Republicans Have Completely Abandoned Criminal Justice Reform

In the Republican party platform and at the 2024 convention, alternatives to tough-on-crime policies are unfortunately in short supply.

The Republican Party wants you to be afraid. Very, very afraid.

Under former President Donald Trump, the party is playing up fears of violent crime, even as crime rates have fallen from their pandemic-era spike. And in the process, it is abandoning the modest yet meaningful moves toward criminal justice reform it made in recent years.

This much was clear on the second night of the 2024 Republican National Convention (RNC), whose theme was "Make America Safe Again." Several of the presenters spoke of the need to get tough on crime.

"We are experiencing a plague of crime across America," said retired police Lieutenant Randy Sutton. "It's all made America more dangerous than ever before."

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis charged that Democrats, like President Joe Biden, "have unleashed progressive prosecutors across our nation who care more about coddling criminals than about protecting their own communities."

If Trump's choice of running mate signaled how thoroughly he has bent the GOP's economic policy to his will, Tuesday night at the convention provided an unfortunate indication of how thoroughly the party platform has abandoned any prospect of criminal justice reform.

Trump accepted his party's nomination the first time, in 2016, during what he called "a moment of crisis for our nation."

"The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life," he warned. "Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this Administration's rollback of criminal enforcement." He detailed frightening statistics from big cities: murder rates up 50 percent in Washington, D.C., and up 60 percent in Baltimore; more than 2,000 victims of gun violence in Chicago in the previous year alone.

"The first task for our new Administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities," Trump pledged. "In this race for the White House, I am the Law And Order candidate."

Trump conveyed similar fears at the 2020 convention, held amid the COVID-19 pandemic and nationwide racial-justice protests. "Your vote will decide whether we protect law abiding Americans, or whether we give free reign to violent anarchists, agitators, and criminals who threaten our citizens," he said.

In each case, the message was clear: Violent criminals lurk around every corner, and only by voting Republican can we hold back the deadly hordes.

Of course, that wasn't quite true in either year: While murders in the 30 largest U.S. cities rose by more than 13 percent in 2015, a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that "half of that change occurred in just three cities"—Trump's cherry-picked examples of Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. "Murder nationally is still similar to what it was in 2012, at historic lows."

And while 2020 did see a nationwide spike in violent crime amid summer protests, murder rates fell precipitously in 2023, and preliminary data for the beginning of 2024 suggests that overall violent crime has continued falling and may again hit record lows by the end of the year.

But ginning up fears of violent crime was key to Trump's—and by extension, his party's—pitch to America. In his inaugural address, he warned of "the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives" and pledged, "This American carnage stops right here and stops right now."

This was an unfortunate break with the party's platform in recent years, when the GOP at least feinted toward less punitive criminal justice policies.

"While getting criminals off the street is essential, more attention must be paid to the process of restoring those individuals to the community," read the 2012 Republican Party Platform. "Prisons should do more than punish; they should attempt to rehabilitate and institute proven prisoner reentry systems to reduce recidivism and future victimization."

While the 2012 platform still advocated punitive punishments for certain crimes—including the death penalty for capital murder, "mandatory prison time for all assaults involving serious injury to law enforcement officers," and "a national registry for convicted child murderers"—it also hinted at alternatives. The party praised "faithbased institutions that have proven track records in diverting young and first time, non-violent offenders from criminal careers," and said that governments should emulate these groups' "emphasis on restorative justice, to make the victim whole and put the offender on the right path."

Even in 2016, when the GOP first nominated Trump, its platform praised "the Republican Governors and legislators who have been implementing criminal justice reforms like those proposed by our 2012 platform." (Of course, the party did not draft a new platform in 2020, simply carrying over the 2016 document unaltered.)

As president, Trump even signed the FIRST STEP Act, which accomplished many laudable goals, like reducing mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug crimes and allowing federal inmates to accumulate more credits toward early release. In the law's first year, thousands of people left federal prison early as a result of shortened sentences.

But then the effort stalled. While Trump bragged about signing the FIRST STEP Act and ran ads in 2020 touting his ability to accomplish criminal justice reforms, he had soured on the law by the end of his term. By the time he announced his bid for reelection in 2022, Trump had stopped talking about the bill altogether and was calling for anyone "caught selling drugs, to receive the death penalty." Some Republican-led states that implemented reforms are now repealing them, even in places where the measures were successful.

The FIRST STEP Act was not only one of the most successful reform initiatives in recent years, but it represented a truly bipartisan effort—progressive activist Van Jones still brags about working with Republicans to get it passed—but it became verboten in GOP circles.

The 2024 GOP platform makes no mention of criminal justice reform and instead pledges to "restore law and order," "stand up to Marxist Prosecutors," and "restore safety in our neighborhoods by replenishing Police Departments, restoring Common Sense Policing, and protecting Officers from frivolous lawsuits"—presumably a reference to Trump's stated pledge to give cops "immunity from prosecution."

On the second night of the RNC, with immigration and crime as its theme, speakers stuck to the party line: Many presenters spoke of immigration and crime as if they are inextricably linked, and nobody mentioned criminal justice reform, other than one mention of "comprehensive prison reform" by Republican National Committee co-Chair Lara Trump as one of Trump's first-term accomplishments.

It's a shame that on an issue like paring back the needlessly punitive aspects of the criminal justice system—on which Republicans and Democrats broadly agreed with one another very recently—the GOP has completely turned its back.