“Tough-on-Crime” Policies are Back in Some Places That Had Reimagined Criminal Justice

By Amanda Hernández / Stateline

Fueled by public outrage over the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and other high-profile incidents of police violence, a seismic shift swept across the United States shortly afterward, with a wave of initiatives aimed at reining in police powers and reimagining criminal-legal systems.

Yet less than half a decade later, political leaders from coast to coast are embracing a return to “tough-on-crime” policies, often undoing the changes of recent years.

This resurgence is most palpable in the nation’s major urban centers, traditionally bastions of progressive politics. San Francisco voters earlier this month approved ballot initiatives that would require drug screenings for welfare recipients and would loosen restrictions on police operations. The District of Columbia, too, has pivoted toward a harder stance on crime, with its mayor signing into law a sweeping package that toughens penalties for gun crimes, establishes drug-free zones and allows police to collect DNA from suspects before a conviction.

Local and state leaders in blue and red states — including California, Georgia, Louisiana, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont — also have looked to toughen their approaches to crime and public safety in a variety of ways. Lawmakers have proposed bills that would stiffen retail theft charges, re-criminalize certain hard street drugs, keep more suspects in jail in lieu of bail and expand police powers.

Many are passing with bipartisan support.

Some of what we’re seeing is more like … shaving off the edges of some of the policies that felt too lenient.

– Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice

Policymakers are responding to public concerns over rising crime rates and heightened fear and anger due to a surge in offenses such as carjackings and retail theft. To some criminal justice experts, the legislative actions represent more of a partial rollback of progressive criminal justice changes rather than a complete return to past punitive policies.

“The issue for most people isn’t whether something is up or down by 10%. It’s that they are seeing randomness and brazenness, and getting a sense of lawlessness,” said Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. “Some of what we’re seeing is more like … shaving off the edges of some of the policies that felt too lenient.”

The percentage of Americans who think the United States is “not tough enough” on crime grew for the first time in 30 years, according to a Gallup poll released in November. Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they believe the criminal-legal system is too soft, up from 41% in 2020.

While national crime data is notoriously difficult to track and understand, violent crime across the United States decreased in 2022 — dropping to about the same level as before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the FBI’s annual crime report. Property crimes rose during the same period. Crime data compiled by the Council on Criminal Justice also suggests that most types of crime are reverting toward pre-pandemic levels.

Georgia’s legislature earlier this year passed a bill that would add 30 additional felony and misdemeanor crimes to the state’s list of bail-restricted offenses, meaning that people accused of those crimes would be required to post cash bail. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp hasn’t said whether he will sign the bill.

Last week, the Tennessee Senate passed a bill that would prohibit local governments from altering police traffic stop policies. If signed into law, it would overturn a Memphis city ordinance that bans pretextual traffic stops, which is when police use minor traffic infractions such as broken taillights as grounds to investigate motorists for more serious crimes.

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat who leads the first state to decriminalize drugs, announced in early March she plans to sign legislation that would redefine the possession of small amounts of hard drugs, such as fentanyl or methamphetamine, as a misdemeanor punishable by a maximum of six months in jail.

The bill also would allow law enforcement to take action to prevent the distribution and use of controlled substances in public areas, such as parks or sidewalks.

“What we did is we tried to make sure that we could blend together our public safety in a behavioral health approach when folks are caught with drugs,” said Oregon state Rep. Jason Kropf, a Democrat and one of the bill’s lead authors.

Still, critics of the new legislation argue that re-criminalizing drug use would disproportionately affect Black, Latino and Indigenous communities, and further burden Oregon’s already overwhelmed criminal justice system. There are more than 2,800 people in the state currently unrepresented in court and about half are facing misdemeanor charges, according to the Oregon Judicial Department’s dashboard.

Some of these concerns are why Oregon state Sen. Floyd Prozanski, a Democrat, voted against the new legislation.

