![]() This distinction is relevant to criminal justice reform (Bartos & Kubrin, 2018:2 Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Scholars of the policy process often distinguish “policy talk,” or how problems are defined and solutions are promoted, from “policy action,” or the design and adoption of policy solutions, to better understand the drivers of reform and its consequences. Consensus on effective reform hinges on shared understandings of what the problem is and shared visions of what success looks like. For one, the goals of reform vary across stakeholders: Should reform reduce crime and victimization? Focus on recidivism? Increase community health and wellbeing? Ensure fairness in criminal justice procedure? Depending upon who is asked, the answer differs. But identifying what drives effective criminal justice reform is not so straightforward. Thoughtful are proposals to improve the policy-relevance of criminological knowledge and increase communication between research and policy communities (e.g., Blomberg et al., 2016 Mears, 2022). Equally apparent, however, is the lack of criminological knowledge incorporated into the policymaking process. Scholarship yields real insights into effective programming and practice in response to a range of issues in criminal justice. How can we improve the effectiveness of criminal justice reform? At its core, a reform is an effort to ameliorate an undesirable condition, eliminate an identified problem, achieve a goal, or strengthen an existing (successful) policy. Despite extensive talk of reform, achieving actual results “is about as easy as bending granite” (Petersilia, 2016:9). And, not all jurisdictions have bought into this new sensibility: rural and suburban reliance on prisons has increased during this new era of justice reform (Kang-Brown & Subramanian, 2017). ![]() Another 3.9 million people remain on probation or parole (Kaeble, 2021). continues to have the highest incarceration rate in the world, with nearly 1.9 million people held in state and federal prisons, local jails, and detention centers (Sawyer & Wagner, 2022 Widra & Herring, 2021). While the number of individuals incarcerated across the nation has declined, the U.S. ![]() Transforming extensive support for criminal justice reform into substantial reductions in justice-involved populations has proven more difficult, and irregular. ![]() Rather than the rigid “law and order” narrative that characterized the dominant approach to crime and punishment since the Nixon administration, policymakers and advocates have found common ground in reform conversations focused on cost savings, evidence-based practice, and being “smart on crime.” A “new sensibility” prevails (Phelps, 2016). New laws passed to reduce incarceration have outpaced punitive legislation three-to-one (Beckett et al., 2016, 2018). This support has yielded many changes in recent years: scaling back of mandatory sentencing laws, limiting sentencing enhancements, expanding access to non-prison alternatives for low-level drug and property crimes, reducing revocations of community supervision, and increasing early release options (Subramanian & Delaney, 2014). Rather, where bitter partisanship divides conservatives and progressives on virtually every other issue, bipartisan support for criminal justice reform is commonplace. Calls to ratchet up criminal penalties to control crime, with some exceptions, are increasingly rare. After decades of criminal justice expansion, incarceration rates peaked between 20 and have dropped modestly, but consistently, ever since then (Gramlich, 2021). Across the political spectrum in the United States, there is agreement that incarceration and punitive sanctions cannot be the sole solution to crime.
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