The spike in crime charges prompted by the pandemic in 2020 cemented the backlash to progressive prison justice reform. Within the years that adopted, lawmakers from each main events handed legal guidelines that rolled again modifications to the prison justice system that had aimed to decrease penalties and scale back the jail inhabitants. And in 2024, tough-on-crime legal guidelines, it appears, made a decisive comeback.
Over the previous yr, New York despatched the Nationwide Guard to patrol the New York Metropolis subways, Louisiana handed a legislation to strive 17-year-olds as adults, and Oregon recriminalized medicine it had decriminalized not so way back. It additionally wasn’t simply lawmakers who have been desperate to make these modifications. In March, San Francisco voters authorised poll measures that expanded police surveillance and imposed drug exams on welfare recipients, and in November, California voters handed a poll measure to toughen penalties for drug- and theft-related crimes, whereas Colorado voters selected to cut back parole eligibility for individuals convicted of violent crimes.
The souring temper on the breakthroughs received by progressive prison justice advocates within the years main as much as the pandemic has clearly taken maintain. And that’s regardless of the truth that, on common, crime charges have really been falling since 2021.
This backlash will seemingly proceed within the coming yr, given Donald Trump’s return to the White Home and his marketing campaign guarantees of enacting harsher legislation enforcement, together with by increasing the federal loss of life penalty.
So what does the street forward appear like for prison justice reform advocates?
Understanding the backlash
In some ways, lawmakers are responding to the general public’s sentiments about crime. However as I’ve written a number of occasions over the previous yr, the best way individuals really feel about crime doesn’t all the time mirror what crime tendencies really appear like. In actual fact, it nearly by no means does. During the last 20 years, polls constantly confirmed that nearly all of Individuals believed crime was getting worse, although throughout that very same timespan, crime charges usually fell yr over yr.
However that doesn’t imply that persons are totally misguided and that crime isn’t a difficulty that lawmakers ought to take significantly. In any case, the United States is a extra violent nation than its friends, and lawmakers have to handle that truth. It’s additionally the case that after an precise rise in crime — significantly violent crimes like homicide, rape, and assault — as was the case in 2020, persons are understandably anxious and is perhaps sluggish to digest the excellent news.
The place lawmakers go flawed, nonetheless, is how they reply to public sentiments. It’s very troublesome to pinpoint the reason for against the law wave or work out the right way to scale back crime within the quick time period. Responding by reflexively passing tough-on-crime measures would possibly alleviate individuals’s fears, however doesn’t essentially clear up the issue. In actual fact, as politicians attempt to outcompete one another over who or which social gathering is more durable on crime, they contribute to a vicious suggestions loop that solely reinforces the notion that crime is getting uncontrolled. Regulation-and-order campaigns, for instance, exaggerate and infrequently lie about crime tendencies. And so as an alternative of reassuring the general public that issues are getting higher, lawmakers have solely been including gas to the hearth.
What this implies for 2025 and past
Main coverage modifications continuously undergo a push and pull, and prison justice reform isn’t any totally different. The tough-on-crime legal guidelines that have been adopted throughout the nation within the Nineties imposed overly harsh penalties, together with lengthy sentences that contributed to a rising incarcerated inhabitants. However because the jail inhabitants reached its peak within the late 2000s, public attitudes in regards to the prison justice system modified, and lots of reforms — together with decreasing sentences, eliminating money bail, and increasing parole — handed and resulted in lowering the variety of individuals in prisons in the USA.
Now, because the reforms reverse, we’re already seeing the jail inhabitants rise once more after over a decade of sluggish however regular decline. Given the persistence of the backlash, and the way widespread it appears to be, with voters themselves passing more durable crime legal guidelines, prison justice reform advocates will face an uphill battle within the coming years.
But whereas public attitudes round prison justice reform have clearly modified, a few of the classes of the prison justice reform motion have caught round. Individuals, for instance, assist decriminalizing and legalizing marijuana — one thing that not less than 5 extra states did in 2023, in response to the Jail Coverage Initiative.
There are additionally indicators that efforts to move extra forgiving sentencing legal guidelines can nonetheless succeed. Simply this yr, for instance, Massachusetts turned the first state to ban life with out parole for individuals beneath the age of 21. That adopted different states, together with Illinois, Minnesota, and New Mexico, that abolished that sentence for individuals beneath 18 in 2023.
And whereas Trump is prone to roll again a few of the progress made on the federal stage, there’s cause to consider that prison justice reform advocates would possibly ultimately see friendlier territory in Democratic states the place governors will need to draw sharp contrasts with the incoming president, probably opening the window for extra progressive reforms.
So whereas 2024 could have been the yr of the tough-on-crime comeback, it’s nonetheless too quickly to say that the backlash to prison justice reform is right here to remain.