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Criminal Justice Reform Is Necessary
My friend Sean Kennedy asserts in a column at Real Clear Policy that the “Bipartisan Push for Criminal Justice Reform Is Misguided.” I respectfully disagree. On the contrary, criminal justice reform is a conservative effort that is necessary to restrain government that has grown too large, powerful, and costly.
Criminal justice reform, or CJR for short, is a broad-based movement made up of numerous policy reforms taking place mostly at the state level. Texas has pioneered many of the reforms and has inspired a growing number of states to follow suit which has led to, among other beneficial results, reduced recidivism rates and lower prison costs.
CJR is a policy response to the problem of overcriminalization which can be defined as the criminalization of routine behavior that has no business being criminalized and the overly burdensome punishments that are handed down for minor infractions. Or to put it another way, we have too many statutory and administrative laws that are too vague and carry overly disproportionate penalties in contravention to the old saying that “the punishment must fit the crime.”