How Criminal-Justice Reform Fell Apart

A typical way to think about history is as a series of turning points. Sometimes it’s just as useful to think about the moments that looked like turning points and then turned out not to be.

For a brief period, culminating two summers ago, the United States seemed to be on the verge of a serious rethinking of its approach to criminal justice. Years of falling crime had made citizens open to new policies. Democrats and Republicans alike agreed that too many people were in American prisons for too long, and the GOP-led Congress passed the First Step Act, a major reform package that aimed to reduce federal prison sentences, in 2018. A series of police killings of Black people, starting with Michael Brown in 2014, had already brought new attention to the excesses of policing, use of force, and racism.

Then in March 2020, Breonna Taylor died in a police raid gone among white Americans.