Supposedly, The Conservative Case For Prison Reform

Jeremy Cady and I first met on the plush green grass in front of the Missouri Capitol. It was the spring of 2009, and once a week or so a group of capitol staffers, reporters, and even the occasional elected official would kick a soccer ball around on a rectangular section of lawn that more often than not went unused. We’d play three-on-three, or four-on-four, depending on how many would show up. Cady and I generally guarded each other because we were both big, slow, and, well, generally lacking in superior soccer skill.

Supposedly, The Conservative Case For Prison Reform Prison-reform-tony-messenger-e1638833406599

Supposedly, The Conservative Case For Prison Reform Prison-reform-tony-messenger-e1638833406599

I was a capital correspondent for the state’s largest newspaper, The Post-Dispatch; Cady was a Republican staff member in the house—though he would eventually leave state government and go to work for Americans for Prosperity, a libertarian political organization funded by the Koch Brothers.

And some nine years removed from those capitol lawn soccer games, Cady emailed me and asked if I’d be interested in speaking about the debtors’ prison columns I was writing for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch at an Americans for Prosperity event in St. Charles County. (Until that point in my career, any of my writing on the Koch Brothers or Americans for Prosperity was hardly positive—to say the least, we were strange bedfellows.) Many Republicans in Missouri had a catchy but derisive name for my employer: The Post-Disgrace, a clever shorthand to patronize the paper as too liberal. But as I wrote about rural Missourians who were caught in the never-ending cycle of abuse that criminalized poverty fosters, I often received letters that began with some version of this: “I normally disagree with your columns, but…” They were invariably from readers on the right side of the aisle.

Amid the most divided political landscape of my life, I had stumbled upon a unifying issue.

.https://time.com/6126200/conservative-prison-reform-movement/

Supposedly, The Conservative Case For Prison Reform

Supposedly, The Conservative Case For Prison Reform

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