Guest Author
Across the country, policymakers are grappling with the phenomenon of “disruption.” Disruption refers generally to the process whereby some new technology or innovation “disrupts” a long-standing industry and its attendant regulatory environment, threatening market incumbents.
Today, we see disruption most overtly in two areas: education and transportation. In education, new organizational structures, new teaching methods, and new technologies represent the first real threats to a public school monopoly that has gone unchallenged for decades. In transportation, Uber and others are disrupting an industry that has long relied on anachronistic regulations to protect incumbents from competition. However, a third policy area, criminal sentencing, is ripe for disruption, too.
At first glance, criminal justice policy might seem an odd fit for disruption. After all, unlike education and transportation, the criminal justice system is almost entirely a government program. From police officers to prosecutors to judges (and even to public defenders, probation officers and corrections guards), virtually every actor in criminal justice is a government employee performing a government task.
However, when one looks at the principle that underlies disruption, similarities between education, transportation, and criminal sentencing become clear. More than any other principle, disruption is about decentralization – i.e., giving power and choice to those closest to a problem. By decentralizing criminal sentencing policy, we can protect public safety and save tax dollars.
The current public education system is a centralized bureaucracy under a command and control model of organization and regulation. Under the status quo, many decisions – from the schools students will attend, to standards of success, to curriculum, and even to classroom teaching methods – are made by bureaucrats without reference to relevant individual factors. For decades, “education reform” meant spending more money with no oversight or accountability.
Over the past few years, however, new forms of education have emerged as plausible alternatives to traditional public schools. Online education, homeschooling, charter schools, and private schools both secular and religious have meaningfully decentralized educational decisions, and as a result have injected competition and accountability to a system that for too long has had neither.
The same is true in transportation. Since its inception, the taxi industry has been marked by top-down regulation. City and state agencies establish the number of taxis, license drivers, direct routes, and establish rates without reference to ever-changing market factors. By decentralizing the transportation market, Uber, Lyft, and others have taken power from government regulators and put it (literally) into the hands of consumers. In doing so, these disruptors have taken direct aim at a taxi monopoly long subsidized by a regulatory framework that hurts consumers.
Importantly, disruption in education and transportation stems not only from technological innovation, but also from deliberate changes to public policy based on the recognition that centralized decision-making creates inefficiencies that lead to poor performance. That same recognition is beginning to take root in criminal justice policy, where states around the country are shifting away from top-down sentencing laws like mandatory minimums, and toward decentralized decision-making.
For decades, it has been assumed that sentencing policy should be organized along the same principle as education and transportation. Under that model, all sentencing decisions should be made from state capitals, far removed from local courthouses and without reference to individualized factors relevant in determining how best to protect against crime. Today, however, lawmakers have begun to recognize that decentralized sentencing policy offers the same efficiency returns as decentralized schooling and decentralized transportation markets.
It’s easy to see why.
Important questions about the best and most efficient ways to punish offenders and deter criminal behavior often rely on information available to local officials but not available to legislators. Is a particular drug offender more likely to become a productive citizen after a prison stay, or after completing drug court? Would the money spent incarcerating a drug offender be better spent putting more police on the street? These questions and dozens like them – all relevant in determining proper sentences – are almost certainly best answered by local officials who know the needs of their communities. Centralized sentencing makes this kind of efficiency impossible.
Disruption – whether by technological innovation or better regulation – offers opportunities to utilize what Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek called “the knowledge of time and place.” Whether in education, where parents know best the needs of their children, or transportation, where consumers know best what they want from the market, or sentencing policy, where judges and local officials know best the public safety needs of their communities, decentralization is the future, and it should be.
Greg Newburn is the Florida project director for Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for fair and proportionate sentencing laws. He is a graduate of the University of Florida and the University of Florida Levin College of Law. He lives in Gainesville, Florida. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
