any effect once the prisoners were released from prison. Volokh concludes, “So we have no study that actually finds a significant effect of an in-prison faith-based program on recidivism.”10
When recidivism isn’t the only measure of success, some studies of faith-based groups have claimed that religious groups in prisons are effective. One study by the Manhattan Institute in 2005 argued that religiosity reduces the likelihood of fighting and arguing.11 Another report claimed that higher levels of religion in prison correlate with higher levels of mental and physical health, and that faith-based groups “dispense services more effectively than their secular and governmental counterparts.”12 Volokh concedes that, while the studies don’t demonstrate a reduction in recidivism, we don’t have to dismiss them outright: “It may be that a faith-based program is better than nothing. . . . But, at the same time, the program may be no better than a comparably funded secular program.”13 To answer this question, Volokh believes we need comparative studies of secular and religious programs with volunteers who were rejected from a religious group and assigned to a comparable secular program. The problem is that, in prison, the programs are rarely comparable. The reality is that the alternative to a religious group is often nothing at all.
Nevertheless, states view faith-based groups as the ideal solution to prison overcrowding, management, and the increasing lack of state resources for any programs. In May 2011, after hearing arguments in a case about abysmal medical conditions and overcrowding in California state prisons, the US Supreme Court ordered the state to release thirty thousand prisoners from its behemoth penal system. The dissent included remarks by Justice Antonin Scalia, who warned that “most of them will be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness; and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym.” The legal case was notable for its mandate to free so many, a rarity given the political risks of being “soft on crime.” The decision reflected California’s acute budget crisis and the fact that conditions in some of the prisons are what sociologist Loïc Wacquant has described as “a murky factory for social pain and human destruction, silently grinding away.”14 A few days after the historic decision, Pat Nolan of Prison Fellowship issued a press statement in which he applauded the decision and stressed how organizations like Prison Fellowship must now “find ways to help the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation comply with the Court’s order without putting the public at risk,” because California and most states lacked sufficient funds to prepare incarcerated men and women for release. Nolan wrote, “Fortunately, faith-based and community groups have been stepping up to do this work at no cost to the government!”15
As states face budget constraints coincident with decarceration, proponents of faith-based imprisonment claim they can transform prisoners into citizens more effectively and at a lower cost. In 2003, Ellsworth Correctional Facility in Kansas cut its GED program in half and eliminated the substance-abuse program, but opened a Prison Fellowship ministry. Jerry Wilger, head of InnerChange, said, “We already offer GED, substance-abuse, and pre-release programs. If we get sex-offender treatment, we’ll have the whole ball of wax for the state at a bargain-basement price.” “We have a very positive relationship with the board. Sometimes they just give our inmates a green light and say, ‘See you at work release,’” said Larry Furnish, former InnerChange program manager at Ellsworth. Kansas has only 298 coveted work-release positions for about nine thousand former prisoners.
Nolan asserts that not only can his organization perform the work of the state more cheaply and efficiently, reducing recidivism, it can also enact a powerful, life-changing transformation within prisoners. In one newsletter, Nolan recalls being at an Out4Life conference sponsored by Prison Fellowship with Matt Cate, California’s secretary of corrections and rehabilitation.16 At the conference, hundreds of leaders from faith-based and community groups met with corrections officials and law enforcement leaders to build local coalitions for providing reentry services both before and after release. Moving into the vacuum left by the rise of the punitive model of incarceration, Prison Fellowship and other groups now organize job training, GED and college classes, and work-release and other programs. The state saves precious money by outsourcing the labor of running programs in prison to religious volunteers. With few other options, prisoners apply to get into the coveted faith-based prisons and programs with larger cells, less crowding and violence, coveted work-release assignments, air-conditioning, and other perks.
Religious groups that take over social services once provided by state and federal agencies fulfill two goals: bringing more people to Christ and shrinking government. As Chuck Colson once elaborated in a radio interview, “What’s at stake is not just a prison program, but how we deal with social problems in our country. Do we do it through grassroots organizations or big government? We know what works.”17 This is the rationale for the conservative momentum toward criminal justice and prison reform. The faith-based ministries and Right on Crime, the coalition of conservative leaders, espouse policies based on the idea that social welfare is not about governmental responsibility, and that religious organizations are best suited to create the conditions of institutional care giving and moral community in a prison setting.
The Right on Crime coalition emerged in 2010 when the Federal Bureau of Prisons and individual states came under intense political pressure to tighten budgets in a time of economic recession.18 In early 2011, Newt Gingrich and Pat Nolan wrote an article entitled “Prison Reform: A Smart Way for States to Save Money and Lives.”19 Breaking ranks with fellow Republicans, the editorial urged conservative legislators to lead the charge in reforming prisons as states faced severe budget shortfalls. They announced the Right on Crime movement to encourage states to reform their criminal justice systems without compromising public safety. Signatories included Republican economic and social luminaries such as Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Richard Viguerie, Jeb Bush, and Ed Meese. In 2012, the Pew Research Center issued the results of a survey on sentencing and corrections policy in the United States that implied the public was ready for policies that reduce prison populations and spending.20
The coalition reframed prison reform as a fiscal imperative, aligning it with limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise. It cited the same statistics as the opponents of prison did: $68 billion were spent on prisons in 2010, 300 percent more than twenty-five years ago, and even as crime rates plummeted, incarceration rates continued to rise.21 Nolan and Gingrich argued that prisons might be worth the cost if the recidivism rate was not so high. The system is broken, they wrote, and conservatives must fix it through cost-effective approaches that enhance public safety. At the state level, Right on Crime has supported decarceration for drug offenders, minimum wage compensation for prison labor, prison construction moratoriums, eradication of “zero tolerance” policies in public schools, more drug courts, better probation systems, and community treatment centers for the mentally ill and drug addicts.
Many organizations traditionally associated with the Right and the Left now support much of the Right on Crime agenda. The Coalition for Public Safety now includes the NAACP, Americans for Tax Reform, the Faith & Freedom Coalition, the Center for American Progress, Freedom-Works, the Koch brothers, the ACLU, and Families Against Mandatory Minimums.22 The coalition’s mandate is to bring “together the nation’s most prominent conservative and progressive organizations to pursue an aggressive criminal justice reform effort.”23 The coalition had an initial funding of $5 million from Koch Industries, Laura and John Arnold, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Coalition director Christine Leonard says, “There are different reasons why people come into this conversation. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter why they’re at the table, because I think when they get there, they find there’s more they agree upon than they disagree on.”24 A summit on criminal justice led by political activist Van Jones; Democratic senators Cory Booker, Patrick Leahy, and Sheldon Whitehouse; and Republican counterparts Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Rob Portman, and John Cornyn occurred in March 2015.25
In 2011, Pat Robertson, a prominent leader of the Christian Right, announced to his undoubtedly startled audience on his conservative Christian program The 700 Club that he supported the legalization of marijuana and an end to long prison sentences for drug offenses. He told them, “I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol. I’ve never used marijuana and I don’t intend to, but it’s just one of those things that I think, this war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded. I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up.”
He continued, “Prisons are being overcrowded, and the penalties, the maximums, some of them could get ten years for possession of a joint of marijuana. It makes no sense at all. If people can go into a liquor store and buy a bottle of alcohol and drink it at home legally, then why do we say that the use of this other substance is somehow criminal?”26
Robertson seems an unlikely champion of the decriminalization of drugs and of prison reform, but his confession bespeaks the notable shift in the rhetoric of some Republicans and elite Christian conservatives who historically shied away from the taboo topic of emptying prisons in favor of tough-on-crime policies. Robertson ended his segment by noting, “If you follow the teaching of Christ, you know that Christ is a compassionate man,” he said. “And he would not condone the imprisoning of people for nonviolent offenses.”
Underlying the conservative movement for prison reform and Robertson’s statement are decades of work by Christian conservatives such as Chuck Colson and Pat Nolan, who long argued that people in prison can experience an inner revolution and remake themselves through faith. Their notion of religious transformation fits neatly with the conservative consensus on prison reform. Both, for instance, espouse individual effort, responsibility, and a resistance to state programs. In an era in which privatization is championed as a solution to bureaucratic excess, Right on Crime advocates argue that the problems created by the astronomical numbers of incarcerated men and women and dwindling state budgets can be remedied through a combination of private religious organizations and state and federal funds to transform convicts into religiously redeemed citizens. Faith-based imprisonment is also part of a broader conservative impulse to reframe welfare, drug abuse, and incarceration as individual problems of self-transformation and self-responsibility. One man, who was not in the Prison Fellowship InnerChange program, noted, “The Christians do lots of stuff the state used to do, like vocational programs, but now they’re only for believers.”27
The conservative consensus on prison reform is a result of alliances between evangelicals in prison ministry like Nolan and free-market policy analysts like Marc Levin. Levin’s office at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in downtown Austin is remarkably messy for a man who has organized a national coalition on prison reform and is flying out to advise Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives, on the same issues the next day. When I meet him there, Levin looks as if he has been hunkered down in his office for weeks instead of arriving twenty minutes earlier. Piles of paper verging on the brink of collapse are everywhere and food containers monopolize every other bit of conceivable space. Levin’s law degree certificate and a certificate from the Order of the Coil peek out from amid the clutter on the wall.
