Steve Teles ranks among America’s leading academic experts on the application of conservative ideas to problems of governance. He chronicled the rise of the conservative legal movement in a 2010 book. This spring, he and co-author David Dagan have released a new study: Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration.
Not a conservative himself, Teles writes as a sympathetic outsider, always looking for ways to bridge ideological gaps in the service of better policy. With the Cato Institute’s W. Brink Lindsey, Teles has long co-chaired and co-hosted a monthly seminar that steps outside the usual perimeters to bring together not only conservatives and liberals—but also libertarians and socialists—for discussions that are simultaneously unusually frank and unusually practical. I’ve been an occasional participant myself, so I have to disclose that I’ve received four or five free meals from Teles’s funders. Until they start serving better wine, however, I consider my intellectual independence uncorrupted.
[For more of this story, written by David Frum, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...oxy-on-crime/491735/]
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