IT TOOK decades for politics—that messy, flawed business of gauging the public mood, haggling with interest groups and turning out votes—to build America’s prison system: a behemoth of staggering size and cost, unlike anything else in the developed world. What chance is there that the monster can be tamed by the dry, abacus-clicking discipline of economics?
A non-trivial chance is the surprising answer, judging by a bipartisan conference of economists and policy wonks at the White House on April 25th, co-hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the broadly progressive Brennan Centre for Justice. The meeting launched a report into a system that, after decades of relentless growth, holds over 20% of the world’s prisoners, though America is home to less than 5% of the global population. The report’s dry title, “Economic Perspectives on Incarceration and the Criminal Justice System”, should not deceive. Written by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), an in-house think-tank that has advised presidents since Harry Truman, it is a 79-page catalogue of unintended consequences, failed policies and heartbreaking...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/26xffmf
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