The spike in crime rates prompted by the pandemic in 2020 cemented the backlash to progressive criminal justice reform. In the years that followed, lawmakers from both major parties passed laws that rolled back changes to the criminal justice system that had aimed to lower penalties and reduce the prison population. And in 2024, tough-on-crime laws, it seems, made a decisive comeback.
Over the past year, New York sent the National Guard to patrol the New York City subways, Louisiana passed a law to try 17-year-olds as adults, and Oregon recriminalized drugs it had decriminalized not so long ago. It also wasn’t just lawmakers who were eager to make these changes. In March, San Francisco voters approved ballot measures that expanded police surveillance and imposed drug tests on welfare recipients, and in November, California voters passed a ballot measure to toughen penalties for drug- and theft-related crimes, while Colorado voters chose to reduce parole eligibility for people convicted of violent crimes.
The souring mood on the breakthroughs won by progressive criminal justice advocates in the years leading up to the pandemic has clearly taken hold. And that’s in spite of the fact that, on average, crime rates have actually been falling since 2021.
This backlash will likely continue in the coming year, given Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his campaign promises of enacting harsher law enforcement, including by expanding the federal death penalty.
So what does the road ahead look like for criminal justice reform advocates?
In many ways, lawmakers are responding to the public’s sentiments about crime. But as I’ve written several times over the past year, the way people feel about crime doesn’t always reflect what crime trends actually look like. In fact, it almost never does. Over the last two decades, polls consistently showed that the majority of Americans believed crime was getting worse, even though during that same timespan, crime rates typically fell year over year.
But that doesn’t mean that people are entirely misguided and that crime isn’t an issue that lawmakers should take seriously. After all, the United States is a more violent country than its peers, and lawmakers have to address that fact. It’s also the case that after an actual rise in crime — particularly violent crimes like murder, rape, and assault — as was the case in 2020, people are understandably worried and might be slow to digest the good news.
Where lawmakers go wrong, however, is how they respond to public sentiments. It’s very difficult to pinpoint the cause of a crime wave or figure out how to reduce crime in the short term. Responding by reflexively passing tough-on-crime measures might alleviate people’s fears, but doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. In fact, as politicians try to outcompete each other over who or which party is tougher on crime, they contribute to a vicious feedback loop that only reinforces the notion that crime is getting out of control. Law-and-order campaigns, for example, exaggerate and often lie about crime trends. And so instead of reassuring the public that things are getting better, lawmakers have only been adding fuel to the fire.
Major policy changes constantly go through a push and pull, and criminal justice reform is no different. The tough-on-crime laws that were adopted across the country in the 1990s imposed overly harsh penalties, including long sentences that contributed to a growing incarcerated population. But as the prison population reached its peak in the late 2000s, public attitudes about the criminal justice system changed, and many reforms — including lowering sentences, eliminating cash bail, and expanding parole — passed and resulted in reducing the number of people in prisons in the United States.
Now, as the reforms reverse, we’re already seeing the prison population rise again after over a decade of slow but steady decline. Given the persistence of the backlash, and how widespread it seems to be, with voters themselves passing tougher crime laws, criminal justice reform advocates will face an uphill battle in the coming years.
Yet while public attitudes around criminal justice reform have clearly changed, some of the lessons of the criminal justice reform movement have stuck around. Americans, for example, support decriminalizing and legalizing marijuana — something that at least five more states did in 2023, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
There are also signs that efforts to pass more forgiving sentencing laws can still succeed. Just this year, for example, Massachusetts became the first state to ban life without parole for people under the age of 21. That followed other states, including Illinois, Minnesota, and New Mexico, that abolished that sentence for people under 18 in 2023.
And while Trump is likely to roll back some of the progress made at the federal level, there’s reason to believe that criminal justice reform advocates might eventually see friendlier territory in Democratic states where governors will want to draw sharp contrasts with the incoming president, potentially opening the window for more progressive reforms.
So while 2024 may have been the year of the tough-on-crime comeback, it’s still too soon to say that the backlash to criminal justice reform is here to stay.
