Not a week ago I was thinking to myself how quiet, even absent from the scene, Jim Webb has been since the election. If there is one politician I’m not worried about putting in an honest day’s work, it’s Webb, so my concern was more for the country’s sake. As in, we need to hear from this guy, and we need him to be as visible as possible. Put another way: every time Harry Reid’s sepulchral puss is on the news, that is a missed opportunity for the Democratic Party. So I wondered: where is Webb and why has he been so silent. What is he up to?
Nothing much, as it turns out. Merely preparing legislation that seeks to radically overhaul our nation’s archaic and borderline obsolescent policy for dealing with prisoners.
From http://webb.senate.gov/:
The National Criminal Justice Commission Act of 2009 (S.714), to create a blue-ribbon commission charged with conducting an 18-month, top-to-bottom review of the nation’s entire criminal justice system and offering concrete recommendations for reform.
“America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace,” said Senator Webb. “With five percent of the world’s population, our country houses twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. Incarcerated drug offenders have soared 1200% since 1980. And four times as many mentally ill people are in prisons than in mental health hospitals. We should be devoting precious law enforcement capabilities toward making our communities safer. Our neighborhoods are at risk from gang violence, including transnational gang violence. Webb continued: “There is great appreciation from most in this country that we are doing something drastically wrong.”
Glenn Greenwald recently celebrated Webb’s gumption, isolating him as an unorthodox problem solver who instinctively bristles at the pragmatic concept of “business as usual”, otherwise known in political circles as covering one’s ass and taking the safest route possible. Greenwald has some typically excellent analysis of what this means, and how against the grain Webb’s stance truly is:
It’s hard to overstate how politically thankless, and risky, is Webb’s pursuit of this issue — both in general and particularly for Webb. Though there has been some evolution of public opinion on some drug policy issues, there is virtually no meaningful organized constituency for prison reform. To the contrary, leaving oneself vulnerable to accusations of being “soft on crime” has, for decades, been one of the most toxic vulnerabilities a politician can suffer (ask Michael Dukakis). Moreover, the privatized Prison State is a booming and highly profitable industry, with an army of lobbyists, donations, and other well-funded weapons for targeting candidates who threaten its interests.
Most notably, Webb is in the Senate not as an invulnerable, multi-term political institution from a safely blue state (he’s not Ted Kennedy), but is the opposite: he’s a first-term Senator from Virginia, one of the “toughest” “anti-crime” states in the country (it abolished parole in 1995 and is second only to Texas in the number of prisoners it executes), and Webb won election to the Senate by the narrowest of margins, thanks largely to George Allen’s macaca-driven implosion. As Ezra Klein wrote, with understatement: “Lots of politicians make their name being anti-crime, which has come to mean pro-punishment. Few make their name being pro-prison reform.”
Greenwald quotes from the speech Webb made last week in the Senate, on the occasion of introducing his new bill:
The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .
In many cases these issues involve people’s ability to have proper counsel and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .
I’d be the first to point out that Obama’s unbelievable rise from relative obscurity to POTUS (in less than four years) has so dramatically shifted the political landscape that all sorts of previously inconceivable notions are now at least ponderable. Still, the combination of guts, principle and a commitment to actually take the job he was elected to do seriously confirms Webb’s status as a man apart. In this regard he is somewhat above politics (just as the idea of an overdue assessment of our prisons transcends the intelligence-insulting dichotomy of blue-state/red-state bullshit). Not for nothing did the man title one of his books Born Fighting: it’s literally the story of his life. What he pulled off in Virginia in 2006 (in a reliably conservative state against a popular partisan prick) is, on a smaller scale, every bit as miraculous and inconceivable as what Obama did. It made all the sense in the world for a man like him, with his background, to eventually boil over with contempt at the way the Republicans were incinerating America. Between Bush’s buffoonery and Cheney’s psychosis, it was a stroke of brilliant luck (for him, for us) that Webb finally stepped into the fray and became an unassailable voice of reason, for the right reasons. He was among the first, and most articulate, voices calling foul on Bush’s armchair foreign policy as well as the financial stratification that was deliberating occurring on his watch. He remains an authoritative voice on those matters, but as we see, he’s moved on to the next battle. It’s an altercation that will pit the informed against the clueless fearmongers, and it couldn’t come soon enough. Kudos to Webb for reminding us all what politicians (and citizens) should aspire to. That’s change we better believe in.
The Democratic party may not realize it, but they need Webb a hell of a lot more than he needs them. The smartest thing they can do is cede the stage to him as often as possible: merely by associating with a man of his magnitude the Lilliputians in the party are able to improve their own standing; it’s an opportunity none of them should ever pass up. Here’s to hoping Webb gets all the help he’ll need as he charges once more into the fray, and here’s praying he sticks around to fight the good fights for a long time to come.
