When reading about the criminal justice reform movement of the 2010s, the cliché of “different bedfellows” inevitably comes up. Conservatives and evangelicals joined ardent liberals and civil libertarians in grappling with what they (at the time) agreed were unjust prison sentences and punitive policies.
Fast forward ten years, and the bipartisan sleepover is over. Most advocacy groups are still lobbying for reform and winning in some states, but elsewhere the path to broad-based criminal justice reform bills has narrowed or disappeared entirely.
Claiming to deal with rising crime rates and the excesses of progressive reformers, some Republican-controlled state legislatures have not only reversed progress but also rolled back key reforms: increasing prison sentences, limiting parole and probation, limiting bail for offenders of charities, curtailing district attorney discretion, and weakening the Civilian Police Oversight Commission.
Louisiana is a particularly clear example of this backlash. The state was one of many conservative-leaning states to pass bipartisan criminal justice reforms in the 2010s as prison system costs ballooned. At the time, the Pelican State’s incarceration rate was nearly twice as high as the rest of the country, making it the incarceration capital of the world.
In 2017, the Louisiana Legislature passed the Justice Reinvestment Initiative (JRI), a program to reduce the cost of incarceration by focusing on putting violent offenders in prison instead of non-violent offenders. (The latter is a major contributor to the state’s staggering incarceration rates.) A February 2024 report by the Louisiana Legislative Auditor (LLA) found that while the JRI rollout was flawed, it largely worked — reducing increased the total prison population while increasing the proportion of prisoners incarcerated for violent crimes. It also saved Louisiana $152.7 million in prison costs.
Despite the initiative’s apparent success, newly sworn-in Republican Gov. Jeff Landry called a special session of the state Legislature earlier this year to pass a criminal justice package that reversed many of the JRI’s reforms.
The conservative criminal justice advocacy group Right on Crime urged state lawmakers to consider the LLA report, but unfortunately to no avail. Louisiana will now allow 17-year-olds to be charged as adults, make some juvenile criminal records public, eliminate parole, slash the number of “good time” points a prisoner can earn for early release, and limit post-conviction appeals. Other measures would introduce nitrogen gas and electrocution into the state’s death penalty arsenal and make the process off-limits to public records requests.
Kentucky is on a similar trajectory. Overriding Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto, the Legislature enacted the Safer Kentucky Act, which increases criminal penalties for more than two dozen crimes and creates a strike-out provision that would punish offenders with three Violent felonies are sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It also bans street camping and gives property owners the right to use force against someone illegally camping on their property if the person is warned by the owner.
These changes undermine the bipartisan spirit that characterized previous reforms and are costly.
Louisiana’s bill passed before budget analysts had time to understand its cost, but the most conservative estimates put it at about $30 million a year. The Institute on Crime and Justice, a Boston-based think tank, estimates that Louisiana would lose an additional $878 million if all state prisoners released in 2022 remained behind bars to complete their sentences.
Kentucky’s new three strikes law and expanded definition of “violent offender” will cost the state more than $800 million over the next decade, according to the Kentucky Economic Policy Center.
“We may not be able to pay our bills,” Beshear warned at an April press conference. “The amount of money in our budget for corrections and payments to jails that hold low-level felons is based on a budget that does not include House Bill 5 assumptions set.”
Some state legislatures are also working to reverse one of the more promising trends in recent years: the addition of civilian police oversight commissions.
The first police oversight boards were established in the 1970s, but new oversight boards proliferated after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide protests sparked by the tragedy. There are currently more than 100 civilian police oversight boards across the country, which are independent agencies with varying powers and scope that investigate, oversee or audit the operations of police departments.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill in April that strips the Civilian Police Oversight Commission of much of its power to investigate misconduct and hands it to current and former law enforcement officials.
“Today’s legislation will ensure law enforcement can do their jobs without the threat of harassment,” DeSantis said at the signing ceremony. “While blue states denigrate and defund the police, Florida will continue to be the nation’s most critical state for our law enforcement. The most department-friendly state.”
Tennessee also enacted a law that abolished police oversight boards and ended their ability to independently investigate misconduct complaints.
These states will now leave law enforcement to police themselves, shielding them from transparency and accountability despite decades of evidence that Interior Departments covered up abuses and minimized officer misconduct.
Even some Democratic-controlled states are abandoning criminal justice reform. In March, the Oregon Legislature re-criminalized drugs, overturning a 2020 ballot measure passed by voters. Drug crusaders and conservative think tanks have touted Oregon’s decriminalization failure as evidence that legalization leads to chaos. but as reasonThe rise in drug overdose deaths in Oregon is mirrored in other states where hard drugs remain illegal, writes Jacob Salem, and data shows decriminalization has neither created new drug users in Oregon nor in other states of drug addicts flock in, looking for a consequence-free solution.
Despite these setbacks, criminal justice advocates are making some progress. Arizona recently passed a bipartisan bill to eliminate court fines and fees in the juvenile justice system, and Pennsylvania and Virginia passed probation reforms. The Kansas Legislature recently passed a bill to reform the state’s civil asset forfeiture laws, with unanimous support in the House and Senate.
Politicians promote the claim that criminal justice reform leads to increased crime rates. The good news is that now, as these trends are reversing, the counter-reform story should be a harder sell. Murder rates in major cities have been falling sharply since their spike in 2020, with some worrying exceptions like Washington, D.C. wall street journal “From the beginning of the year to the end of March, homicides in 133 cities fell by approximately 20% compared with the same period in 2023,” the report said.
When Landry introduced the bill in Louisiana, he cited crime statistics from 2021 and 2022 but conspicuously ignored 2023, when homicide rates dropped significantly in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
Lawmakers and conservative think tanks want to continue blaming reform policies for out-of-control crime, but they will have a hard time crafting an honest narrative given the data. The future of criminal justice reform is uncertain, but a rollback may be enough to reignite the fight for a more just system. The backlash against criminal justice reform may have come at a good time, but it’s too late.
This article originally appeared in the print edition under the headline “States Reject Criminal Justice Reform.”