“I do believe that this [bill] will in fact reinstitute the war on drugs,” Prozanski said in an interview. “We’re just gonna compound the problem to what’s happened in the current caseload without attorneys — cases being dismissed, cases being delayed. And that doesn’t help anyone in the system, including victims of crime.”

Why some lawmakers are reworking policies

Some criminal justice advocates and experts perceive the recent trend of states dialing back reforms as impulsive reactions to what might be a temporary, pandemic-related spike in certain crimes. They argue that these measures are more about sending a political message than finding solutions.

“Some of the knee-jerk reactions aren’t even responsive to the actual problem at hand,” said David Muhammad, the executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, an advocacy and research group.

Others, though, say recent votes are a “rejection of pro-criminal policies” that prioritized the rights of offenders over the needs of crime victims.

“This is a return to normalcy — to common sense. The fact is that their ideas failed. They were bad,” said Charles Stimson, a senior legal fellow and deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“This isn’t a Democrat or Republican thing or a blue or red state thing. This is a law and order versus chaos thing. Period.”

In Vermont, Republican Gov. Phil Scott urged lawmakers this year to revisit criminal justice reform legislation passed a few years ago, bills that he signed into law. Among them is the state’s “Raise the Age” law, which reclassified 18-year-old adults as juveniles within the criminal justice system. He has urged lawmakers to postpone the plan to do the same for 19-year-old adults. Scott said the state isn’t ready to house those suspects as juveniles.

“I wish I had better anticipated the challenge,” he said in his State of the State address earlier this year.

Last week, the Vermont House approved a bill that would stiffen repeat retail theft violations, allowing aggregation of stolen goods’ value to shift charges from misdemeanors to felonies. The bill will now go to the Senate for consideration.

Meanwhile, in California, a bipartisan effort is underway to amend Proposition 47, which was passed by voters in 2014. It raised the threshold to $950 of stolen goods for shoplifting to be considered a felony and reclassified some drug charges from felonies to misdemeanors. The proposition was widely supported as a way to reduce prison overcrowding. Now, a new bill would, as in Vermont, allow prosecutors to charge repeat retail theft offenders on a cumulative basis for goods stolen.

“Shoplifting, smash-and-grab thefts, and other acts of retail theft trends are causing retailers to close their businesses and endangering customers and employees,” Democratic Assemblymember James Ramos, the bill’s lead author, said in a news release. “Since the pandemic, these crimes have increased. That is not the direction California needs to go.”

Rollbacks in Louisiana

Louisiana earned national attention in 2017 when then-Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, signed a legislative package intended to reduce the state prison population and bolster alternatives to incarceration. Louisiana saved nearly $153 million, and the number of people held in state custody decreased by 1,627 people, or 11%, from 2016 to 2023, according to state records.

The state again earned national attention this winter after lawmakers met for a special session on public safety and considered a slew of bills. These included allowing 17-year-olds to be charged as adults, unsealing some juvenile criminal records, limiting post-conviction appeals and expanding the state’s methods of performing executions to include nitrogen gas and electrocution.

A proposal to move Louisiana’s public defender system under the governor’s direct control was also discussed. The bill raised concerns among attorneys, public defenders and retired judges, according to the Louisiana Illuminator.

“I definitely believe there’s a fear now that public defense will be affected by politics,” said Alaina Bloodworth, who is from Louisiana and is the executive director of the Black Public Defender Association, in an interview.

To date, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry has signed 19 bills into law, encompassing measures such as allowing concealed carry of a gun without a permit, imposing harsher penalties for carjackings and treating all 17-year-olds charged with crimes, including misdemeanors, as adults.

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By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss

As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin. 

Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.

Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes. 

Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.

Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.

On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.

There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.

The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.

Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.

They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel

The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.

We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.

The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.

After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago. 

What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.

“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”

“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality. 

Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.

“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.” 

Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed. 

“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”

When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.

He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.” 

I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows. 

We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.

/sp

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