The TPPF is part of a network of state public-policy centers and think tanks, connected by free-market ideology and funded by Colson and Nolan’s Justice Fellowship and the Heritage Foundation. Levin miraculously cleared some space for both of us and related the origins of what has become a national movement for prison reform. Texas, where Levin and others engineered what became known as the “Texas Turnaround,” is an unlikely leader in prison reform, given its vast prison system and punitive history. Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, Texas has executed more people in prison than the next six states combined. More than one in ten prisoners in the United States are incarcerated in Texas, with the prison population there nearly tripling since 1992. The prison population in Texas grew from about 50,000 in 1990 to a peak of 173,000 in 2010, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, a 346 percent increase; during the same period, the overall US prison population doubled, to 1.5 million.28 The War on Drugs was in full swing and crime rates were high; Texas couldn’t build prisons fast enough to accommodate the growing number of prisoners. The state began shipping some people to county prisons. Private, for-profit prisons sprang up to handle the overflow.
During Democratic governor Ann Richards’s administration, Texas installed a hundred thousand new beds and, by 2006, even those beds were full. The same year, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice director Brad Livingston approached state legislators with a problem: outside observers were projecting the state’s prison population would grow by fifteen thousand inmates in the following six years. He would need $523 million to build a sufficient number of prison beds to house those potential prisoners. Levin worked with Dr. Ana Yáñez-Correa, former executive director of the progressive Texas Criminal Justice Coalition; state senator John Whitmire and state representative Jerry Madden, both law-and-order advocates; and Tony Fabelo, a twenty-year veteran of the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council to create new criminal justice policies for Texas that would include privately run drug treatment programs for people who violated parole, pretrial diversion for the mentally ill, and more options for people on parole and probation. Their proposals were contentious politically, but in 2011, the state legislature voted to close a prison in Sugar Land, near Houston, the first time Texas had shut a prison in 166 years.29 They were not, however, able to reduce sentencing laws that keep people in prison for their entire lives.
Around the same time, Levin began meeting with prominent national leaders like Nolan and Eugene Meyer of the Federalist Society. Nolan was an invaluable ally because he already possessed an extensive network of friends in Washington from his days as a politician.30 Their objective was to build a conservative consensus on prison reform.31 It was an effort to shift not just policy but ideology and change influential conservative politicians’ and policymakers’ minds about the purpose of prisons. The language of “tough on crime” was supplanted by “right on crime” and now “smart on crime.” (The framing of the issue creates a dichotomy in which, if you aren’t tough on crime, you are weak on crime, and now, if you aren’t right or smart on crime, you’re simply wrong.) Levin and Nolan’s coalition has enabled prominent politicians and leaders to sign on to Right on Crime without feeling they are compromising public safety and economic austerity.
Levin advises and speaks throughout the country, conferring with senators, congressional representatives, state governors, and others about how to save money for their states by reducing expenditures on prisons. He is emphatic that the coalition is not a centrist effort. He won’t sign on to a policy or initiative if Right on Crime is the only conservative organization participating, because it will undermine the conservative credentials of the movement. Right on Crime and the conservative prison-reform movement in general focus predominantly on drug offenses, interrupting the school-to-prison pipeline, removing juveniles from the system, increasing the parole rate, and restoring justice initiatives. When confronted with the bleakest prison issues, like solitary confinement, Levin favors a finance and safety argument rather than one that addresses the ethics of solitary confinement, which philosopher Lisa Guenther terms a “social death” and “an assault on being.”32 Levin advocates a step-down approach in which a person moves from solitary confinement to limited contact to the general population because a person recently discharged from solitary will have mental health issues and isn’t fit to be released into public life. Levin’s policy initiatives and those of the broader Coalition for Public Safety lack any critique of the ethics of solitary confinement or the incarceration of juveniles.
