After Willie Horton

As the last presidential contenders throw their hats into the ring for 2008, it's fruitful to recall another presidential race, twenty years ago, which was dominated by someone not on the ballot: "Willie" Horton. It wasn't George H.W. Bush who first aimed this coded racial appeal against Michael Dukakis. It was Al Gore, running to Dukakis's right in the Democratic primaries, who hammered the Massachusetts Governor over his prisoner furlough program. When Gore and Clinton were running four years later, Clinton tried to banish the ghost of Dukakis by flying back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, who demonstrated his fitness for execution by asking his jailers to save some of the pecan pie from his last meal so he could eat it later.

By 1990 only a handful of Democrats who opposed the death penalty remained in statewide office. They had learned the Willie Horton lesson all too well: They would not be out-toughed on crime. With Democrats offering little resistance, right-wing politicians used crime as a wedge issue to dislodge the pillars of the Great Society.

While these profiles-in-no-courage were being etched in Washington, grassroots activists were moving steadily in the other direction. A combination of careful policy and advocacy work and state budget exigencies has brought us near a tipping point: Many elected officials have come to the conclusion that we may have gone as far as a society can toward locking up its people. Signs are everywhere that the prison-industrial complex is beginning to crack:

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