Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.

It was something of a surreal moment. Charles de Ganahl Koch, the nerdy multibillionaire from Wichita who has become known as the Rasputin of the American Right, was trying to explain to me why he was getting into bed—politically speaking—with people like George Soros, his progressive archrival in the big-money-and-politics set, and Cory Booker, the liberal black senator and former mayor of beleaguered (and very Democratic) Newark, New Jersey.

The vast apparatus of foundations, advocacy groups, corporations and think tanks that Koch oversees and supports—what his critics darkly call the “Kochtopus”—was busy this winter launching programs and initiatives aimed at reeling in the worst excesses of one of the few industries larger than his own: the criminal justice-industrial complex. Koch had decided to help pull together a new coalition of left-right advocacy groups in Washington, including the Hillary Clinton-aligned Center for American Progress, to fight what he calls the “overcriminalization of America.” He was underwriting a documentary screening at the Newseum about Weldon Angelos, a marijuana dealer serving a 55-year sentence that even Angelos’ judge called “unjust” and “cruel”—and helping to train attorneys to aid poor people across the country. In March, Koch’s general counsel, Mark Holden, plans to join with Van Jones, a former Obama administration official who took the liberal side on CNN’s since-canceled “Crossfire,” in mounting the #Cut50 Bipartisan Summit, which will explore strategies for reducing America’s incarcerated population by 50 percent over the next 10 years. (Jones’s old CNN adversary, Newt Gingrich, is also involved.)


A passionate prairie libertarian who as a young man reportedly wouldn’t permit a friend to bring an Ernest Hemingway novel into his house because “ Hemingway was a communist” (the friend had to leave the book on the stoop, though Koch denies this happened), the 79-year-old Koch now evinces a much more relaxed attitude toward joining up with Soros and other liberals. “The more the merrier,” he told me. “One of my heroes was Frederick Douglass. He said, ‘I would unite with anyone to do right and with nobody to do wrong.’ We’ve worked with unlikely bedfellows. … But I would say we have gotten the most support in criminal justice reform.”

To anyone who followed the past several national political campaigns, it might seem that Charles Koch had wandered through the looking glass. This is, after all, the same Charles Koch who considers Democrats to be “ collectivists,” who believes that President Barack Obama uses “ Marxist models” and whom Harry Reid blasted on the floor of the Senate as “ power-drunk” and “ about as un-American as anyone that I can imagine.” But when we spoke in February, Koch insisted there is nothing strange or secretive or un-American about his criminal justice campaign—it all makes perfect sense. And he explained why.

***

America’s sixth-richest person (he’s tied with brother David, according to Forbes), Charles Koch has never spent a day in prison. But he has seen the inside of more courtrooms than he can count. Over the decades, lawsuits and threatened prosecution nearly tore both his family and company apart, even as Koch was brilliantly building the $250 million oil business left him by his father, Fred, into a $115 billion empire. What changed things for him, Koch says, was a 1995 Texas case against Koch Industries. As Koch tells it, state prosecutors pressured a Koch employee he had fired into testifying in a criminal case against four other Koch workers, saying they had covered up a chemical-pollution infraction at one of Koch’s plants. The prosecutors offered Koch a deal: Cut the four employees loose to be charged and convicted, and Koch Industries wouldn’t suffer.

It might seem that Charles Koch had wandered through the looking glass.

Koch says he directed his lawyers to fight instead. It took six long years to get the case and all 97 felony charges dropped (though Koch paid a $10 million settlement). “The whole organization was immobilized. Everybody was terrified,” he remembers. The case immediately popped to mind when I asked him what really inspired his jump into criminal justice reform. “If that can happen with us, with our resources and what we did to defend our people, what happens to people in a company that doesn’t defend them? Or even worse, to poor people who get caught in something and have no recourse?” he says. As for why now, Koch has a simple, practical answer: The politics have changed, and “now, unlike the past, we have the opportunity to bring about real change.”

Critics would say that the libertarian-minded Koch brothers have ample personal reasons to want to curtail the power and reach of the U.S. justice system. After all, it serves both their industrial and political purposes to reduce laws on the books that can constrain them. Thanks to a series of court rulings opening up the floodgates for political spending by outside groups and individuals, Koch money can now do almost as it pleases in politics; the Kochtopus would obviously like to do the same in court against the tree-huggers and labor unionists who so often seek to block them.

