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Crime and redemption: states are using fiscal scarcity to find more creative approaches to reducing crime. The most notable holdoit is Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Article Excerpt
BECAUSE THE TEXAS LEGISLATURE IS IN SESSION A MERE five months out of the year, serving as a Lone Star state representative is not the most time-consuming of jobs. It's hardly unusual, therefore, that Ray Allen, the Republican chairman of the House Corrections Committee, has a couple of careers on the side. When he's not serving the good people of Dallas County, Allen runs the Academy for Firearms Training, where Texans who want to apply for a concealed-carry handgun permit can go and receive the required instruction. He also, along with his chief of staff, heads a company called Service House Inc., whose sole client is the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA). On the NCIA's dime, Allen lobbies Congress, the White House, the Department of Justice, and the Office of Management and Budget on the virtues of prison privatization. Oddly enough, this is actually legal.

All of which suggests that Ray Allen may not be the legislator one would expect to have written a law mandating that first-time low-level drug offenders get treatment instead of prison time. Nor would one expect that in Texas-a state that carries out one third of the executions performed in this country and has a museum dedicated to its prison system--both houses of the Republican-controlled legislature would pass Allen's bill unanimously, or that the Republican governor would sign it into law. But in June, that's exactly what happened. As Allen put it to the San Antonio Express-News, "This is the first time I've agreed with liberal Democrats on anything."

One might also suspect that if such tender mercies are prevailing in Texas, there must be some sort of national trend, and in that one would be correct. Texas is far from alone in its reconsideration of the criminal-justice policies of the past 20-odd years. Last year, on Christmas Day, Michigan's outgoing governor, John Engler, signed three bills repealing the state's mandatory minimum drug laws, which had been the most punitive in the nation. Colorado has given judges discretion to put drug offenders on probation instead of sending them to prison, and states like Missouri and Delaware have reduced the sentences for drug offenses and low-level felonies. Arizona and Washington are...