Some have argued that diversion programs and new parole systems merely recreate a prison beyond the walls. Proposals like privatized, for-profit halfway houses and treatment centers, and parole monitoring and tracking only expand the supervisory state.33 They are also ripe for abuse. If the goal is to fill a private addiction program or parole program, then what incentive would those programs have to help people get out? They need to fill spaces to continue to be profitable. Jill McCorkel describes this scenario in a women’s prison in Pennsylvania that contracted with a private drug treatment program.34 A central question is whether community supervision, expanded treatment, and increased use of sanctions other than prison for minor parole and probation violations effectively addresses the system of mass incarceration in the United States or merely compounds and supplements.
Mark Kleiman recently proposed dealing with people who commit violent crimes without reducing public safety by monitoring them in their homes 24/7. This would reduce the prison population by 80 percent, he argues. He posted a provocative proposal on Vox, suggesting that people would be released from prison before their sentences were up and placed in apartments rented by the government.35 Once there, they would be monitored continuously via web cam, while being assigned public-service jobs. They would retain their status as prisoners and be subject to strict rules regarding things like curfew, drug use, and geographic location. Each apartment would be located in a community otherwise populated by fully free citizens and would function, in the words of Kleiman and his coauthors, “as a prison without bars.”36 Kleiman’s slightly dystopian proposal isn’t so farfetched, considering the technology now employed to maintain our current system of security, such as E-Verify, drones and aerial surveillance, GPS and neighborhood lockdown, handheld fingerprint machines, facial recognition, weaponized ankle bracelets, and cell-phone tracking.
The faith-based strand of prison reform in Texas also has a long history of receiving federal funds. As governor of Texas, George W. Bush supported and promoted the Prison Fellowship pilot programs in a Texas prison. In 1996, the Texas Governor’s Advisory Task Force on Faith-Based Community Service Groups, appointed by Bush, issued Faith in Action: A New Vision for Church-State Cooperation, a report that identified pressing social problems, attacked “today’s welfare system,” called for the privatization of welfare, and announced that government had a key role to play as an “enabler” of faith-based groups that could respond more effectively to those problems.37
When he became president, Bush signed an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) in January 2001. The rationale behind the faith-based policies was to ensure that religious organizations were equal competitors for government funding; the Bush administration claimed the federal government had discriminated against faith-based organizations in the past. Since 2001, faith-based organizations have received $1.1 billion in federal and state funding with the mandate to focus their efforts on at-risk youth, ex-offenders and prisoners, homeless men and women, substance abusers, and welfare-to-work families.38 The OFBCI chose Prison Fellowship as one of four national partners for a $22.5 million workplace reentry program for ex-offenders.39 Former PF officials also lead Dare Mighty Things, which received a $2.2 million grant by the Department of Health and Human Services and now serves as a clearinghouse for faith-based and community groups applying for federal money.40
On February 5, 2009, President Obama signed Amendments to Executive Order 13199, establishing the White House Office and President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. That office works across eleven government agencies as a resource for nonprofits and community organizations, both secular and religious, for financial resources and access to grants. In his 2009 inaugural speech, Obama struck a balance between the necessity for government intervention in a period of economic emergency and the power of individuals to effect change in their own lives: “But no matter how much money we invest or how sensibly we design our policies, the change that Americans are looking for will not come from government alone.”41
The efficacy of these new religious and political coalitions around prisons is based on differing views of what has caused mass incarceration as we know it today. One misconception is that the prison system is a result of tough-on-crime policies supported only by conservative politicians. In fact, it was bipartisan dynamics that helped build the prison system, as Naomi Murakawa argues in The First Civil Right.42 President Ronald Reagan may have kicked off the War on Drugs and pushed the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, but President Bill Clinton gave us the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, providing nearly $10 billion for funding new prisons in the 1990s. Senator Joseph Biden led the Senate in amending the provisions of Clinton’s 1994 omnibus crime bill: it expanded the death penalty and created new mandatory minimum sentences.
A constellation of economic, social, and political factors has fueled prison growth, and scholars have come to argue that crime is not the driver of incarceration.43 Recently, scholars and others have begun to demonstrate that crime and incarceration are not causal. Some portion of the current decline in crime is attributable to tough sentencing and release policies, but crime is also affected by trends in employment and drug-abuse rates. To counteract the argument that more prisons lead to less crime, the Sentencing Project found that states that lagged behind the national average in rising incarceration rates during the 1990s actually experienced a steeper decline in crime rates than states above the national average.
