Meet the men fighting to keep minor drug criminals in jail
“The American system is built to be deliberative,” said Eli Lehrer, president of the R Street Institute, a libertarian-skewing think tank that supports a reexamination of the drug war, said. “I’m not that different from a lot of these people and obviously I hope that the Smarter Sentencing Act would become law. I support it. But I don’t think the conservatives oppose it — or the liberals opposing it — are doing so out of bad motives.”
Lehrer believes the Republican Party won’t change until some of the fervent tough-on-crime types have left politics.
“The generational divide is enormously important,” he said. “If somebody was originally elected at a time when many of their constituents’ number one complaint was crime, that’s going to shape their political ideology for life, as it should.”
