The Daily Herald was one of Bill Lee’s early stops in his campaign for governor.

I spent part of a May 2017 interview fascinated about Lee’s name and its similarity to the former baseball player, Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who ran for governor in Vermont. I jokingly wondered if the businessman worried that anyone would confuse him with the “Spaceman,” whose ideas were loonier than a Warner Brothers cartoon. We chuckled for a few seconds about it.

Then I started listening closely to Lee after asking him his top priorities, if elected (which, as you know, he was in November 2018). He told me criminal justice reform was his primary issue after having volunteered with a nonprofit prison ministry group called Men of Valor.

For a second, I thought Lee had gone off the rails as surely as his sports namesake or perhaps like slightly off-center animated character.

After all, what candidate in his right mind would campaign for prison reform? This is Tennessee, where we like to lock away criminals and throw away the key, I thought to myself. When’s the last time a prosecutor or judge ran for office on the pretext of softer sentencing or concern about rates of recidivism?

But the more Lee talked about it on the campaign trial, the more he made sense to me and apparently to other voters. After volunteering with prisoners and seeing the issue for himself, Lee was convinced the state really could reform convicts and save money at the same time. He wasn’t the least bit on base, after all.

“We need to be tough on crime and smart on crime,” Lee said. “I want to work with leaders for sentencing reform, judicial reform, intake reform, re-entry reform.”

Lee started providing more details about his vision, such as using faith-based groups to solve some of the state’s social problems, such as the opioid plague.

“State government is never going to solve this problem,” Lee said during one of the gubernatorial debates with former Nashville Mayor Karl Deal. “And, you know, I have said that when I’m governor, we’ll have an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, where our nonprofit community, our community organizations, our faith community — where we create an environment where they can play a bigger role.”

At noon Saturday, Lee will be sworn in to succeed Gov. Bill Haslam. He will begin working on his legislative package and partnering with leaders in the Republican Party to support and pass his agenda.

Guess what? Yes, his initial push as governor will include criminal justice reform, focused on smarter sentencing and spending less on prisons and jails.

One of the central figures in the push for prison reform will be Rep. Michael Curcio, R-Dickson, who represents parts of Columbia and Maury County in Nashville. Curcio was named chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, where he will be front and center in the governor’s crusade.

At a speech at Friday’s Kiwanis Club of Columbia and later during an interview at The Daily Herald, Curcio spoke excitedly about picking up the mantle and challenge in the state House.

“I don’t want to get ahead of the governor’s announcements of his legislative agenda,” Curcio said, “but it’s going to include exciting ways to cut the prison population and have a major impacts across communities in Tennessee.”

Curcio, whose district also includes the Turney Center prison complex in Hickman County, explained how Texas was ready to spend billions for new prisons. Before it did, leaders asked bipartisan prison-reform organizations to make recommendations.

The result was praising the First Step Act. It aims to reduce the prison population by 50 percent. It includes common-sense steps that include banning the shackling of women during childbirth, providing a pathway to compassionate release for the terminally ill and elderly, and placing prisoners within a reasonable driving distance of their families.

That’s out-of-the-box thinking for law-and-order Republicans, who have been afraid of prison reform politically in the past.

“There are reforms as a conservative that you can support and and can be smart on crime,” Curcio told me. “Looking at Texas and Georgia, changes in policy and rehabilitation led to better public safety.”

Curcio mentioned the possibility of creating more rehabilitation programs, like one at the Turney Center, where inmates make hardwood floors, that would prepare the prisoners for life after release. Vocational training, academic classes and substance abuse treatment might be able to reduce sentences, if legislation comes out of this session.

In Georgia, former Gov. Nathan Deal signed a sweeping justice reform bill to control unimpeded growth of prisons and reserve them for only the most violent criminals. The measure saved taxpayers $265 million over five years. The state also supported the development of “accountability courts” that require defendants to work, seek treatment and stay sober.

“This is something that for a long time was not about,” Curcio said. “We need to take a deep hard look at prison reform. The reality is, we cannot keep people in prison for nearly as long as their sentence. We have to figure out, who are we mad at and who are we afraid of? We are going to take a top-to-bottom look at these issues.”

Haslam’s pardon of Cyntoia Brown also brought harsh sentencing into the spotlight in Tennessee. Many times, prosecutors use add-on charges, such as aggravating circumstances, to force defendants to serve more time in prison. That’s a good tale to tell the voters on the campaign trail, but it doesn’t do much for reforming inmates and saving the state money.

We should start using technology instead of prisons. It doesn’t take a blue-ribbon panel of legal experts to figure out we should keep low-level offenders at home with their children and family, wearing an ankle bracelet, instead of forcing the state to provide three meals and a cell.

I’ll be interested to hear Lee’s inaugural address Saturday. What will he say about prison reform? How will Lee set the stage for it under his leadership?

The newcomer’s ideas don’t sound so dicey or spacey any more.

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James Bennett is editor of The Daily Herald. His column mixes exclusive reporting, old-school storytelling and original commentary. He’s been a Tennessee Press Association first-place award winner for editorial writing, news reporting and public service since joining the newspaper in 2014. Contact him at jbennett@c-dh.net.