Some scholars have taken the view that prisons are a response to social movements and a way for the state to manage and control surplus populations. Jonathan Simon, a University of California-Berkeley law professor, argues that mass imprisonment is a new approach not just to manage crime but manage society.44 He outlines how an insular, risk-averse, and punitive social ethic has reshaped not only how the bottom half lives but how the top half does as well. Robert Perkinson, the author of Texas Tough, argues that the prison boom is a backlash against the civil rights movement: “It was states’-rights conservatives, inspired by George Wallace, who first seized on crime as a polarizing issue in national politics; the Republican Right thereafter picked up the baton and used it as a cudgel against liberalism for almost half a century.”45 Perkinson shows that just as convict leasing, lynching, and segregation developed in the turbulent wake of the emancipation of slaves, mass imprisonment took hold in reaction to the first African American freedom movement, the civil rights movement. In the latter, as white conservatives surrendered on integration, they insisted on getting much tougher on crime, to which they symbolically chained a host of developments they found troubling, from civil disobedience to urban rebellions. In 1960, the US prison population was 60 percent white. By 2005, it was 70 percent nonwhite. In the same Southern jurisdictions that avidly resisted integration, prison populations first started to grow (in the late 1960s versus the mid-1970s nationally) and experienced intense expansion.
In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander traces the rise of the carceral system to the drug wars and their disproportionate effect on African American communities.46 Beginning in the 1970s, police, prosecutors, judges, and parole boards also began to exert their enormous discretionary power in a more punitive way, which included stiffer punishments for drug offenses, the proliferation of mandatory minimums, three-strikes laws, truth-in-sentencing legislation, draconian sex-offender measures, mandatory sentencing guidelines, and life sentences.47 The War on Drugs also conjured the specter of “the super-predator,” a pathological and violent inner-city youth whose moral sense is so degraded that rehabilitation is not a possibility.48 Ironically, John DiIulio, who went on to direct the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and support many studies about faith-based programs under George Bush’s presidency, coined the phrase “super-predator” and ushered in the laws that enabled juveniles to be sentenced as adults and placed in adult prisons, often without the possibility of parole.
Law-and-order candidates for political office have consistently performed better at election time in the United States. Americans’ collective reactions to violent crime—especially homicide, which rocketed upward in the 1960s, leveled off in the 1980s, and fell in the 1990s—are so pervasive, Jonathan Simon contends, that crime fighting has become a paradigmatic means of governing, a pathway to authority and legitimacy for policymakers.49 Governors and presidents, even more so after 9/11, have increasingly posed as lawmen on the campaign trail, while crime victims have become an idealized class of citizens deemed especially worthy of government intervention.
The strides made by Right on Crime to make prisons a national issue cannot be discounted. In 2015, President Obama visited a maximum-security prison in Maryland. In the 2016 election, unlike in previous election cycles, presidential candidates have actively debated mass incarceration.
Right on Crime has made an impact on policy, but it has also performed the ideological work of shifting perceptions of prisons and punishment. Faith-based ministries, with their emphasis on the potential for change, are a crucial piece of this ideological shift in how the public views people in prison. While Levin focuses on fiscal responsibility and safety, the ministries in prison highlight the individual’s potential for change. American attitudes about punishment derive from underlying cultural norms in American identity, according to law professor Robert Ferguson, who elaborates a typology of cultural traits and their implications for why we punish so severely in America. These traits are proportionality, mercy, forgiveness, toleration, individualism, freedom.50 When we think of proportionality, we tend to think the punishment must increase with the severity of the crime. With mercy, the impulse is to think that criminals take advantage of it. With forgiveness, we don’t grant it until the sin has been paid for in some way. Toleration is withdrawn if someone is convicted. Individualism translates to a need for strict accountability. Freedom can be taken away if necessary. All these beliefs contribute in various ways to how Americans conceive of prisons. In arguing that prisoners are not incorrigible and capable of transformation, the faith-based ministries contribute to a broader conversation about why we punish for longer and longer periods and what is the purpose of the prison itself.