Illustration by Steve Brodner

But Charles Koch isn’t the only one who has woken up to America’s self-perpetuating, out-of-control criminal justice system—a reminder of how far the best-intentioned government programs can, when left unchecked, do as much harm as good. And so this very rich right-winger has found himself fighting alongside the likes of Booker and Soros—even as Soros and the Kochs separately prepare to spend millions of dollars opposing each other in next year’s presidential race. Indeed, an increasingly loud clamor of activists from both the left and right, from city halls to Capitol Hill, lawmakers to lawyers, are taking aim at what both sides now term “over-incarceration” and the general unforgivingness of America’s justice system. “The use of the criminal law to solve problems has just gone too far,” says Chris Stone, president of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. “This is not about the libertarian right or the left. It’s about common sense.”

Reform has long been paralyzed by a sense of helplessness about changing things—a helplessness driven by decades of politics that said anything that benefited criminals could and would be used against you on Election Day. The devastating 1988 “Willie Horton” ad that accused Michael Dukakis of being soft on crime froze debate and terrified politicians for nearly a quarter century. Yet in the past year—following nationwide protests against police tactics provoked by the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York—issues of race and criminal justice reform have finally returned to the national debate, resonant in a way they haven’t been since the late 1960s. And, just as surprisingly, this odd new coalition uniting liberals with libertarians has built bipartisan momentum to actually do something.

In Washington, where so much seems paralyzed by partisanship, Senate leaders like Democrat Patrick Leahy and Republican Rand Paul have found common ground, becoming partners to relieve tough sentencing guidelines and ease the way for felons to re-enter society. The legislators, in turn, are recruiting—and being boosted by—an influx of money to push the reform agenda. “Are we ramping up? We absolutely are,” says Melissa Cohlmia, chief of corporate communications at Koch headquarters in Wichita.

Booker, only 17 months on the job, has been one of the most aggressive converts to the new bipartisanship, and he has found a surprisingly open door at Koch Industries and other conservative organizations—just months after the Kochs plotted a $125 million midterm spending spree to try to keep Democrats out of Congress. “I’ve worked with their chief counsel, with Grover Norquist, Newt Gingrich. I talked to people involved in numerous conservative think tanks, Christian evangelicals and groups from fiscal conservatives to libertarians,” Booker told me. “It’s clear to me that the zeitgeist is growing, and that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

***

The scale of the problem this unlikely coalition is tackling almost dwarfs comprehension. Criminal justice has become one of America’s biggest industries.

Over the past generation, the incarcerated population in the United States has leaped 300 percent, from just 500,000 in 1980 to more than 2.3 million today, or more than 1 in 100 adults—including one in 16 black men and one in 36 Latino men. It is the highest rate of incarceration in the world; America now hosts 25 percent of the world’s prisoners even though Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population. According to the Pew Center on the States, the United States houses more inmates per 100,000 population than the top 35 European countries combined. The United States even houses more inmates, percentage-wise, than Russia.

The racial disparities are devastating. The odds of a black child born in America going to prison today are nearly one in three, or 27 percent—and that’s five times more than in the 1970s, says Todd Clear, a prominent criminologist who serves as provost of Rutgers University. Under the current system, most of the ever-expanding prison population will never vote or be a parent to their kids (in many states, felons are not allowed in the schools) or know anything but crime, ensuring that the downward spiral continues.

Then there’s the sheer cost. For most of the 20th century, incarceration rates in America were about 100 per 100,000 people, which remains close to Western Europe’s rate today, says Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. They rose sharply as sentences grew longer and more mandatory sentences hit first-time offenders. Now the population has plateaued at about 700 per 100,000 people. At approximately $40,000 per inmate, that is costing taxpayers about $80 billion more than it used to—not counting, of course, the intangible costs of unearned wages, unpaid debts and unparented children. A breakthrough study by Lance Hannon and Robert DeFina of Villanova University found that the official poverty rate would have fallen considerably—by more than 10 percent—during this whole era had it not been for mass incarceration.

In America today, under ever-harsher sentencing laws in place for 30 years and meager efforts at rehabilitation, it’s usually once a criminal, always a criminal, no matter how minor and nonviolent the offense. It is an endless cycle of doomed lives and sky-high recidivism rates. As Booker recounted when we met recently, many black kids growing up in projects in places like Newark have no more prospect of avoiding petty crime and rising in life than the Untouchables in India, trapped in an “almost-caste system” and, once in trouble, unable to escape from the “ridiculous amount of collateral consequences that kept them from moving on with their lives.” They are, in other words, pretty much doomed, with the prison maw awaiting them.

