Type “Paul Ryan poverty” into Google and you’ll
turn up pages upon pages of recent news hits. The Republican
senator’s plan for “Expanding Opportunity in America” was released
July 24, and since then there have been no shortage of writers and
pundits both criticizing and praising Ryan’s proposals.
Conspicuously absent from critics’ responses, however, has been
much if any discussion of the plan’s criminal
justice reform elements.
To me, these are by far the most exciting parts of Ryan’s
agenda. When is the last time an American politician brought up
criminal justice reform in the context of poverty policy proposals?
And yet a huge part of what keeps people poor is our draconian
criminal justice system. As of 2008, one
in every 100 people in America was in prison. We throw
people in jail for the most insane reasons—possessing pot, having
sex, street vending without proper paperwork—thereby already
putting them (and their families) in economic jeopardy. And then we
release them into a system where over-eager cops, parole officers,
and bureaucrats are on the ready to issue fines or haul them back
into prison should they fail to meet any number of labyrinthian
requirements.
The link between poverty and over-aggressive incarceration in
the U.S. is undeniable. “During the past
decade, researchers have identified serious individual
and community-level harms attributable to rising incarceration,”
write Robert DeFina and Lance Hannon, professors of criminology
and sociology at Villanova University,.
Our own work offers evidence that
mass incarceration has, over time, significantly increased poverty.
In many ways, this finding is unsurprising. A criminal record, for
example, has been shown to decrease the likelihood of landing a job
and to reduce both the level and growth of wages. And in many
states, a criminal record means reduced access to the social safety
net and to licenses for certain types of professions. The economic
harm extends to offenders’ spouses and partners, who themselves
often have a harder time getting and holding a job, due to the
logistical difficulties of being in a relationship with someone in
prison or jail.
In a 2010 paper coordinated by the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, a team of leading criminologists argued that mass
incarceration is highly linked to growing inequality in the
United States.
Obviously criminal justice reform alone won’t end poverty, but
it could help make a serious dent. And it could
theoretically draw much more bipartisan support than
hotly-contested ideas like reforming the tax code or social safety
net. Conservative and liberal legislators in Congress have already
been working together
to push for sentencing reform.
Yet many Democratic politicians are strangely
quiet on the subject, as were liberal critics of Ryan’s poverty
plan. To read many critiques, you might not even know
there was a criminal justice reform element to his
porposals. See: Jamelle
Bouie at Slate,
Annie Lowrey at New York,
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post,
John Nichols at The Nation, and
Pat LaMarche at The Huffington Post, to list just a
few examples.
I’m not expecting these people to fawn over Ryan’s poverty plan
or ignore areas of disagreement—there’s a lot to dislike in it,
from a progressive or
a libertarian perspective. But let’s give credit where credit
is due. Would it have killed folks to highlight some ways Ryan may
have gotten it right? (Credit where credit is due: Nicole Flatow
at Think
Progress did just
this.)
Of course, maybe these folks don’t agree on the
criminal justice elements; maybe they’re opposed to sentencing
reform, or think our prison industrial complex has no bearing on
poverty in America. But if that’s the case, why not say so? Why not
condemn these reform ideas, too? The fact that they didn’t even
mention them—while tending to support criminal justice reform under
other circumstances—makes me think the omission isn’t innocent but
pure partisan posturing.
And this is what infuriates me about hyper-partisans, be they
politicians, pundits, or your mom. At some point actual people have
to matter more than winning the news cycle. At some point you have
to demonstrate that you actually give a fuck about the people more
than the politics. And this is seen all too rarely, on either side
of the left-right divide.
People like to talk about how libertarians are selfish. How we
all worship Ayn Rand and do the bidding of billionaires and want to
make the poor polish our monocles while we’re privatizing the
roads. There’s a myopic tendency to assume that just because we
don’t come to the same conclusions about how to help the poor (or
the world), we don’t care.
Take a look at the kinds of things Reason regularly covers:
police abuse, criminal
justice reform,
sex work,
civil liberties,
parents’ rights, stopping U.S. warmongering,
ending
regulations that make it harder for
the poor and
middle-class to make a living, opening
the borders indiscriminately. We care. Take a look at the
guaranteed-basic-income supporting folks
at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, the work
done by
people like Radley Balko and Maggie McNeill, the
crusaders at IJ and Families Against Mandatory Minimums. They
care. Take a look at Paul Ryan’s poverty plan. The criminal-justice
and occupational-liscening reform elements are ways of
caring.
Does Paul Ryan really care? I have no idea. And I don’t
care about that. I will take action-oriented allies where I can get
them, no matter whether their motives are pure or we vehemently
disagree elsewhere. Because I’m not interested in writing
libertopian fan fic. I’m interested in how we can actually
help people economically and actually make people more free, given
current realities and constraints. I’m not willing to overlook the
good in the favor of the perfect, and I wish I could say the same
for more people working on and covering Capitol Hill.
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