Even though faith-based groups helped shift the public debate about the potential for people to change, scholars like Marie Gottschalk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, have argued that we still need to address violent crimes and the people who commit them. If we released everyone now serving time in state prisons whose primary charge is a drug offense, we would reduce the state prison population by only 20 percent.51 In 2012, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported a decline in the US prison population for the second consecutive year due to reported decreases in twenty-six state departments of corrections.52 Advocacy groups and policy analysts across the political spectrum celebrated, but they neglected the “slight” increase in US prisoners housed in private prison facilities and the increase in federal prisoners, as Kay Whitlock and Nancy Heitzeg have noted in their series on the bipartisan coalition.53 New reform efforts make three faulty assumptions according to Whitlock and Heitzeg: we can dismantle the prison system without addressing policing practices and biases that determine who is funneled into the criminal legal system; the existing system is basically fair, and people caught up in it deserve to be there; and we don’t need to challenge or critique the structural inequalities of a capitalist system.
As the United States has dismantled the welfare state, it has simultaneously created the carceral state. “Prisons are partial geographical solutions to political economic crises, organized by the state, which is itself in crisis,” geographer Ruth Gilmore argues. She claims that California’s prison boom is a “prison fix” to a problem of fourfold surplus: capital, land, labor, and state capacity. If you want to know why so many prisons were built, Gilmore argues, don’t look to crime rates. “Look instead to economic depression in the agricultural regions of the state, and the search for new jobs and new ways of attracting state dollars in these areas. Look at the collapse of social services in urban areas of southern California.”54 The US states that have experienced a decrease in spending per capita on welfare have tended to experience an increase in spending on prisons. Countries that have gaping income inequalities generally have higher violent crime rates and often higher incarceration rates.
The recent prison-reform coalitions rarely discuss what to do about violent criminals and extremely long sentences, or what should happen to people once they are in prison. As Gilmore writes, “Most campaigns to decrease sentences for nonviolent convictions simultaneously decrease pressure to revise—indeed often explicitly promise never to change—sentences for serious, violent or sexual felonies.”55 Questions about the distinction between somebody who’s done something horrible and somebody who is a horrible person are central to how faith-based ministries conceive of their work, even if they focus exclusively on the individual. Right on Crime doesn’t attend to these distinctions. Grover Norquist, a Right on Crime signatory, argued, “You’re seeing a lot of people are sent to prison who perhaps ought not to be in prison, in terms of some cost-benefit analysis. And, again, we’re conservatives. I think there are a bunch of people who deserve to be in prison forever. I think there are some people that deserve to be in prison for a long time. I don’t get weepy about the whole idea.”56
The Right on Crime perspective lacks an analysis of the root causes for why we imprison, because it is rooted in the conservative fiscal assumption that privatization, rather than the expansion of social services, is a solution to mass incarceration. In an interview about her book Caught, Gottschalk discusses the structural shifts that need to happen so that people don’t end up in prison initially; she claims she’ll believe that people like Norquist, Gingrich, and other leaders on the Right are truly ready to make significant dents in the carceral state the day they begin supporting Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. Gottschalk writes, “If you care about reentry and about keeping people out of prison in the first place, there’s no public policy that you should support more strongly now than Medicaid expansion. Medicaid expansion gives states huge infusions of federal money to expand mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and medical care for many of the people who are most likely to end up in prison. It also allows states and localities to shift a significant portion of their correctional health care costs to the federal tab.”57
In 2008, the federal Second Chance Act was signed into law with the intention of improving outcomes for people returning to communities from prisons and jails. The legislation authorizes federal grants to government agencies and nonprofit organizations to provide employment assistance, substance abuse treatment, housing, family programming, mentoring, victim support, and other services that can help reduce recidivism.58 Texas and other states have chased after federal Second Chance and justice reinvestment dollars, which are a relative pittance. Meanwhile, according to Gottschalk, they have been eschewing the billions of dollars in Medicaid funding that could provide real second chances to people released from prison, many of whom, truth be told, never had a first chance.
In fiscal 2012, Congress allocated just $63 million for the Second Chance Act, which works out to less than $100 for each person released from prison and jail that year. Compare that to the estimated $100 billion Texas will forfeit in federal dollars over the next decade because of its decision to opt out of Medicaid expansion. The NAACP issued a report about prison spending versus education spending that points to the difference between trying to change the social factors that affect the rate of imprisonment and what Gottschalk calls “tinkering with the carceral state” and Wilbert Rideau terms “trimming the fat” but leaving the rest intact. Over the past three decades, state and local government expenditures on prisons and jails have increased about three times as fast as spending on elementary and secondary education.59 When asked to discuss this disparity with Benjamin Jealous, former NAACP president, Norquist refused to talk about redirecting money toward public education. “That’s a separate discussion,” he said.60