Less time, less crime: conservatives lead a movement toward "tough and smart" sentencing policies.

• Author: Stewart, Julie

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

We are in the early stages of a sentencing revolution. Across the country, states seem to be racing each other to cast off their failed, budget-draining mandatory sentencing regimes in favor of smarter, more efficient alternatives. Surprisingly, this movement is being spearheaded by conservatives.

In 2007 the blood-red state of Texas, facing a skyrocketing prison population that would have required more than $1 billion for additional facilities, decided to shift resources to treatment programs. Gov. Rick Perry, a conservative Republican, called the move "tough and smart," a view that was vindicated when both crime and incarceration rates dropped. Texas is continuing to enact evidence-based reforms that aim to rehabilitate offenders, such as hiring dozens of re-entry coordinators to help newly released inmates adjust to life outside prison, thereby reducing the number who commit new crimes and end up back behind bars.

Before leaving office last year, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, also a Republican, signed a comprehensive reform bill that diverts low-risk, nonviolent offenders into community corrections programs rather than state prisons. The new law will save money while helping offenders make the transition back into their communities.

In the first few months of this year, Arkansas, Kentucky, Alabama, and Oklahoma hopped on the reform bandwagon. Not one of those states was carried by Barack Obama in 2008. The governors pushing hardest for reform right now include Indiana's Mitch Daniels, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, and Ohio's John Kasich. All three are beloved by conservatives.

Skeptics say the conservative conversion has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with saving money. Even if that were true, so what? Corrections spending is totally out of hand; according to the Pew Center on the States, it is now the second fastest growing line item in state budgets, trailing only Medicaid. As the UCLA criminologist Mark Kleiman (see "'Long Prison Terms Are Wasteful Government Spending,'" page 71) told the Boston Phoenix earlier this year, budget reduction might be "the least good reason" to support sentencing reform, but "in this case, the goal of saving money, and the goal of not keeping people in cages, gets you to the same place."

Some traditionally blue states also have arrived at that place. In 2009 New York finally overthrew the nearly 40-year-old Rockefeller drug laws, a grotesque set of mandatory minimum...