Legal Commentary

This post accompanied by a soundtrack:  

I've really enjoyed Jonathan's post on exiting Nixonland, which offers a path for healing the disease he has written so eloquently about in Governing Through Crime and on his blog. But much as I would like to believe it, I think a new discourse has permeated our correctional language: the discourse of limited resources.

I've been following this for a while now, and have seen this operate on the city, state and federal level. Any type of correctional program requiring a more-than-nominal budget, regardless of its content and political backing, has been discussed and defeated without regard to its merits. Last month, San Francisco's Community Justice Center's budget was killed by the City Supervisors. Then, Democrat and Republican lawmakers teamed up to kill a planned expansion to the San Quentin Death Row. And, most recently, the amended budget from Governor Schwarzenegger includes a plan to eliminate parole for nonviolent offenders and to increase early releases from prison based on good behavior credits.

This is not a consistent preference for a discourse of fear over other discourses; it's a discourse characterized by a lack of discourse. In other words: we no longer care what the correctional project is about or which political agenda it advances. We only care how much it costs.