This could not be a more well-timed account of the recent right turn on criminal justice reform. In it, David Dagan and Steven M. Teles unpack the reasons conservatives now champion the cause of decarceration. More than new information, the economics of common sense and electoral pressures are important, they argue, in order to understand this shift. The genesis for the most significant sentencing reform movement that America has seen in decades, Dagan and Teles contend, is a mix of deliberate rhetorical strategy, resources, organization, and helpful allies.

The opening chapter of Prison Break is fittingly titled “How Minds Change” because changed minds are what the authors underscore as centrally important. They establish at the outset that changing minds is itself a process, and one that must happen from the inside out. The balance of the book lays out the change process that resulted in conservatives shifting away from their tough-on-crime position. We learn that the initial rise of law-and-order conservatism was forged through the use of rhetoric that made the maintenance of order, as opposed to resistance to the state, a core principle of conservative ideology by the 1980s. By the late 2000s, cracks began to appear in the wall of conservative defenses for massive criminal justice expenditures and imprisonment. This occurred thanks to Clinton Democrats who broke the Republican monopoly on law and order, the decline in crime, and the emergence of terrorism. Still, these shifts, standing alone, were not enough.

The description of how an elite coalition began “rounding up a posse” is the point in the book where the ingenuity of Dagan and Teles begins to crystallize and where the book is arguably at its best. We learn the personal stories of powerful insiders who eventually became former prisoners, but who maintained enough connections and political savvy to help form an elite coalition that would soon drive criminal reform on a national scale. With the help of what the authors dub the “technocratically oriented and almost obsessively bipartisan” (p. 66) Council of State Governments and Pew Charitable Trusts, an alternative crime policy agenda was crafted. It was not anchored in the old and stale arguments to rechannel criminal justice funds to education and health. This more conservatively palatable agenda called instead for reallocating funds within the criminal justice system to achieve better crime-control outcomes. The book takes us deep behind the scenes to learn how the elite coalition worked quietly with allies on the left. The catchy set of clichés that they devised postulated prisons and police as being just as much a part of government as any other agency, and hence whose growth should be viewed with the same skepticism as any other government growth.

Surprisingly, the capitol of capital sentencing—Texas—is where the reform agenda first took off under the governorship of Rick Perry. By tracing enactment of a 2007 law, Dagan and Teles reveal how Texas Republican legislators crafted innovative prison and sentencing reforms. Similar reforms soon followed in other red states. Eventually in Washington, DC, as well, the changed tone would foster a new policy conversation, though not as yet actual legislative outcomes. Prison Break ends with a note about the reasons for pessimism as well as optimism. Chief among the former are an increase in the salience of crime and also party polarization, the kind of polarization that could diminish the perception among conservatives not only that sentencing reform is an idea whose time has come but also that it is more specifically their idea.

If one were to quibble with this altogether solid analysis of the ideological drivers of policy innovation, it would likely be with the authors’ full-court-press challenge to alternative explanations for the conservative reform movement. Dagan and Teles challenge the oft-made claims that the conservative shift is not due to economics or the ineffectiveness of penal policy. However, to carry the day on these points, a more in-depth discussion is called for than can be fitted to the few pages that they allot. A few pages permit the authors to show only that, firstly, corrections expenditures eclipsed health-care and education spending for decades, and conservatives did not complain about the cost until now. Next, their challenge to the conventional wisdom on economic downturns and corrections expenditures is similarly underdeveloped. The critique of existing accounts of how spending and economics affect conservative policy and politics would be substantially bolstered were the authors to ground it on more direct evidence of whether past studies of, and arguments about, unsustainable costs did in fact fall on deaf conservative ears, as they assert. Or, as they actually intimate early on, was it the case that conservatives heard the complaints but nonetheless believed that the expenditures more than paid off in reduced crime? For a book that proffers an insider perspective, this direct evidence would seem easy to amass.

To be fair, nonetheless, the overriding purpose of the book is to tell us something that we do not already know about crime politics and policymaking, as opposed to poring over old data with a new theory. In this respect, it is a mission accomplished.

Eloquently written and with a view toward a wide audience, those looking to Prison Break for a heavily statistically account of causal relationships between ideological shifts and crime policy positioning will not find it. There is no lengthy discussion of methods, data sources, measurements, correlation coefficients, and such. The authors’ argument rests largely on an impressive array of field interview data and a handful of multidecade trend charts. The book tells a believable story, and in storytelling format. Titillating anecdotes and life stories are incorporated to help illustrate the central conclusion in each chapter.

Of the many personal stories is one that stands out, namely Pat Nolan’s. Nolan watched the idyllic place of his boyhood on Crenshaw Boulevard in 1950s Los Angeles metamorphose into the cradle of gangsta rap and the 1992 race riots. Nicknamed early on “the arch-conservative boy wonder” (p. 18), Nolan worked his way from Reagan campaign staffer to Republican California assemblyman, then to coarchitect of prison expansion in California and to federal inmate. While he was behind bars, his “eyes had been open” (p. 45), following which he endeavored to open the eyes of fellow conservatives. Nolan’s life course is joined together in the book with that of Charles Colson, a former Nixon aide turned prisoner and, finally, born-again Christian prisoner advocate. Both could legitimately vouch for the uprightness of conservative ideals and at the same time speak to the need for reform. Together they helped forge the elite coalition for the change in thinking and for state legislation that is documented throughout the work.

The book’s carefully researched discussion makes a noteworthy contribution to a vibrant and impressive body of literature on criminal justice politics and policy. Prison Break is about conservativism and sentencing reform, yes. But at its broadest level, it is about how the minds of policymakers are changed and what it takes for such change to occur. Whether read for instructional or informational purposes, it will not disappoint. It gives a grounded explanation for the reason that conservatives turned against mass incarceration.