American conservatism rose hand-in-hand with the growth of mass
incarceration. For decades, conservatives deployed "tough on crime"
rhetoric to attack liberals as out-of-touch elitists who coddled
criminals while the nation spiraled toward disorder. As a result,
conservatives have been the motive force in building our vast
prison system. Indeed, expanding the number of Americans under lock
and key was long a point of pride for politicians on the right -
even as the U.S. prison population eclipsed international records.
Over the last few years, conservatives in Washington, D.C. and in
bright-red states like Georgia and Texas, have reversed course, and
are now leading the charge to curb prison growth. In Prison Break,
David Dagan and Steve Teles explain how this striking turn of
events occurred, how it will affect mass incarceration, and what it
teaches us about achieving policy breakthroughs in our polarized
age. Combining insights from law, sociology, and political science,
Teles and Dagan will offer the first comprehensive account of this
major political shift. In a challenge to the conventional wisdom,
they argue that the fiscal pressures brought on by recession are
only a small part of the explanation for the conservatives' shift,
over-shadowed by Republicans' increasing anti-statism, the waning
efficacy of "tough on crime" politics and the increasing engagement
of evangelicals. These forces set the stage for a small cadre of
conservative leaders to reframe criminal justice in terms of
redeeming wayward souls and rolling back government. These
developments have created the potential to significantly reduce
mass incarceration, but only if reformers on both the right and the
left play their cards right. As Dagan and Teles stress, there is
also a broader lesson in this story about the conditions for
cross-party cooperation in our polarized age. Partisan identity,
they argue, generally precedes position-taking, and policy
breakthroughs are unlikely to come by "reaching across the aisle,"
promoting "compromise," or appealing to "expert opinion." Instead,
change happens when political movements redefine their own
orthodoxies for their own reasons. As Dagan and Teles show,
outsiders can assist in this process - and they played a crucial
role in the case of criminal justice - but they cannot manufacture
it. This book will not only reshape our understanding of
conservatism and American penal policy, but also force us to
reconsider the drivers of policy innovation in the context of
American politics.
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