If that can happen with us, with our resources and what we did to defend our people, what happens to people in a company that doesn’t defend them?”

The new toughness has been only marginally effective in reducing crime, even as it’s vastly increased the number of people trapped in the system. According to the Pew study, putting more people in jail in recent decades “accounted for only about 25 percent of the reduction” in violent crime during the 1990s, and many criminologists think the percentage is actually far less. And what unites figures as disparate as Soros and Rand Paul, for example, is a strong sense that the “war on drugs” that intensified during the Reagan and Clinton administrations only increased the prison population while doing nothing to reduce narcotics use.

Sociologists say that partly what drove the super-sizing of the prison population from the late ’70s onward was a not-so-subtle undercurrent of racism—a kind of backlash to the civil rights movement. “After the social protests and unrest of the ’60s, policymakers sensed the discomfort on the part of white voters,” argues Western, the Harvard sociologist. “Researchers who have looked at that historical period say that while the civil rights movement was making all those political gains, the backlash was starting. That’s when a vigorous debate begins on the national stage about crime policy in American cities and so on, and criminal justice took a punitive turn.” This has led to what author Michelle Alexander has called “ the new Jim Crow” system under which, she says, many young black men in large American cities are “warehoused in prisons” because they can’t make it in our globalized economy.

It’s here, with prisons, that reformers are starting. They are targeting the tougher sentencing laws that began in the 1970s. “Very long sentences have no impact on public safety,” says Clear, the Rutgers criminologist. “High rates of incarceration make [minority] communities less safe, not more safe.” The statistics roll off his tongue: In the 1970s, three-quarters of people convicted were sentenced to probation. Today, it’s less than a quarter. In the ’70s, the median prison sentence was 17 months; it’s now 30 months. In the 1980s, new mandatory sentencing laws decreased the availability of parole, particularly for drug crimes. By the early ’90s, recidivism statutes like three-strikes laws took hold, under which a second or third felony gets a much longer term. “Each state has a different story,” Clear says, “but they have created an iron law of increasing incarceration.”

The problem also stems from “the use of criminal law to regulate all kinds of personal, social and economic behavior that wasn’t historically intended to be treated as criminal,” says Norman Reimer of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, whose group is among many that have received some of the tens of millions of dollars the Kochs have given over the past 10 years on the issue. As Reimer explains, even as violent crime has declined steadily, the government increasingly has focused on “everything from substance abuse—which is not a classic crime, not something that derives from the biblical sense of wrongdoing—to overregulation.”

To illustrate his point, Reimer cites a case, which the Supreme Court recently ruled on, where fish and wildlife authorities used the white-collar Sarbanes-Oxley Act to prosecute a Florida fisherman for throwing three grouper back into the Gulf of Mexico. Sarbanes-Oxley imposes a maximum sentence of 20 years for the destruction of “any record, document or tangible object” to obstruct an investigation. The grouper—which the fisherman allegedly wanted to rid himself of so he wouldn’t get fined—were considered “tangible objects.” (At a hearing last fall, Justice Antonin Scalia, normally a friend to prosecutors, was aghast. “What kind of a mad prosecutor would try to send this guy up for 20 years?” he said. In February, the court overturned the fisherman’s conviction.)

“There’s a sufficient level of injustice that left and right are bending to meet up in a consensus about it,” Reimer says. “It’s bad for the economy. It’s bad for families. It’s bad for the country. We have 70 million Americans with criminal records, and I really don’t think we’re a nation of bad people.”

***

Groups supported by both the Kochs and Soros are backing a wide range of left-right bills in the new Congress—and especially in the Senate, where the movement has gained special resonance among some of the body’s boldest names. Senators Leahy and Paul have introduced the Justice Safety Valve Act, designed to give relief to the nation’s bloated prison system by offering judges leeway to consider sentences below the mandatory minimum for all federal crimes. Booker, Dick Durbin of Illinois and Leahy—among the most liberal of senators—are joining with Republicans Ted Cruz of Texas and the libertarian-leaning Mike Lee of Utah to reintroduce the Smarter Sentencing Act, giving federal judges more discretion in handling nonviolent drug offenses. Booker and Paul, meanwhile, are pushing the REDEEM Act, which would make it easier for juveniles who commit nonviolent crimes to clear those convictions from their records, lift the federal ban on food stamps and welfare benefits for low-level drug offenders, offer incentives to states that currently try juveniles as adults to encourage them to raise the age to 18 and ban most solitary confinement for children.

