Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) on Wednesday became the latest potential 2016 candidate to sign on to a growing movement for criminal justice reforms on the right, adding his name to the list of endorsers for a group called Right on Crime.
The Statement of Principals that Perry signed says that criminal justice policies should be subjected to dispassionate, evidence-based accountability like any other public policy, and notes that efforts to gauge the success or failure of the system must recognize that “crime victims, along with the public and taxpayers, are among the key ‘consumers’ of the criminal justice system.”
Perry said he is joining Right on Crime because it is “focused on helping people understand why a big, expensive prison system — one that offers no hope for second chances and redemption — isn’t conservative policy,” and called for “evaluat[ing] prisons based on whether they g[e]t results.”
Reconciling Perry’s maneuver with his record as governor is straightforward in some ways and baffling in others. It isn’t just that Texas leads the league in executions per season, with over 20 per year during Perry’s tenure. It’s that Perry wrongfully executed an innocent man despite receiving scientific proof that the man’s arson conviction was incorrect.
Texas convicted Cameron Todd Willingham of setting the 1991 fire that killed his three children, and Perry allowed his execution to go ahead in 2004. But the arson science used to convict Willingham was junk, and Perry knew it. He was given a report debunking the conviction and asked to delay the execution for 30 days so the case could be reviewed. Perry decided Willingham should die anyway. Years later, the only other piece of evidence against Willingham was also debunked. The jailhouse snitch who claimed Willingham had confessed was in a quid-pro-quo arrangement with Willingham’s prosecutor, and lied about Willingham to get a reduced sentence and cash.
Willingham’s jurors never heard the evidence that proves he did not kill his children, but Rick Perry received a comprehensive expert report on that evidence from Dr. Gerald Hurst in the weeks before Willingham’s execution. Perry was not asked to absolve Willingham’s conviction, as Willingham’s advocates tearfully recall in the documentary Incendiary. He was only asked to delay Willingham’s death so that the bad science that was sending him to the needle could be scrutinized. A spokeswoman for the then-governor told the New York Times that Perry was thoroughly briefed on the contents of the report on the night Willingham was killed for a crime he did not commit. In the years since, Perry has refused to acknowledge Willingham’s innocence, described him as a “monster” when asked about it, and even interfered with the Texas Forensic Science Commission to derail an investigation into Willingham’s conviction.
Right on Crime’s statement announcing the move personally credits “the leadership of Governor Perry” in Texas’ sweeping prison and probation reforms from the mid-2000s as the spark that started conservatives thinking critically about ineffective criminal justice programs and overcrowded prisons after years of tough-on-crime posturing. Heavy-hitters on the right like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch brothers have since endorsed a similar slate of criminal justice system reform. Groups like Right on Crime have not only sprung up but formed a trans-ideological partnership with both natural allies like FreedomWorks and left-leaning groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for American Progress.
But while Texas’ endorsement of treatment over jail was in many ways the launch-pad for all of that motion, Perry’s role in the origin story is more complicated than the press release copy suggests. It was state legislators, not Perry, who crafted the treatment-focused system Texas invested in in place of building new prison beds and relying strictly on punitive treatment for drug crimes and other petty offenses. The expert those lawmakers brought in to tailor the idea was “a 20-year veteran of the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council whose job had been eliminated three years earlier by Rick Perry,” the Washington Post noted last year.
Perry hadn’t just fired Tony Fabelo, the corrections expert who would later craft Texas’ reforms. He had eliminated the entire budget of the entire Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council at the behest of his chief of staff, amid a push to hand the state’s prisons over to private, for-profit companies — the spiritual if not literal opposite of the reforms that would come in 2006. Perry justified the move in fiscal terms, according to the Austin Chronicle, but “[e]ven on the face of it, that didn’t make a whole lot of sense” given that the council’s budget was just a million dollars a year, and it had brought far greater federal money into the state in previous years.
Perry did ultimately drop his privatization push and sign off on Fabelo’s successful reform proposals, and the example Texas has set since is important. Pew Charitable Trusts prisons expert Adam Gelb describes “a deep, visceral reaction to the fact that Texas has taken a different path when it comes to crime and punishment.” But during his 2012 presidential bid, Perry kept mum on the prison policies that Right on Crime now wants to attribute to his leadership.
Perry’s new willingness to make noise about reforming the criminal justice system may signal that he is a changed man. But despite Wednesday’s move, there is no sign that he is ready to grapple publicly with the darker corners of his justice record.
There are bigger, more politically challenging policy ideas than drug treatment for parole violators out on the horizon. Sentencing reform, stronger review systems to correct wrongful convictions, and the propriety of capital punishment in a country where forensic frauds and dishonest prosecutors have sometimes thrived will all become flashpoints for coalitions like these. Right on Crime’s guiding principal is that criminal justice policy should be evidence-based and results-oriented, an approach that should lead naturally to support for these more difficult reforms but which doesn’t explicitly endorse them. Perry’s insistence that Todd Willingham was a child-incinerating “monster” and interference with Texas’ best attempt at auditing decades of scientifically erroneous convictions like Willingham’s make it hard to gauge the practical impact of Wednesday’s move.