Getting smart on crime: conservatives discover prison reform.

• Author: Cusac, Anne-Marie
• Position: Cover story

When John Turner left Walker State Prison in Georgia in early August, his wife gave him a new set of clothes. He put them on and looked at himself in the mirror. "This is me for the rest of my life," he thought, vowing never to return to wearing prison stripes.

When we talk three days after his release, Turner is thrilled about his newfound freedom. He likens it to "going into a different world." Cellphones amaze him: "Everyone's on them, everywhere you go." He's still getting used to sleeping with the lights off. During dinner at a restaurant, he wanted to sit in a corner so his back was not to anybody.

Turner, thirty-eight, is a beneficiary of prison reforms that came about under Georgia's Republican Governor Nathan Deal, who took office in 2011. Deal opened accountability courts for veterans and offenders with mental health and substance abuse problems, built prison education programming, invited in religious groups, and decentralized the state's juvenile justice facilities.

Deal's second inaugural address contained a message for inmates: "If you pay your dues to society, if you take advantage of the opportunities to better yourself, if you discipline yourself so that you can regain your freedom and live by the rules of society, you will be given the chance to reclaim your life." Turner, who recently got hired as a welder, has taken that message to heart.

In 2014, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, "Substantially fewer African Americans are being locked up in Georgia, a remarkable and historic change in a state that has long packed its prisons with disproportionate numbers of black offenders."

Georgia's reforms are among the most significant of a slew of recent criminal justice changes led by Republicans in the Deep South as well as Northern red states. These reforms have attracted publicity, in part because conservatives are driving, and campaigning on, them.

Many of the current Republican candidates for President have reformist criminal justice positions. A recent Brennan Center publication, Solutions: American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice, contains essays from several of them. These include: "Save Jail for the Dangerous," by Chris Christie; "Reduce Federal Crimes and Give Judges Flexibility," by Ted Cruz; "Restore Fairness in Sentencing," by Rand Paul; "A Step Toward Freedom: Reduce the Number of Crimes," by Marco Rubio; and "Follow the Texas Model," by Rick Perry.

Perry's essay reads in part: "By the time I left office in 2015, Texas had expanded the number of specialty courts in the state from nine to more than 160. We reduced the number of parole revocations to prison by 39 percent. We saved $2 billion from our budget, not to mention the countless lives saved. We did all this while our crime rate dropped to its lowest point since 1968. And for the first time in modern Texas history, instead of building new prisons, we shut down three and closed six juvenile lock-ups."

Marie Gottschalk, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, disputes Perry's rosy report in her book, arguing that the drop in Texas's prison population is linked to the number of people scheduled for parole.

The politicians who have jumped on the prison-reform bandwagon have also drawn criticism for tinkering around the edges of significant change, and for confining many of their reforms to the "non, non, non" crimes--nonviolent, nonserious, and nonsexual. Such reforms don't do enough to diminish our massive prison system, critics say.

But Turner's crimes were not "non, non, nons." He served two full, concurrent fifteen-year sentences for kidnapping and armed robbery. Turner pushes himself to tell his story, sometimes pausing to say how difficult it is to admit what he did.

A crack addict who left school at fifteen, Turner kidnapped a woman at gunpoint, took her money, then forced her to drive him to buy drugs, which he consumed in her car. A police officer stopped the car and arrested Turner when he fled. He was in his early twenties.

Turner wishes he could ask the woman's forgiveness, though by law he cannot contact her. But he's done other things to set a positive course for his future.

He earned a welding certificate in prison, declaring in his graduation speech that the skills he acquired "will assist to me in my journey to reentry so that I can be a father, a husband to my wife, and a...