Elsewhere, the Kochs have jumped into issues so stereotypically liberal that GOP candidates eager for that reported $889 million in right-wing, Koch-generated 2016 financing might find themselves spinning in their election booths. Inspired by Charles Koch’s unpleasant courtroom experiences over the years, the company's general counsel, Mark Holden, privately expressed solidarity with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers as it mounted, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, the John Adams Project in 2008—an effort to supply civilian lawyers to assist in the defense of the prisoners at Guantánamo. (The group’s name was inspired by Adams’ unpopular but righteous defense of British soldiers after the Boston Massacre.)

Though the Kochs did not fund or directly support the John Adams Project, that association with the NACDL led to a bigger collaboration. “After the John Adams Project, I began talking to them about the crisis in indigent defense,” says Reimer. The result: a substantial grant from Koch to the NACDL to provide training and scholarships for attorneys in impoverished areas around the country, as well as to set up activist groups to reform defense for the indigent. “The Kochs believe deeply in the right to counsel, even for the most unpopular defendants,” Reimer says.

Soros’ Open Society Foundations has also funneled money to Reimer’s group for John Adams and other projects, though it is not working directly with the Kochs. Stone says the Soros group is focusing on rolling back mandatory minimum sentences and campaigned for Proposition 47 in California, for example, which mandated misdemeanors instead of felonies for “non-serious and nonviolent crimes.” The measure was approved in November.

Illustration by Steve Brodner

What Koch doesn’t say is that there could be a considerable political benefit too in appealing to the minority voters who abandoned the GOP in droves in 2008 and 2012. While Koch is clearly casting his lot with the GOP in 2016, he’s also giving to the United Negro College Fund and pushing the envelope on immigration by backing groups like The Libre Initiative, which departs from Republican hardliners by collecting money for refugee children being held at federal sites and provides tutorials on U.S. immigration law and how to build family businesses.

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A generation after Willie Horton, in fact, a growing number of Republicans are now proudly driving today’s reform efforts. These are not Lee Atwater’s heirs. Instead of playing the race card to drive up their white vote, these new-era GOPers come to the cause with libertarian notions of freedom and an instinctive aversion to the long arm of the law. Others give the campaign for criminal justice reform a distinctly moral and philosophical cast, stressing evangelical Christian beliefs in a second chance. And then there are those classic conservatives who are increasingly appalled at the vast cost of the prison system. But, of course, it is not lost on any of them that in an America headed for a majority-minority population by 2044, their party may stand to benefit—and certainly cannot sustain election after election of receiving just 6 percent of the black vote and 27 percent of the Latino vote, as Mitt Romney did in the 2012 presidential race.

In an interview with Politico Magazine, Rand Paul said that during visits with his Kentucky constituents, he became convinced that African-American communities especially were being destroyed by the failed “drug war.” “I’d go to meetings, and people would tell me how hard it is for them to get work, because when they were 20, they had a felony conviction,” Paul says. “Another fellow said, ‘I can’t go to my kid’s school because of it. And it was always African-Americans, the minorities. Perhaps that’s why we have 40 percent federal and 60 percent state recidivist rates.”

With his presidential ambitions, Paul, who received just 13 percent of the black vote in his 2010 Senate win, is no doubt also hoping to improve on the GOP’s miserable showing among African-Americans. Still, his ideas on the issue are virtually indistinguishable from those of Soros, the Hungarian-born former hedge fund whiz who, like Koch, derives many of his principles from long-dead European philosophers of libertarianism and freedom (in Koch’s case, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek; in Soros’, Karl Popper). And whose thinking, like Koch’s, fits into no easy category. “While he is often characterized in the press as the sugar daddy of the left, he’s animated by the concept of an open society that he picked up from Karl Popper at the London School of Economics, and growing up under Nazism and communism—all that led him to reject ideology. To recognize that the world is complicated,” Soros’ poitical strategist, Michael Vachon, told me.

