The first year of the Trump administration has fueled a growing narrative that criminal justice reform is over, undone by federal retrenchment, civil rights rollbacks, and a renewed punitive agenda. But the data tell a more complicated story. While Washington has moved sharply in one direction, state governments have quietly passed bipartisan reforms, suggesting that criminal justice reform in the United States has not collapsed—it has decentralized and grown more incremental.
At the federal level, the Trump administration’s actions have marked a clear departure from the reform momentum of the previous decade. Federal civil rights oversight of local police has been gutted, the death penalty reinvigorated, funding for evidence-based crime prevention initiatives withdrawn, due process protections in immigration enforcement curtailed, bail reform efforts attacked, and the federal war on drugs escalated. Taken together, these actions have fueled a growing narrative that the era of criminal justice reform is over.
But that narrative is incomplete, and in important respects, incorrect.
While federal rhetoric and policy have shifted sharply in a punitive direction, state governments continue to serve as the primary engines of criminal justice reform. In fact, state-level reform activity not only persisted during the first year of the second Trump administration, but increased relative to the final year of the Biden administration, defying conventional wisdom.
Over the past year, I have worked with students at Princeton University to build a database tracking state criminal justice reform laws enacted between 2021 and 2025 across 16 issue areas, from front-end reforms tackling diversion, policing, fines and fees, juvenile justice and sentencing reform to back-end reforms addressing solitary confinement and other conditions of confinement, expungement, parole and probation, reentry, second look laws, and oversight. The results complicate the dominant “backlash” narrative. Although the pace of reform has slowed since its peak earlier in the decade, and punitive laws have passed and previous reforms repealed, criminal justice reform has continued across red, purple, and blue states, often in a bipartisan manner—even amid heightened political polarization and federal retrenchment.
The numbers are striking. In 2025 alone, 35 states passed at least one criminal justice reform law, up from 32 states in 2024, the final year of the Biden administration. Between 2021 and 2025, states passed at least 654 criminal justice reform laws. Notably, the number of reform laws enacted increased from 96 in 2024 to 115 in 2025—the first year of the second Trump presidency.
These figures do not support the claim that reform has come to a halt. Rather, they suggest a transition away from sweeping legislative reform packages toward more incremental, targeted policy change, often enacted with bipartisan support.
The substance of these reforms matters. While they are incremental, they will help thousands of people currently incarcerated, interacting with law enforcement, or trying to get a job post-incarceration. These policies push back—often quietly—against punitive approaches that disproportionately impact low-income communities and perpetuate cycles of incarceration.
For example, in 2025 alone, both Arizona and Virginia eliminated the longstanding crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity. Oklahoma eliminated a range of court fees that have long trapped low-income individuals in cycles of debt and incarceration. South Dakota reduced felony classifications for certain drug offenses. Alabama removed barriers to employment for people with criminal records and passed civil asset forfeiture reform. Georgia strengthened protections against the execution of individuals with intellectual disabilities and provided paths for domestic violence victims to obtain shorter sentences. Maryland passed second look legislation that allows people who were ages 18-25 at the time of their offense to petition for a sentence reconsideration after 20 years, with exceptions. North Dakota launched a pretrial diversion pilot program and eliminated many criminal justice fines and fees. Arkansas enacted legislation to improve police interactions with individuals with special needs. Utah made it easier for people on probation or parole to receive mental health services. Delaware made it harder to arrest young people. Montana reformed probation to allow for removals of conditions of supervision.
Across the 2021–2025 period, police reform, reentry support and expungement initiatives accounted for the largest shares of enacted legislation. Slightly more back-end reforms—those focused on reentry, supervision, and conditions of confinement—passed than front-end reforms addressing arrest, charging, or sentencing decisions. That trend became more pronounced in 2025, when approximately 62 percent of enacted reforms focused on the back end of the system.
The shift towards more back-end reforms in recent years is hardly surprising. These measures occupy a policy zone of greater political consensus, where voters and advocacy organizations across the ideological spectrum strongly agree that inhumane treatment—whether during incarceration or after release—is both unjust and counterproductive. Such practices not only violate basic principles of dignity but also undermine public safety by increasing the likelihood of recidivism. By contrast, front-end reforms—those aimed at diverting individuals from the criminal justice system altogether—continue to garner stronger resistance. Critics, often aligned with more punitive approaches, argue that deterrence depends on harsher penalties, including lengthy mandatory minimum sentences and mandatory arrest policies that limit opportunities for diversion.
