page_title: Decarceration in the United States
section_title: Transpartisan support for decarceration
hierarchical_section_title: Decarceration in the United States / Transpartisan support for decarceration
caption_attribution_description: Vice President George H. W. Bush attends a campaign rally in Omaha, Nebraska
context_page_description: Decarceration involves government policies and community campaigns to reduce the number of people held in custody or under custodial supervision in the United States. Decarceration, the opposite of incarceration, also entails reducing the rate of imprisonment at the federal, state and municipal level. Home to 5% of the global population but 25 percent of its prisoners, the U.S. possess the world's highest incarceration rate: 655 inmates for every 100,000 people, enough inmates to equal the populations of Philadelphia or Houston.
context_section_description: In "The Politics of Decarceration" (Yale Law Review, 2016) professor Rachel Barkow asserts that the call to decarcerate transcends party politics, with ideologically-driven liberals and conservatives agreeing for different reasons the U.S. must reduce its prison population. For liberals or progressives, Barkow writes mass incarceration was born from structural racism, capitalism and social inequality; for conservatives, it was a product of federal over-reach and bloated budgets that consumed too many tax dollars. While liberals focused on steering inmates back into productive societal endeavors, Barkow writes that conservatives embraced the notion of spiritual redemption or reconciliation over retribution.
  In contrast to bipartisanship, in which entrenched politicians and party leaders reach a compromise, Barkow says trans-partisanship is "led by ideological true-believers on the back benches, and distinct factions that converge on shared policy positions through separate, independent routes."
  Barkow traces the pivotal moment in transpartisanship back to 2012, when conservative politicians Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist, influenced by Watergate felon and "evangelical celebrity" Charles Colson, issued a "Statement of Principles" that judged the American criminal justice system as broken with prisons and jail expenditures the fastest growing area of state budgets, second only to Medicaid expansion. 
  The turn-around followed an era of bipartisan support for prison expansion, triggered, in part, by the 1988 presidential campaign in which Republican George Herbert Walker Bush defeated Democratic Party opponent Michael Dukakis, then Governor of Massachusetts, with a tough on crime platform buoyed by an independent expenditure group's broadcast of a commercial attacking Dukakis for governing a state that furloughed Willie Horton, an African-American prisoner who, upon his release from prison, raped a white woman and fatally stabbed her boyfriend.
  Despite what critics called the race-based politics of the campaign, scholars assert Republicans and Democrats, in the years that followed, competed to see which party could prove tougher on crime, culminating with the passage of the 1994 crime bill signed by President Bill Clinton, that provided incentive grants for states to construct more prisons, "funded 100,000 more police officers, and supported grant programs that encouraged police to conduct drug-related arrests" — in what some have called an escalation of the War on Drugs.
caption: 1988. Winning Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush.
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