Earlier this month, California voters rolled back a series of criminal justice reforms on the ballot. Los Angeles ousted District Attorney George Gascón, who had been elected on promises to end cash bail and prioritize violent crime. San Francisco re-elected District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who oversaw a increase in crime in his first year in office after replacing Chesa Boudin after 2022 RECALL.

Conventional wisdom quickly gathered: “Public safety” had won the day. Crime increased and reforms emerged. Initial results concluded that voters were getting “serious about murder” and proclaimed that the reform impulse was dead.

In Alameda County, California, District Attorney Pamela Price, who also promised to end cash bail and leave low-level crimes without charges, was eliminated from her race — but not because of a huge spike in crime. Oakland, the most populous city in Alameda County, saw a decrease of 33 percent in homicides this year.

Contrary to the prevailing narrative, the fate of criminal justice reforms across the state is more complicated than it seems. California is experiencing historically low levels of crime statewide. Aside from the spike in homicides that hit the cities and rural areas nationwide during the Covid-19 pandemic, crime in California has been relatively flat since the late 1990s.

It was a big change. In recent years, California has been a bastion of reform. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the closure of San Quentin State Prison’s death row. Legislators passed 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 yes ballot measure radically transform the penitentiary system and allocate funds to alternatives to incarceration.

So what changed? The voters were certainly prepared sensational coverage of shoplifting and horror stories blaming law reform prosecutors for letting offenders off the hook. And excessive spending from corporations, real estate interests and technology investors helped reform opponents get their message across.

Money, however, was not the only factor that ousted Price and Gascón or drove voters to opposes the abolition of 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 going on here is the housing crisis and the prevalence of homeless people on the streets up and down California is creating a psychological sense of disarray for people that will absolutely, inevitably, make them feel unsafe,” Irwin said. “And unless and until we begin to really meaningfully address our housing crisis and our homelessness crisis, it’s going to be very difficult 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 need to meet voters where they are and, first and foremost, acknowledge their feelings, especially their fear.”

People’s fears, whether rooted in personal experience or influences like the news media and advertising campaigns, can’t be explained by data, Irwin said. Whether they are unfounded or not, people need those feelings validated.

“If we ignore or minimize these feelings, we will lose voters. And we lost voters because we belittled their feelings.”

The price of fear

In Alameda County, voters who chose reformer Price as the district attorney had chosen just two years earlier remember heran effort that began to take root before Price was elected.

Shortly after Price won his 2022 election, some of the same donors who bankrolled Boudin’s recall shifted their sights to Alameda. They just launched a recall campaign seven months after taking office. In an April interview with The Intercept, Price said the wealthy investors who were funding the retreat stepped in to protect real estate interests in downtown Oakland.

On Monday, Price acknowledged the results of the recall and released a statement listing her accomplishments in office. She brought up charges of murder and violent crime, which she said came at a greater rate than her predecessor, as well as charges she brought to police for homicide. (The anti-repeal campaign declined comment and pointed to Price’s statement.) Those achievements, however, had not been enough.

The opposite approach – taking “tough on crime” positions – has also failed. The mainstream Democratic Party tried to assuage voters’ fears about crime and safety, but the strategy served to galvanize opponents of the reform, who tend to repeat the same statements sensational murder, be it up or down.

Now, just as national Democrats grapple with their messaging failures, criminal justice policy advocates are grappling with the fact that putting people with facts isn’t enough to win elections.

Recognizing where reformers can learn from their mistakes is not the same as capitulating to people who want to roll back failed mass incarceration strategies, said Jessica Brand, a strategist who works with reform prosecutors across the country, including Gascón , the Los Angeles District Attorney. who lost his re-election bid by more than 20 points.

“That solution is not mass incarceration — it’s supportive housing and effective treatment beds and economic support.”

“We as a progressive movement must work harder to implement robust solutions that actually address people’s fears and concerns. These are, by the way, solutions that we need morally,” said Brand. “That solution is not mass incarceration — it’s supportive housing and effective treatment beds and economic support.”

People go to the solutions that are available even if they don’t work anymore, Brand added, “but we can’t just say those things where the problems are prevalent—we have to fix them, or a lot of people will fall back on what they know, and this is prison and prisons.”

Lessons from “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 responsibility for crime when it happens, said Smart Justice California’s Irwin . The dynamic was evident in the campaigns on Proposition 36, which increased penalties for low-level crimes, and in Nathan Hochman’s successful bid to unseat Gascón.

“When the proponents of Proposition 36 or Nathan Hochman started running in their races, they realized pretty quickly that while voters want accountability and want things to change, they don’t really want a total return to incarceration en masse,” Irwin said. “That’s why proponents of Proposition 36 have shifted from their early messaging, which focused on a really tough-on-crime framework, to a”mass treatment“rhetoric”.

Hochman ran as a candidate who was “‘hot to reform,” Irwin said, adding, “This is a person who was a lifelong ‘tough on crime’ Republican until just weeks before he filed to run in the attorney general’s race.” (Hochman’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Irwin noted that the election was not a clean check for “tough on crime” opponents of reform.

“That actually hasn’t happened at all in legislative races,” she said. “The legislature, which is ground zero for policy and budget investments in public safety, will play an important role in the coming years in vetting proposed responses to the public’s sense of insecurity.”

Election results in other parts of the country contradict argues that the drive for criminal justice reform has stalled. Reform-minded prosecutors and sheriffs in Texas, COLORADOOhio, Georgia, Illinoisand Florida won races in the face of similar attacks on reform.

California plays an outsized role in debates about crime and justice reform, but the state is unique in important ways. State laws do easy to get a recall on the ballot, so reform candidates are more vulnerable to being eliminated that way.

And California’s housing crisis and fentanyl boom have created an inescapable sense of disorder and chaos despite steady or declining crime rates. Third, the massive amount of money spent in California’s criminal justice reform proxy wars far exceeds similar efforts in other states.

California billionaire and former Los Angeles Republican mayoral candidate Rick Caruso has spent more than 100 million dollars on his mayoral campaign, which relied heavily on efforts to attack candidate Karen Bass’ ties to Gascón, the LA district attorney, Irwin said.

“A huge chunk of that $100 million that he spent telling Angelenos that they’re not safe, and the reason they’re not safe is because of DA Gascón,” she said. “This supercharged the narrative both in terms of safety and DA Gascón in Los Angeles. And even though Rick Caruso failed in his efforts to become mayor of LA, he succeeded in his efforts to oust DA Gascón.”

In Alameda County, officials are already making preparations to name Price’s replacement. The appointee will serve at least until 2026, the next time Alameda voters have a chance to elect their own DA.