The spike in crime charges prompted by the pandemic in 2020 cemented the backlash to progressive legal justice reform. Within the years that adopted, lawmakers from each main events handed legal guidelines that rolled again adjustments to the legal 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 12 months, New York despatched the Nationwide Guard to patrol the New York Metropolis subways, Louisiana handed a regulation 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 had been wanting to make these adjustments. In March, San Francisco voters permitted poll measures that expanded police surveillance and imposed drug checks 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 folks convicted of violent crimes.
The souring temper on the breakthroughs gained by progressive legal justice advocates within the years main as much as the pandemic has clearly taken maintain. And that’s despite the truth that, on common, crime charges have truly been falling since 2021.
This backlash will probably proceed within the coming 12 months, given Donald Trump’s return to the White Home and his marketing campaign guarantees of enacting harsher regulation enforcement, together with by increasing the federal demise penalty.
So what does the street forward seem like for legal 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 instances over the previous 12 months, the best way folks really feel about crime doesn’t all the time replicate what crime tendencies truly seem like. The truth is, it virtually by no means does. Over the past twenty years, polls constantly confirmed that the vast majority of People believed crime was getting worse, regardless that throughout that very same timespan, crime charges usually fell 12 months over 12 months.
However that doesn’t imply that individuals are totally misguided and that crime isn’t a problem that lawmakers ought to take severely. In spite of everything, the United States is a extra violent nation than its friends, and lawmakers have to deal with that reality. It’s additionally the case that after an precise rise in crime — notably violent crimes like homicide, rape, and assault — as was the case in 2020, individuals are understandably nervous and could be gradual to digest the excellent news.
The place lawmakers go incorrect, nevertheless, is how they reply to public sentiments. It’s very tough to pinpoint the reason for a criminal offense wave or determine methods to scale back crime within the quick time period. Responding by reflexively passing tough-on-crime measures may alleviate folks’s fears, however doesn’t essentially remedy the issue. The truth is, as politicians attempt to outcompete one another over who or which get together is more durable on crime, they contribute to a vicious suggestions loop that solely reinforces the notion that crime is getting uncontrolled. Legislation-and-order campaigns, for instance, exaggerate and infrequently lie about crime tendencies. And so as a substitute 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 adjustments continually undergo a push and pull, and legal justice reform is not any completely different. The tough-on-crime legal guidelines that had been adopted throughout the nation within the Nineteen 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 concerning the legal justice system modified, and lots of reforms — together with reducing sentences, eliminating money bail, and increasing parole — handed and resulted in decreasing the variety of folks 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 gradual 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, legal justice reform advocates will face an uphill battle within the coming years.
But whereas public attitudes round legal justice reform have clearly modified, a number of the classes of the legal justice reform motion have caught round. People, for instance, assist decriminalizing and legalizing marijuana — one thing that a minimum of 5 extra states did in 2023, in keeping with the Jail Coverage Initiative.
There are additionally indicators that efforts to move extra forgiving sentencing legal guidelines can nonetheless succeed. Simply this 12 months, for instance, Massachusetts turned the first state to ban life with out parole for folks underneath the age of 21. That adopted different states, together with Illinois, Minnesota, and New Mexico, that abolished that sentence for folks underneath 18 in 2023.
And whereas Trump is more likely to roll again a number of the progress made on the federal degree, there’s purpose to imagine that legal justice reform advocates may finally see friendlier territory in Democratic states the place governors will wish to draw sharp contrasts with the incoming president, doubtlessly opening the window for extra progressive reforms.
So whereas 2024 could have been the 12 months of the tough-on-crime comeback, it’s nonetheless too quickly to say that the backlash to legal justice reform is right here to remain.
