Thompson: We Need a Marshall Plan for Schools and Prisons
I grew up in the post-World War II era known as "Pax Americana." We all knew that our ambitious New Deal/Fair Deal era policies, ranging from G.I. Bill to the rebuilding of Europe with the help of the Marshall Plan, were not perfect. But, we knew in our bones that tomorrow would be better than today. Government and social science would both play a role in the campaigns to expand the promise of America to all.
The Marshall Project's Eli Hager, in What Prisons Can Learn from Schools, pulls two incredibly complicated social problems together in a concise and masterful synthesis. Hager's insights are deserving of a detailed analysis. This post will merely take a first step towards an explanation of why Democrats and liberals, especially, must heed his wisdom.
School and prison reform are both deeply rooted in the Reaganism and the lowered horizons of the 1980s. The defeat of the "guns and butter" approach to the Vietnam War demonstrated the limits of our power. The Energy Crisis of 1973, along with a decade and a half of falling or stagnant wages, was somehow blamed on liberalism. The U.S. entered the emerging global marketplace without the confidence that had marked our previous decades, meaning that we were more preoccupied with surviving competition than building community.
Americans lowered our horizons. As Hager explains, we were loath to tackle the legacies to the "overwhelming unfairnesses of history." So, we broke off schools and prisons into separate "silos," and sought less expensive solutions for their challenges. We rejected the social science approach to tackling complex and interconnected social problems that were rooted in poverty. Our quest for cheaper and easier solutions would soon coincide with the rise of Big Data as a substitute for peer reviewed research in service to a Great Society.
I was researching the legal history of Oklahoma County when forces unleashed by the Reagan administration transformed my world. Its repudiation of the supposedly liberal regulation of finance brought down the savings and loan industry and the banking system in the Southwest. Virtually overnight, "Supply Side Economics" destroyed most of our high-quality blue collar jobs, and the "War on Drugs" further devastated families.
Oklahoma's criminal justice system of the 1980s still had one foot squarely planted in the old Jim Crow. Although records often were kept the old-fashioned way, data-driven policies were common, as should be clear to anyone who was ticketed by law enforcement officers needing to meet their "quota." In the Oklahoma County Courthouse, we had barely outgrown a numbers-driven ritual that should This Week In Education: Thompson: We Need a Marshall Plan for Schools and Prisons: