Earlier this month, voters in California rolled back a number of criminal justice reforms on the ballot. Los Angeles ousted District Attorney George Gascón, who had been elected on pledges to end cash bail and prioritize violent crime. San Francisco reelected District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who oversaw a spike in crime in her first year in office after replacing Chesa Boudin after his 2022 recall.
The conventional wisdom came together quickly: “Public safety” had won the day. Crime was up, and reforms were out. Initial takeaways from the results concluded that voters were getting “serious on crime” and proclaimed that the reform push was dead.
In Alameda County, California, the local prosecutor, Pamela Price, who had also pledged to end cash bail and let low-level offenses go uncharged, was ousted in her race — but not because of a huge spike in crime. Oakland, the most populous city in Alameda County, saw a 33 percent drop in homicides this year.
Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the fate of criminal justice reforms throughout the state is more complicated than it seems. California is experiencing historically low levels of crime statewide. Apart from the homicide spike that affected cities and rural areas around the country during the Covid-19 pandemic, crime in California has been relatively steady since the late 1990s.
It was a major shift. In recent years, California had been a bastion of reform. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the closure of death row at San Quentin State Prison. Legislators passed the Racial Justice Act in 2020, a landmark bill that made it easier to challenge criminal convictions based on evidence of racial bias. And, that same year, Los Angeles voters approved a ballot measure to radically transform the jail system and allocate funding to alternatives to incarceration.
So what changed? Voters had certainly been primed with sensational coverage of shoplifting sprees and horror stories blaming reform-minded DAs for letting offenders off the hook. And outsized spending from corporations, real estate interests, and tech investors helped opponents of reform get their message out.
Money, though, wasn’t the only factor in ousting Price and Gascón or leading voters to oppose abolishing slave labor in prisons, said Anne Irwin, founder and director of the criminal justice policy advocacy group Smart Justice California.
“And the question now is, how should we respond? How can we make voters feel safe and actually be safe?”
“What’s really happening here is the housing crisis and the prevalence of unhoused people on the streets up and down California is creating for people a psychological sense of disorder, which will absolutely, inevitably make them feel unsafe,” Irwin said. “And unless and until we begin to really meaningfully solve our housing crisis and our homelessness crisis, it will be very hard to make Californians feel safe.”
“And the question now is, how should we respond? How can we make voters feel safe and actually be safe?” she said. “We have to meet voters where they are and first and foremost, acknowledge their feelings, especially fear.”
People’s fears, whether rooted in personal experience or influences like news media and ad campaigns, can’t be explained away with data, Irwin said. Whether unfounded or not, people need those feelings validated.
“If we ignore or downplay those feelings, we will lose voters. And we have lost voters because we have downplayed their feelings.”
Price of Fear
In Alameda County, voters who had elected reformer Price as district attorney just two years earlier chose to recall her, an effort that began taking root before Price was elected.
Shortly after Price won her election in 2022, some of the same donors who funded Boudin’s recall shifted their sights to Alameda. They launched a recall campaign just seven months after she took office. In an April interview with The Intercept, Price said wealthy investors funding the recall got involved to protect real estate interests in downtown Oakland.
On Monday, Price conceded the recall results and released a statement listing her accomplishments in office. She touted her prosecutions of murders and violent crimes, which she said came at a higher rate than her predecessor, as well as charges she brought against police for homicide. (The campaign against the recall declined the comment and pointed to Price’s statement.) Those accomplishments, however, hadn’t been enough.
The opposite tack — taking “tough-on-crime” positions — has failed too. The mainstream of the Democratic Party has tried to assuage voters’ fears around crime and safety, but the strategy served to boost opponents of reform, who tend to repeat the same claims sensationalizing crime whether it’s up or down.
Now, just as national Democrats are wrestling with their messaging failures, criminal justice policy advocates are grappling with the fact that plying people with facts isn’t enough to win elections.
Acknowledging where reformers can learn from their mistakes is not the same as capitulating to people who want to bring back the failed strategies of mass incarceration, said Jessica Brand, a strategist who works with reform DAs around the country, including Gascón, the Los Angeles DA who lost his reelection bid by more than 20 points.
“That solution is not mass incarceration — it’s supportive housing and actual treatment beds and economic support.”
“We as a progressive movement need to work harder to implement the robust solutions that actually respond to people’s fears and concerns. These are also, by the way, solutions that we morally need,” Brand said. “That solution is not mass incarceration — it’s supportive housing and actual treatment beds and economic support.”
People turn to the solutions that are readily available even if they no longer work, Brand added, “but we can’t just say those things in places where the problems are prevalent — we have to actually address them or else many people will resort to what they know, and that’s jail and prisons.”
Lessons of “Warm to Reform”
Trends in other parts of the country show that people are still open to reform, as long as it’s packaged in a way that gives people a sense of accountability for crime when it does occur, said Irwin of Smart Justice California. The dynamic was apparent in the campaigns of Proposition 36, which increased sentences for low-level crimes, and Nathan Hochman’s successful bid to unseat Gascón.
“When the proponents of Proposition 36 or Nathan Hochman began to run their races, they pretty quickly realized that while voters want accountability and they want things to change, they do not actually want a wholesale return to mass incarceration,” Irwin said. “That is why Proposition 36 proponents pivoted from their early messaging, which focused on a real tough-on-crime framework, to a ‘mass treatment’ rhetoric.”
Hochman ran as a candidate who was “‘warm to reform,’” Irwin said, adding, “This is a person who had been a lifelong, ‘tough-on-crime’ Republican until just weeks before he filed to run in the attorneys race.” (Hochman’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
Irwin noted that the election was not a clean sweep for “tough-on-crime” opponents of reform.
“That actually didn’t play out at all in the legislative races,” she said. “The legislature, which is ground zero for policy and budget investment in public safety, is going to play an important role in the coming years in vetting proposed responses to the public sense of lack of safety.”
Election results in other parts of the country belie claims that the push for criminal justice reform has died. Reform-minded prosecutors and sheriffs in Texas, Colorado, Ohio, Georgia, Illinois, and Florida won their races in the face of similar attacks on reform.
California plays an outsized role in the debates about crime and justice reform, but the state is unique in important ways. State laws make it easy to get a recall on the ballot, so reform candidates are more vulnerable to being removed that way.
And the housing crisis and fentanyl boom in California have created an unavoidable sense of disorder and chaos despite steady or decreasing levels of crime. Third, the massive amount of money spent on proxy wars over criminal justice reform in California dwarf similar efforts in other states.
California billionaire and former Republican Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso spent more than $100 million on his mayoral campaign, which relied heavily on efforts to attack candidate Karen Bass’s ties to Gascón, the LA district attorney, said Irwin.
“A giant share of that $100 million he spent telling Angelenos that they are not safe, and the reason they are not safe is because of DA Gascón,” she said. “That supercharged the narrative around both safety and DA Gascón in Los Angeles. And even though Rick Caruso failed in his efforts to become LA mayor, he succeeded in his efforts to take down DA Gascón.”
In Alameda County, officials are already making preparations to appoint Price’s replacement. The appointee will hold the office until at least 2026, the next time Alameda voters will have the chance to elect their own DA.
