This November, six ballot measures in five states will give voters a chance to make significant changes to their criminal justice systems.
In Oklahoma, voters could ban harsh sentencing enhancements that can keep people in prison longer for nonviolent crimes. In California, voters will consider three measures: one to affirm the end of cash bail, another to let people vote while on parole, and a third to roll back recent criminal justice reforms. In Nebraska and Utah, voters could prohibit slavery as a criminal punishment, including forced prison labor. And in Kentucky, voters could approve a controversial crime victims’ rights law.
Not all of these are for reform as many people think of it today. Some of the initiatives, particularly in California and Kentucky, have been criticized by activists seeking to end mass incarceration and the war on drugs.
But depending on how voters take these initiatives, they could continue the broader work of the past decade to reel back America’s punitive criminal justice system. Galvanized by Black Lives Matter, other civil rights causes, and the high financial costs of mass incarceration, lawmakers and the public have become increasingly critical of the system, which has made America the world’s leader in incarceration and spawned a vast network of consequences, from oppressive voting laws for people convicted of felonies to the continued use of forced labor as a criminal penalty.
Coupled with always-important local and state races for sheriffs, prosecutors, and judges, and local ballot initiatives, Election Day gives Americans a direct say in this system. It’s also at the local and state level that voters can make the highest impact on the justice system: The vast majority of the country’s 18,000 police agencies are run by towns, cities, counties, and states, and about 88 percent of people in prison are held at the state level.
There are a lot of criminal justice measures on the ballot in 2020, ranging from marijuana legalization to drug decriminalization to local police reforms. But here are six of this year’s biggest statewide measures and what they could do to change the system.
1) Oklahoma State Question 805: Sentencing reform for nonviolent crimes
Over the past decade and a half, American lawmakers have increasingly moved to reduce the country’s massive prison population — the largest incarcerated population in the world. As part of that, they’ve aimed to reduce penalties for nonviolent crimes in particular.
Oklahoma State Question 805 is a continuation of those efforts. Under current law, Oklahoma prosecutors and judges can use previous nonviolent felony convictions to impose a longer sentence for a defendant. That includes several more years or even up to life in prison.
The ballot measure would prohibit that for nonviolent offenses — with an exception for anyone who has ever been convicted of a violent felony. It would also retroactively apply to people who received longer sentences due to such an enhancement, potentially reducing their punishment.
Supporters claim that the measure would help reduce overly punitive prison sentences and cut Oklahoma’s prison population, which was the largest in the country — and the world — as of 2018. That would make the criminal justice system not only more fair, supporters argue, but also less expensive, since locking people up costs a lot of money.
Opponents claim that reducing prison sentences, particularly for people with criminal records, would lead to more crime — reducing the potential deterrent of a long prison sentence and letting would-be repeat offenders out sooner. They say the higher cost of incarceration is worth the public safety gains.
The research suggests that shorter prison sentences, relative to the US baseline, don’t lead to more crime. In 2017, David Roodman of the Open Philanthropy Project conducted an extensive review of the evidence on longer prison sentences. He concluded that “tougher sentences hardly deter crime, and that while imprisoning people temporarily stops them from committing crime outside prison walls, it also tends to increase their criminality after release. As a result, ‘tough-on-crime’ initiatives can reduce crime in the short run but cause offsetting harm in the long run.”
In short, longer prison sentences can actually make people more likely to commit crimes in the long term.
At the same time, locking people up for long periods of time is very costly. There’s the actual financial cost of putting people in prison, which the Prison Policy Initiative estimated at $182 billion a year for the US in 2017. There’s also the social cost of people being ripped away from their families and communities; as one example, the New York Times calculated in 2015 that for every 100 Black women not in jail or prison in America, there are only 83 Black men — what amounts to 1.5 million “missing” men who can’t be there for their kids, family, or...
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