Harris still has an opportunity to tackle criminal justice reform

This week marks four years since the Harvard Kennedy School’s most notable professors published an essay with the weighty title “How should the U.S. presidential candidates think about criminal justice reform?” Scan the headlines during the 2024 campaign, though, and you might find yourself asking whether either candidate thinks about criminal justice reform at all.

This year’s campaign is unfolding before a very different American public than the one outraged by the 2020 police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky. At the time, then-candidate Joe Biden made headlines for issuing so many far-reaching pledges about criminal justice reform that the Prison Policy Initiative couldn’t even track them all. Even Republicans were touting a successful bipartisan criminal justice reform law, the First Step Act, which was passed in 2018.

Whatever hope existed for criminal justice reform didn’t last long into the Biden administration, however. And while Vice President Kamala Harris has proven to be a trailblazer in her defense of reproductive freedom and LGBTQ+ rights, her campaign recently backpedaled on Harris’ prior support for sweeping criminal justice reform. To the party’s activist base, that sudden shyness about such reform looks a lot like Harris abandoning advocates in her race to the center. 

It isn’t just Harris, either. But what changed?