Almost as surprising as the seemingly sudden acceptance of gay marriage in America has been the GOP turnabout on warehousing nonviolent criminals, creating a massive prison state, a policy equally morally bankrupt and financially expensive. Former David Cameron speechwriter Danny Kruger visited Texas and reported for the BBC on the shuttering of prisons in a red state. An excerpt:

“Texas, for instance, has half the population of the UK but twice its number of prisoners.

Then something happened in 2007, when Texas Republican Congressman Jerry Madden was appointed chairman of the House Corrections Committee with the now famous words by his party leader: ‘Don’t build new prisons. They cost too much.’

The impulse to what has become the Right on Crime initiative was fiscal conservatism – the strong sense that the taxpayer was paying way too much money to fight a losing war against drugs, mental ill-health and petty criminality.

What Madden found was that too many low-level offenders were spending too long in prison, and not reforming. On the contrary, they were getting worse inside and not getting the help they needed on release.

The only response until then, from Democrat as well as Republican legislators, was to build more prisons. Indeed, Mr Madden’s analysis suggested that a further 17,000 prisoners were coming down the pipe towards them, requiring an extra $500m for new prisons. But he and his party didn’t want to spend more money building new prisons. So they thought of something else – rehab.”