The Koch brothers love Scott Walker — but not his tough-on-crime past

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker holds up a bill eliminating the 48-hour waiting period for handgun purchases after signing it in Milwaukee in June. (Photo: Jeffrey Phelps/AP)

A couple months ago, at a Republican fundraising event at the Union League Club of New York in Manhattan, the billionaire conservative activist and philanthropist David Koch gave a very warm welcome to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

“My brother and I are going to take a neutral position as to who we are going to support until the primaries are over,” Koch, 75, told the New York Republican donors. “So when the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination, well,” he said, pausing for laughter, “Then we will support.” The Kochs quickly insisted to news outlets that the crack did not amount to an endorsement.

But it did highlight the coziness between the Kochs and Walker, who are so ideologically in synch that the industrialist brothers have had a hard time suppressing their glee at the prospect that the Wisconsin governor could become the next president of the United States. The Kochs are particularly impressed by Walker’s fight to slash public unions’ collective bargaining rights and subsequent triumph in a recall election. David Koch told the Palm Beach Post at the time that he thought Walker’s battle with public sector unions was “courageous” and “critically important.”

But as Walker gears up to announce his presidential bid, one major area of disagreement remains between him and Kochworld: the effectiveness and fairness of the U.S. criminal justice system.

Walker remains attached to the tough-on-crime policies that helped make his reputation as a young politician in the Wisconsin Assembly in the ’90s; the Kochs, on the other hand, have helped lead a conservative movement to reverse many of those same laws, which they regard as callous and an example of government overreach run amok. Most of the leading GOP candidates now echo the Kochs’ concerns about America’s enormous prison population and agree the system needs reform. But Walker’s extensive personal role in passing the laws that are now being rolled back puts him in tough spot: If he backs off too far from his original positions, he could look like a flip-flopper, but if he sticks to his guns, he might seem like a tough-on-crime relic and could alienate his most important backers.

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Protestors of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s bill to eliminate collective bargaining rights for many state workers pack the rotunda at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., in 2011. (Photo: Andy Manis/AP)

Between 1997 and 1998, Walker wrote or co-sponsored more than two dozen bills limiting parole, increasing prison time for a variety of offenses, expanding the definition of crimes, and other criminal justice changes. His crowning achievement was the Truth in Sentencing Act, a bill that effectively ended the parole system in the state of Wisconsin. The law has expanded the prison population in the state and is partly responsible for the fact that the prison budget outpaced higher education spending for the first time in state history in 2011 .

Many politicians, both liberal and conservative, supported these kinds of tough-on-crime laws in the 1990s and early 2000s, but Walker’s penchant for punishment has continued even as the public policy debate has shifted toward reform. He shut down the clemency process altogether as governor and has not pardoned a single Wisconsinite since he took office. Walker has continued to oppose parole, as well — the state only granted 6 percent of parole requests in 2013, compared to 13 percent in 2010.

This could be a source of tension between Walker and the Kochs, who have become the leading advocates among deep-pocketed donors for reforming the criminal justice system and reducing the prison population. The Kochs have joined an already robust conservative movement for penal reform that includes many leading 2016 GOP candidates, including Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, and have also partnered with liberal think tanks and politicians to advance their goals. These include scaling back the number of people who are incarcerated, providing more opportunities for people leaving prison to reintegrate into society and simplifying the criminal code. Reform activists point to states — many of them red, such as Texas and Georgia — that have experimented with these reforms and cut spending while reducing the crime rate.

The Kochs’ political operation hopes Walker will come around. A source with knowledge of the Freedom Partners network said there have been general discussions with the governor’s staff about the issue and that Team Walker has been receptive to some of the criminal justice reforms close to the Koch brothers’ hearts. The governor himself hasn’t directly spoken to anyone in the Koch network about criminal justice reform, the source said. The reform supporters hope they can sway Walker, the son of a Baptist preacher, both by appealing to his fiscal conservatism and by arguing that people deserve a chance at redemption.

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Koch Industries executive VP David Koch, left and Charles Koch, head of Koch Industries, right. (Photo composite Yahoo News, photos: AP, Getty)

But a Walker aide told Yahoo News that the governor has no plans to “evolve” on criminal justice and believes strongly in the “truth in sentencing” principle he endorsed 15 years ago.

“It’s a record that he’s really proud of,” the aide said.

Walker is much more likely to emphasize front-end solutions to the nation’s bloated prisons — like increasing the number of jobs and educational opportunities in poorer communities — than reducing sentences or helping people returning from prison better integrate into society.

Even if Walker decides to soften his position to better fit the mood of the moment and reflect his wealthy supporters’ views, he could run the risk of appearing wishy-washy. A former Walker staffer said that the governor and his team are hyper-sensitive to the perception of flip-flopping or modulating tone to pander to voters, which has already dogged Walker on immigration and same-sex marriage. Any storyline that looks like a shift in position or a change in emphasis is one that Team Walker wants to avoid.

For now, Walker appears to be deemphasizing his criminal justice past, which he used to feature in political ads and in speeches. And the few times he has talked about criminal justice, he walks a fine line of showing openness to some reforms without repudiating his tough-on-crime history. In an essay for the left-leaning Brennan Center, Walker highlighted his support for alternative, problem-solving courts that require frequent drug treatment and testing as an alternative to jail time for low-level offenses. But Walker also began the essay by referring to the Truth in Sentencing Act, saying that he passed the law so that victims can know exactly how long their perpetrators will be behind bars. He does not appear to be backing away from those principles; instead he asserts that the country can reduce the prison population by preventing people from committing crimes in the first place. How? By providing better job opportunities.

Walker did acknowledge at an event in Florida in June that he believed federal mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug crimes should come under review. But he also claimed Wisconsin does not imprison many people for nonviolent drug crimes and thus doesn’t need to reconsider its own mandatory minimum scheme. Criminal justice reformers disagree, pointing out that more than half of new prisoners in Wisconsin in 2013 were in prison as a result of probation violations, such as failing to check in with their probation officer or using a cellphone without authorization. These prisoners’ original convictions may have been for armed robbery or some other violent crime, but the reason they were sent back to jail was for nonviolent, administrative offenses.

Pat Nolan, a conservative activist who leads the Right on Crime reform movement after his own stint in prison for campaign violations, said he wishes he could talk to the governor about alternatives to this dysfunctional system. “You are failing, your system is failing,” Nolan said of Wisconsin’s high recidivism rate. “And wouldn’t conservatives look at what’s working?”

Walker stands out in the GOP field for his resistance to reform, along with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who argues that any drug legalization would be a grave mistake and reducing sentences for drug crimes should be done with great care.

“He’s the exception,” Nolan said of Walker. “The other candidates are all relatively on board.”

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Gov. Scott Walker and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke Jr. at the Greater Milwaukee Law Enforcement Officer Memorial ceremony in May. (Photo: Fran McLaughlin)

Walker’s position makes more sense in context — criminal justice reform has not caught on in his state as it has elsewhere, especially among conservatives, and many are still pushing for stiffer punishments. Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke Jr., a friend and political ally of Walker’s for more than a decade, says Walker deferred to his expertise on public safety when he ran Milwaukee County as executive before he became governor. Clarke, who derides criminal justice reform as a “social engineering experiment,” says Walker mostly agrees with his tough take on policing and his skepticism of reform.

Clarke said he finds the conservative rhetoric around reducing prison populations disingenuous, since released inmates are hardly going to move to the affluent communities where political elites live.

“They’re not going to move to the Koch brothers’ neighborhood,” Clarke said of ex-convicts. “They’re going back to the American ghetto, where they’re going to engage in that crime again.”