Dear Reader,

In the summer of 2020, at the height of the George Floyd protests, it looked like America might be turning a page on its approach to crime and punishment. Calls to “Defund the Police” rang out from across the country, including from elected officials and those running for office. Many jurisdictions passed policing reforms and other progressive legislation related to criminal law. It was a sharp departure from the five previous decades in which tough-on-crime politics reigned supreme.

Even at the time, some on the political left were cautioning against using “defund the police” as a slogan or going too far with a message that seemed weak on crime. By the time of President Biden’s first State of the Union Address, it was clear the tide had turned. Biden declared to bipartisan applause that we should fund the police.

If one needed further proof that tough-on-crime politics is alive and well, the 2024 presidential campaign provides it. Donald Trump’s campaign is almost non-stop fear-mongering over crime. His attack on immigration is rooted in claims that migrants commit crimes. His speech at Madison Square Garden echoed themes he has used throughout the campaign. He called the crisis at the border “bigger than inflation” and “bigger than the economy” because it is “allowing criminals from all over the world to enter our country.” He claimed Kamala Harris “unleashed an army of migrant gangs who are waging a campaign of violence and terror against our citizens.” This baseless, hyperbolic claim was then topped by an even bigger whopper: “Kamala has imported criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions from all around the world, from Venezuela to the Congo . . . and she has resettled them into your communities to prey upon innocent citizens.” He repeated the false claim that Venezuelan gangs have taken over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado, something that the Republican mayor of Aurora has taken pains to debunk.

Trump uses the imagery of immigrant crime to gain support for his mass deportation plans. He has promised to “launch the largest deportation program in American history to get these criminals out.” In fact, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.

Trump’s tough-on-crime posturing isn’t limited to immigration. He argues against gun regulation because “[w]hen a criminal crawls into your house at night, it would be nice to be able to at least have a chance, wouldn’t it?”

He has attacked Harris for being “one of the originals for Defund the Police” and bragged about the fact “we have every endorsement from virtually every sheriff’s department, every police department.”

He has focused on crime at every turn, even though crime rates are lower now than during Trump’s own time in office. Facts are irrelevant to Trump, however. He has repeatedly attacked ABC News presidential debate moderator David Muir for what Trump says was a false fact-check on his claim that crime in this country is “through the roof.” As FactCheck.org notes, “Muir wasn’t – and isn’t – wrong.” Crime rates are lower now than they were in 2020 when Trump was president. Trump’s rhetoric, however, has never been limited by facts. And in his telling, America is a crime-ridden hellscape.

This is hardly new for Trump. He made the same claims in the 2020 election and still lost, even though Joe Biden spent the primaries promising criminal justice reforms. But Biden was one of the original tough-on-crime politicians, so even if he claimed to support some reforms, it was not as if anyone could accuse him of being soft on crime. Biden was, after all, the person who led the charge for harsh mandatory minimum drug sentences and the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, one of the harshest federal laws ever enacted that provided billions of federal dollars for police and prisons and created harsh new penalties. Moreover, Biden’s actions in office show he is still more the Biden of the 1990s than the reformer he claimed to be in the primaries. He did almost nothing on criminal justice reform in his time in office.

Harris, for her part, seems to have made the political calculation that it is not wise to be seen as soft on crime in today’s political climate. She has put her experience as a proscecutor front-and-center in her campaign. A standard line in her stump speech is to emphasize that she can take on Trump because, as a prosecutor, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.” She views the “prosecutor v. felon” framing of the election as a winning one for her, even while criminal justice reformers and progressives wince at the damage it does to the image of formerly incarcerated people by imbuing the label “felon” with a meaning that the person with that conviction is permanently irredeemable.

Harris’s presidential campaign in 2024 is a stark contrast to her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2020 when she downplayed her career as a prosecutor. In the summer of 2020, at the height of the George Floyd protests, the perception of crime, punishment, and policing seemed to be changing.

But that moment did not last. We have returned to the status quo before the summer of 2020. Even the pre-2020 world was different from the peak of tough-on-crime politics that dominated the 1980s and 1990s. Progressive candidates for district attorney have been elected and reelected, though some have lost. We have lowered incarceration rates from their peak, though the last few years have seen an uptick from the rate in 2020. Some criminal justice reforms can still garner support, even though they tend to be modest. Even Donald Trump passed a significant piece of criminal justice reform legislation with the First Step Act, though by its very name, that legislation acknowledged more needed to be done and yet nothing was.

But those seeking dramatic changes to America’s approach to crime and punishment should not be fooled into thinking that a majority of American voters are ready for something more drastic than that. This presidential election reflects that reality. Kamala Harris has not called for harsh new penalties or expanded policing, but she is also not proposing any new reforms on the criminal justice front or otherwise signaling that this will be a key issue if she is elected. The campaign, in other words, is not exactly leaning in to big changes on the criminal justice front and is instead leaning into her career as a former prosecutor. Moreover, roughly half the country (we’ll find out exactly how much) agrees with the dystopian vision painted by Donald Trump and is on board with his promises to expand the police state and get tougher.

As I write this, the winner has yet to be declared, and the polls reflect this is a tight race. Even if Trump does not win, however, the support he has achieved by fear-mongering cannot be ignored. It shows that the public’s concern with crime remains strong, even when crime rates go down. Trump has demonstrated it is less about reality than rhetoric, and all it takes is a high-profile story or two to get voters on board with harsh responses and the candidate who pledges to take them. This is the political dynamic that made America the most carceral nation on earth, and it is still going strong.

Stay Informed,

Rachel