Why embracing criminal justice reform is a ‘First Step’ toward victory in 2024 

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the enactment of the First Step Act signed by former President Trump — the most comprehensive federal criminal justice reform legislation since the start of the war on drugs in the 1970s. The act came under fire at the outset of the primary season from other Republican candidates seeking to challenge Trump and define themselves as “tough on crime.” If they hope to topple the MAGA behemoth, however, they’ll need to think twice about ditching his criminal justice reforms, and think critically about addressing crime. 

The First Step Act created federal in-prison recidivism reduction programming, made modest sentencing reforms, and increased oversight and operations for successful reentry into society after incarceration — all reforms still needed in many states around the country. As primary voting gets underway next year, the remaining candidates should learn from the successes of the First Step Act in standing behind this truth: With adequate guardrails for public safety and well-designed incentives for better behavior, criminal justice reforms improve outcomes for all.  

To have any success against Trump, who just this week put out his campaign’s “Platinum Plan” including a commitment to a “Second Step Act,” other candidates must embrace what he did well and commit to further reforms.  

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released new crime numbers and a new poll indicating that Americans are more critical of our country’s criminal justice system than in recent years. Especially when public feelings of day-to-day safety are on the decline in cities such as Chicago and San Francisco, the successful candidate will need to stake out a viable policy platform to address the concerns of millions of Americans.  

Ron DeSantis’s out-of-the-gate rejections of the First Step Act provided a perfect case of how not to proceed, proposing a repeal of the ground-breaking reform law and calling it a “jailbreak bill.” The presidential hopeful accused the act of “allow[ing] dangerous people out of prison,” despite having actually voted for this legislation in Congress and having signed into law as governor a bill dubbed the “Florida First Step Act,” which in many ways mirrored the federal legislation enacted nearly half a decade ago.  

Such hypocritical claims are nothing more than partisan political fodder. It is this type of knee-jerk argument that candidates need to avoid if they want to be successful.  

DeSantis’s apparently newfound position on reform was a deliberate play into the rise-in-violent-crime narrative we saw in the 2022 election season, as well as a way for DeSantis to differentiate himself from former President Trump. These angles are likely to lose in 2024. The public by and large understands that reducing recidivism and fixing the broken parts of a system that often misuses resources is key to enhancing public safety and addressing the very rise in violent crime on which reflexive arguments against reform depend. 

The numbers bear this out: Recidivism rates for those released under the First Step Act are nearly threefold lower than the Bureau of Prisons’s self-claimed average, and research conducted since the implementation of the First Step Act in 2019 indicates that similar public safety reforms — such as pretrial reforms and alternatives to arrest — have no correlation to the rise in violent crime seen over the course of the pandemic. 

For candidates Chris Christie and Nikki Haley, this point rings true as well, and their own tenures back it up — a promising sign for how they would approach crime given a larger executive position. Both of their home states of New Jersey and South Carolina, respectively, have been held up as models of reforms that address public concerns about safety, while simultaneously improving other outcomes of the justice system; these include reducing cyclical incarceration, economic disparities and barriers that exist for those with criminal records.  

New Jersey’s careful reform of cash bail and pretrial detention under Gov. Christie’s leadership — which he has rightly defended in recent months — has been lauded as the gold standard of bail reform in our country, accomplishing an effective elimination of cash bail while improving public safety. This resounding success, now a decade in the books, is a slam-dunk counter to the pervasive current narrative that the result of limiting cash bail is inevitably an increase in crime. Christie has also spoken up many times over the years on the need to end the war on drugs and seek alternatives to the criminal justice system to address substance use and behavioral and mental health.  

South Carolina, by a similar token, dramatically improved its criminal justice system during Haley’s tenure as governor, and the state was heralded as an example of the conservative and compassionate way to approach crime initially modeled by the First Step Act itself. Changes implemented from 2010 onward resulted in a prison population reduction of about 15 percent while Haley was governor. The successes of these reforms were also seen in the state’s comparatively low recidivism and violent crime rates.  

Vivek Ramaswamy’s notably more populist style of rhetoric make his intentions on crime tough to read when it comes to particular policies, but his apparent efforts to be a similar figure to Trump this election give hope that he may ultimately come down in favor of reforms that Trump himself supported — at least on the campaign trail. After all, there is little tougher on crime than preventing crime from happening in the first place, and that is what reform is all about. 

At the end of the year as candidates gear up for primary voting, they must remember the successes of the First Step Act in its first five years. Reforms in its style just win — both politically and for public safety. As crime remains top of mind for many Americans, candidates should look to highlight their support for such smart proposals that are doubtless to succeed. 

Sarah Anderson is associate director of the Criminal Justice and Civil Liberties program at the R Street Institute and a contributor for Young Voices.