Several commentators have taken Sen. Dick Durbin to task this week for his conflicting tweets on prisons. On one hand, the Illinois senator rightly expressed concern about increasing prison populations; in another tweet, however, he praised ballooning spending on prisons as Keynesian ‘stimulus packages’ for the local economy. Derek Cohen, policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for Effective Justice, addressed the larger issues in The Hill, arguing that cutting costs goes hand-in-hand with more effective criminal justice policies.
Arresting prison population growth while keeping the public safe is one of a few issues on which Congress is showing bipartisan agreement. Academics, practitioners and politicians from all across the political spectrum have highlighted meaningful ways federal law and corrections policy can be reformed at no detriment to public safety…. Federal prison overcrowding can be greatly diminished, if not eliminated, with sensible criminal justice reform…. Opening facilities for the sake of jobs is unsustainable fiscal and criminal justice policy.