JUDY WOODRUFF:And what about the connection to education that Ben Jealous and the NAACP are making, that money spent on prisons, some of that money ought to be redirected to the public education?

GROVER NORQUIST:Yes. Well, that's the NAACP's study and analysis.

When taxpayer activists look at it, we say, let's not waste money on prisons and the judicial system, if it's not getting us safer streets and safer cities. What we're finding in Texas, which has implemented a number of these reforms, there are drop in costs and getting less crime.

I'm in favor of allowing taxpayers to keep the money that's presently being misspent. But that's a separate discussion. Once you save money that's being misspent, whether the government spends it someplace else or taxpayers get to keep their own money, we can have that conversation another time.

JUDY WOODRUFF:How do you go about—so, you identify that all this money is being spent, but how do you go about persuading politicians, policy—public policy-makers to make a change?

BENJAMIN JEALOUS:Right now, there's a whole lot of hope at the state level.

There's huge budget pressures. And people are willing to kind of ask tough questions. And so we have gotten people in states across the South, for instance, to sit down together and say, OK, what works? Dollar for dollar, what makes us safer?

And so now, for instance, you see, in the state of Texas, there's 18 smart-on-crime bills moving. You have Tea Party activists and NAACP activists pushing the same bills.

JUDY WOODRUFF:And yet, Grover Norquist, I mean, traditionally, anybody who has looked at politics, being tough on crime is generally seen as a good move politically. Is this pushing in another direction here?

GROVER NORQUIST:Well, what I think conservatives bring to the table is that we have not focused on issues of prisons and criminal justice. We have focused on those things the government shouldn't be doing and said stop doing these things, and not spending enough time focused on those things the government should do, but spending wisely, having cost-benefit analysis, making wise decisions in how you spend. Conservatives who have a tradition of being tough on crime, speaking to the fact that tough on crime doesn't mean that everybody spends as many years in prison as possible.

Not everybody should go to prison. There are other ways to punish people, fines and restitution and house arrest and other things other than prison. And I think that makes it easier to make progress, because, clearly, Texas is not soft on crime, yet Texas is leading the reforms to spend less. They just decided not to build four prisons, which they would have had to do, because they were incarcerating fewer people now.

JUDY WOODRUFF:How do you know where to draw the line, Ben Jealous? How do you know this is the right amount to spend keeping people locked up, these are the people who should stay behind bars, and these are people we can treat differently?

BENJAMIN JEALOUS:You start with the hard facts.

On one hand, more than half people in prison right now are low-level, nonviolent drug offenders. It didn't always used to be that way, but that is what it is now. And we know, dollar for dollar, drug rehab is seven times more effective for that population. So, boom, you're going to deal with a whole bunch of folks.

At the same time, you can look back in the 1960s, when the FBI said that -- that cops in this country solved 90 percent of the homicides. And last year, they said that cops solved about 60 percent.

Now, the cops are just as good now as they were then, but they're focused on something else. And so what we're saying is—and this gets down to it—look, we want violent people behind bars. Our neighborhoods are plagued. But that means that a cop has got to be able to focus on solving the homicides and not spending so much time frisking young black kids, seeing if they have a joint, when that kid really, you know, if he has a problem, he should be going to rehab.

JUDY WOODRUFF:And is there evidence out there, to both of you—I mean, Grover on this, too—that spending more on education is going to prevent young people from ending up in prison?

GROVER NORQUIST:You can talk to him about that.

JUDY WOODRUFF:Right. Right.

BENJAMIN JEALOUS:Yes.

We know right now, for instance, that, if you just dealt with access to high-quality teachers, right —and getting high-quality teachers in school means paying them more usually—that over half of the—quote, unquote—"achievement gap" would disappear overnight.

That achievement gap is largely a resource gap. You look at the schools in these areas that have high incarceration rates, they tend to have high teacher turnover, they tend to have a very low level of high-quality teachers. They tend to not have computers. They have a hard time with A.P. books. They don't have music. Sometimes, they don't have even recess.

And so we say, look, it's just sort of obvious that, if you put more money here, just to get these kids up to what the kids in the suburbs have, they would do much better. School would be a more engaging place. They would learn more. But you can also see that that's where the money has been taken from.

JUDY WOODRUFF:Well, it's a big subject, much to look at here. And we thank you both for being with us.

Grover Norquist, Benjamin Jealous, thank you.

GROVER NORQUIST:Thank you.

BENJAMIN JEALOUS:Thank you very much.

JUDY WOODRUFF:Thanks.