For Koch, it is all about a government that has clearly gone way beyond his minimalist ideal. “He sees everything through the lens of what makes you freer, and the First Amendment,” says Holden, his general counsel, and he has a particular reverence for the Constitution’s Fifth and Sixth Amendments, which bar the illegal seizure of property and guarantee due process.

The excesses of the criminal justice system amount to the perfect devil for libertarians and liberals alike. For liberals, it is the embodiment of the brutal militarized state; for libertarians, of that state’s overreach. For both, it is the symbol of out-of-control government excess that must be rolled back. The coalition is not limited just to criminal justice reform but is also part of a shift in American politics in which traditional liberals are being driven into the libertarian camp simply because they no longer trust the government they once placed their faith in—whether it is police, the National Security Agency or the military-industrial complex that has helped to orchestrate the two longest wars in American history in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Paul says he is struck that he doesn’t even have to “split the difference” anymore with far-lefties like Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon on the NSA and privacy, or with Booker on crime. “It’s become a right-left continuum where right and left are coming together,” Paul told me. “Ron Wyden and I, we call ourselves the Ben Franklin Caucus, meaning we don’t want to trade liberty for security. It also helps people to understand that bipartisanship is not really the same as compromise. Wyden and I are not splitting the difference on privacy. And on criminal justice, I don’t think I’m splitting the difference with Cory Booker.”

Both sides are aware of the irony of these new alliances. “I don’t think libertarian is on the other end of the liberal spectrum,” says Soros’ aide Vachon. “His philosophy is that nobody is in possession of ultimate truth. Therefore, you have to constantly examine your assumptions. Look at the evidence and stay in touch with reality.”

Ron Wyden and I, we call ourselves the Ben Franklin caucus.”

***

Charles Koch seems to be enjoying confounding his partisan enemies, but his political views have long been more complex than their caricature. “What we might do is support some who are getting our message right rather than just attacking each other and posturing. Absolutely,” Koch says. “We would pick a Democrat if he or she was more on the same page than a Republican. We’re not Republicans or Democrats or even libertarians; we’re for people who we believe they are on balance helping the country to be better.”

Daniel Schulman, a Mother Jones editor who wrote a well-received book on the Kochs, Sons of Wichita, explains that Charles Koch is actually “fairly difficult to pigeonhole. Most people see him as this conservative kingmaker, but years ago, he was railing against the Republican establishment—largely crony capitalism and corporate welfare, Republican businessmen seeking federal subsidies, over which he felt the Republicans were doing themselves a disservice.” Indeed, the Kochs have sometimes worked against their economic self-interest out of conviction: Koch boasts that his company was the only major producer in the ethanol industry to argue for the demise of the ethanol tax credit in 2011.

Illustration by Steve Brodner

Koch, like his brother, is just as much a pragmatist with a scientific bent of mind as Soros, despite his reputation as an ideologue. “They are chemical engineers. Right brain, very logical. Proof of concepts. They are constantly probing for ways to be more objective. All their experimentation in politics goes back to when David ran for the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980,” one longtime associate explains. After that failed effort at running for vice president in a party that garnered a tiny fraction of the vote, the brothers gradually came to think the better route was to raise the libertarian content of the already established GOP, but also to work on their own.

And they’re now beginning to feel a fierce urgency to their work. For Charles Koch, the time to get things done has come in part because he believes he doesn’t have all that much time left. Brian Doherty, a conservative journalist, recalls that in 2006, Koch told him, “As I get older, my time horizon is getting shorter. I’d like to see more happen faster.”

Koch himself says he doesn’t intend to wait very long. As we finish our conversation, I’m still wondering how it all fits together for him and what the man is really after—how to square the image of the menacing right-winger with $25 million donations to the United Negro College Fund. Koch says it all goes back to his libertarian views, which he links in turn to his engineering studies at MIT more than a half century ago and his belief that if “the physical world” behaves according to certain set rules, “the same thing has got to be true of the social world.” Besides, he adds, “All through this, my vision has been of a society in which everyone has the freedom and opportunity to live according to the vision on which this country was founded. And that means everyone is treated equally under the law.”

Yet, he’s not waiting around for all these lovely abstract principles to assert themselves. Koch says his guides to action—in changing criminal justice and politics in America—are the abolitionists of the 19th century. “That lesson really impressed me,” Koch says. “If there is wrong, you don’t say we have to get rid of it gradually. If injustice exists, you need to eliminate it immediately.”