Most of the reforms passed are modest when compared to the landmark legislation of earlier years, but their cumulative effect is meaningful. Together, these incremental changes signal not a retreat from reform, but a quiet and pragmatic recalibration of the criminal justice system toward policies that prioritize human dignity, reduce unnecessary punishment, and build safer communities through sustained, evidence-based change.
The partisan distribution of these reforms further challenges conventional assumptions. Based on data from the Cook Political Report’s State Partisan Voting Index from 2021 to 2025, Republican-leaning states enacted more reforms than Democratic-leaning states during the 2021–2025 period. Twenty-eight Republican states passed reforms, compared with 20 Democratic states and two politically even states. In 2025 alone, 19 Republican-leaning states passed reforms, compared with 17 Democratic-leaning states. Criminal justice reform, at least at the state level, remains a bipartisan enterprise.
This is not to deny that this period has also produced punitive legislation and rollbacks of earlier reforms. For example, Louisiana has repealed many of the historic sentencing reforms it passed in 2017—reforms the author helped shepherd—a cautionary example of how quickly hard-won progress can unravel. Reforms in other states have also faced serious attacks. Fear, whether rooted in personal insecurity or xenophobic anxieties and racism, remains a powerful force in American politics.
Yet that fear coexists with a widespread recognition that the current criminal justice system is profoundly unfair. Nearly half of all U.S. adults have an immediate family member who has been incarcerated, creating an intimate awareness of the system’s failures and a more nuanced public appetite for reform. Surveys show that Americans prefer prioritizing assistance over punishment in areas such as homelessness, drug addiction, and mental health. Americans distrust mandatory minimums that strip judges of discretion and they are suspicious of punitive policies that unnecessarily expand government power without delivering safety.
The lesson is not that reform is inevitable or secure, or that the backlash against many reform efforts is not real and worrisome. It is that criminal justice reform in the United States has become structurally decentralized and more incremental. Even as federal leadership recedes, state policymakers—often responding to fiscal pressures, empirical evidence, and local bipartisan coalitions—continue to pursue actions that reform the system modestly, mitigate its harms, and improve fairness and accountability.
On August 26, 2025, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed a law eliminating many fines and fees in his state’s criminal justice system. He said: “We believe a second chance should actually be a second chance. We’ve made huge strides by closing four prisons and giving over 40,000 people the opportunity to start again. I’m excited to make that a reality for even more people by eliminating these unnecessary fees that keep people trapped in the system.”
If you didn’t know any better, you might assume that this was said by a Democratic governor in Massachusetts or perhaps my home state of New Jersey. But Governor Stitt is a conservative Republican leading one of the most reliably Republican states in America—one that President Trump carried by more than 30 points in 2024—and he has advanced criminal justice reforms, with red state voters rewarding him with reelection.
The United States continues to suffer from a mass incarceration crisis, with 1.9 million people incarcerated in prisons and jails, a rate that is three to eight times higher than other wealthy democracies. The United States has about four percent of the world’s population but nearly 20 percent of the world’s people in prisons and jails. From 2010 to 2020, the nationwide incarceration rate dropped by 31 percent, a drop unprecedented since the United States began tracking incarceration rates, even accounting for reductions due to COVID. But that downward trend has now reversed. From 2021 to 2023, the nationwide incarceration rate increased by 4.6 percent, with most of that increase occurring in 2021 and then stabilizing in 2022 and 2023.
But declarations of the death of criminal justice reform are premature. In 2024, I worked with the Council on Criminal Justice and The Just Trust to convene on Princeton’s campus fourteen of the nation’s leading conservative and progressive advocacy organizations to try to come to agreement on bipartisan principles to guide criminal justice policymaking in America. After months of negotiations, the groups, which ranged from the ACLU to CPAC, came to agreement on four principles: safety, fairness, dignity, and accountability. Now these organizations, who normally agree on little, are working together to turn those principles into state policies. For example, in 2026, Dream.org, one of the principle signatory organizations, helped lead a successful legislative effort in Wisconsin to extend Medicaid coverage for people about to leave incarceration. On March 18, 2026, the legislation passed almost unanimously, with just one objection by a lawmaker who is retiring this year.
The movement for criminal justice reform has not disappeared. It has adapted—and it now lives, principally, in the states.
