A Serious Anti-Poverty Agenda Has to Include Criminal Justice Reform

For the last year or so, Rep. Paul Ryan has been on a
“listening
tour” in the country’s low-income neighborhoods. Ryan’s legion
of liberal critics has accused
the Wisconsin Republican of disingenuousness, claiming that there’s
no way he can square his stated interest in improving the lives of
the poor with his commitment to cutting government spending. But
there is one rather obvious set of reforms that would let him do
both, reforms that liberals in theory should support. In an

interview with The Daily Beast last week, Ryan brought
it up:

I asked the representative from
Janesville, Wisconsin, if he could reflect on a previously held
ideological view that had changed over the course of his learning
tour.

Without hesitation, Ryan delved into the need to reform federal
sentencing guidelines….Reflecting on past congressional efforts
to limit discretion on the part of federal judges in imposing
strict sentences—a reflection that will be sure to raise eyebrows
in the House Republican Cloakroom—Ryan said: “I think we had a
trend in America for a long time on mandatory minimums where we
took away discretion from judges. I think there’s an appreciation
that that approach has some collateral damage—that that approach is
missing in many ways…I think there is a new appreciation that we
need to give judges more discretion in these areas.”

Specifically, Ryan hailed the bipartisan work of Sens. Mike Lee
(R-UT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) to
dramatically overhaul the federal sentencing guideline
structure now in place. Dubbed the “Smarter Sentencing Act,” the
legislation, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee this year,
would cut mandatory minimum sentences in half for certain drug
offenses. It also would reduce crack cocaine penalties retroactive
to 2010 and expand the discretion of federal judges to sentence
defendants in certain cases to less time in jail than mandatory
minimum guidelines permit.

That only scratches the surface
of the changes that are necessary, but it’s a step in the right
direction, and it’s good to see it get an endorsement from Ryan
(whose record on civil liberties
hasn’t been very good in the past). If,
as he says, Ryan’s alternative to the traditional welfare state
is to strengthen civil society, then he should be trying to root
out the institutions that tear civil society apart. And the most
corrosive of those are surely the prison-first crime policies that
have given the U.S. the world’s highest incarceration rates,
ripping young people out of their families and communities and
exiling them to an archipelago of cages. (See also: policies that

confuse school discipline with crime control, policies that

confuse cops with late-night social workers, etc.) 

Speaking of civil society and the law: Ryan’s tour seems mostly
to have taken him to civil society’s more presentable
faces—violence-free
zones, church-based drug rehab
programs, and so on. All well and good, but it’s important to
realize that a great deal of the community-based problem-solving
and local mutual aid that’s out there isn’t likely to attract a
high-profile visitor, because it operates in a legal grey zone—or,
in some cases, actively violates the law. Whether it’s
self-organized day care operations that violate the local licensing
or zoning rules, organizations that ignore ordinances against
feeding the homeless, or urban homesteaders with less-than-certain
title to the abandoned buildings they’re transforming into homes or
the abandoned lots they’re transforming into gardens, these efforts
could stand a little legal relief. The laws that need to be cleared
away for such projects to flourish aren’t always imposed on the
federal level, so a congressman’s ability to help them may be
limited. But if you want your poverty-fighting agenda to be focused
on the real institutions of civil society, as opposed to the most
camera-ready, these have to be part of the picture.