Can Criminal Justice Reform Cross the Aisle?

With more than 30 years of experience as a police officer
and public servant, Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony W. Batts has encountered
a fair share of public discontent. After witnessing the unrest that broke out
in Los Angeles after
the acquittal of the police officers responsible for the brutal beating of
Rodney King, the series of protests that gripped Oakland after the
police officer that shot Oscar Grant was acquitted, and the chaos that
rocked Baltimore after Freddie
Gray died in police custody, Batts has come to acknowledge that moments of
mass protest about police brutality reflect the anger and frustrations of neglected
communities and expose the ugly flaws of zero-tolerance policing for all to see.

“After seeing heightened policing lead to mass protest] I
started to project out on how we were decimating communities,” Batts explained
during his introductory remarks at a recent event hosted by New America and the
Brennan Center for Justice. “What you saw in the past 60 days [in Baltimore] is
a byproduct of some of the things that had taken place in a bygone era of mass
arrest.”

In a year that has been marked by headline-grabbing stories and
images of police violence, public focus on the relationships among race,
policing, and punishment has been intense and public opinion on race relations
have become increasingly
negative. In this context, resolving the tensions that exist between
police and the communities that they serve is a difficult task. But as encounters
between the police and the public continue to dominate the news cycle and
ratchet up pressure on law enforcement, Batts’s comments call attention to another
dimension to the conversation that must be explored: enacting positive and
sustainable policy reforms to the criminal justice system.

Criminal justice reform is “a big problem that defies
political categorization or easy political answers,” explained moderator and
New Models of Policy Change Program Director Heather Hurlburt. She was joined
in conversation by Jamelle Bouie of Slate Magazine, Inimai
Chettiar of the Brennan
Center Justice Program , and Right on
Crime Founder and Policy Director Marc Levin for a a discussion of how
political polarization and the upcoming presidential election would influence
legislative attempts at bipartisan criminal justice reform. The panelists quickly
turned to the idea that even with the 2016 campaign season underway, criminal
justice reform was an issue that could bring bipartisan coalitions together
rather than pull them apart.

“The process of passing bills can be quite long, and the
fact that coalitions are [beginning to] happen now doesn’t guarantee that
something happens next month, next year, or even four years from now,” Bouie noted. “But the process is beginning
now and that’s vital.”

Bouie’s acknowledgment of the foundations for bipartisan
criminal justice legislation is timely. Last week U.S. Representatives Jim
Sensenbrenner (R-WI) and Bobby Scott (D-VA) introduced the Safe,
Accountable, Fair, and Effective (SAFE) Justice Act in the hopes of enacting criminal justice reforms at the federal level. While the SAFE Justice
Act answers the
demand for reform-minded legislation, the actual viability of a bill that
is expected
to “prioritize federal prison space for chronic and violent offenders,
reduce recidivism through enhanced supervision of offenders in the community,
and increase transparency and accountability throughout the system” remains to
be seen.

The difficulty in
promoting extensive criminal justice reforms at the federal level is nothing
new for Levin, who directs the Center for Effective Justice at the Texas Public
Policy Foundation in addition to this leadership of Right on Crime. Levin has
made a name for himself as a member of the conservative wing in
support of criminal justice reform, especially when that reform is connected to policy change at the
state level.

“The reality is,
you can take an issue at the state level and you may not see much difference
between parties, or much polarization either,” Levin noted when discussing how
some states have moved ahead of the federal government on criminal justice
reform. “I think that we are in a better position to have this discussion.”

As the director of the Brennan Center’s Justice Program,
Chettiar worked with a broad range of politicians and likely presidential
contenders to create Solutions:
American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice—a collection of essays about the legislative
need for criminal justice reform. After editing the final version of Solutions,
Chettiar recalled, she came to believe that “there is bipartisan consensus that
we do need to reduce the size of our prison population.” She cautioned that
politicians are divided on the exact nature of “how to do that and to what
extent,” a tension evident nationally between more popular policy suggestions
like sentencing reform for non-violent offenders and harder sells like
eliminating the death penalty.

The panelists also
highlighted a declining crime rate as a key factor in
generating the ability
to talk more openly about the oftentimes damaging outcomes of the criminal
justice system. At a time where incarceration has increased even as the actual rates of documented criminal activity have decreased it has become politically dangerous to
sustain the “tough on crime” rhetoric that dominated the 1990s. With less evidence for the need for an
amped-up incarceration system, there is the potential for positive change from
both sides of the aisle, especially in the case of politicians that, as Levin
explained, “have had their views on criminal justice change over time” due to
improved statistical data on the flaws present in the
justice system. That both
parties also need to garner support for the upcoming general election also helps
keep the issue from becoming fractured along party lines for fear of turning
off potential voters.

Despite this
progress, the panelists were hesitant to dismiss the existence of any political
polarization on criminal justice issues. Levin noted that adding conversations
about effective policing to the mix may also muddy the waters a bit due to
racialized perceptions of police officers, but commented that even if crime
rates went back up slightly, the progress on the issue has been “pretty amazing.”

“Even if Washington
doesn’t move legislatively on criminal justice issues, as long as national
politicians aren’t trying to scare each other over crime and are speaking in
favor of reform, I think that it just creates political conditions around the
country for moving forward at the state level,” Bouie commented in an
assessment of what comes next for criminal justice reform. “I really don’t
think you can overstate how important it is that no one is trying to demagogue
[on this issue].”