Listen up Democrats – the votes are in and the public is done with mass incarceration

The success of left-leaning prosecutors in the primaries in Northern Virginia shows voters will no longer tolerate ‘tough on crime’ posturing

On Tuesday, voters in Northern Virginia joined a growing chorus of American communities embracing substantive criminal justice reform. It’s a win for everyone.

Democratic primaries in Arlington and Fairfax, Virginia, pitted career prosecutors against insurgent candidates running on unapologetic criminal justice reform platforms. By 9 pm, the results were clear: reform triumphed.

In Arlington, the race between incumbent commonwealth’s attorney Theo Stamos and Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti drew an astounding level of national attention and interest group funding. In Fairfax, former Justice Department attorney Steve Descano won a shocking upset against veteran commonwealth’s attorney Raymond F Morrogh.

Tafti and Descano, boldly pledged to end marijuana possession prosecutions, expand addiction treatment through drug courts, and end the use of cash bail. These are all long overdue in Virginia and nationwide. Tafti’s and Descano’s policy proposals put them in line with a growing number of states, most recently New York, which earlier this year passed a series of criminal justice reform laws that sharply reduce the use of cash bail and the number of misdemeanor crimes that require incarceration.

Stamos and Morrogh learned a difficult lesson about just how far – and fast – the political centre of the Democratic Party has shifted in the era of Donald Trump. Criminal justice reform issues once thought too extreme for polite conversation – what if we just ended the use of cash bail? – are increasingly becoming policy.

On criminal justice reform, the energised new left is rewriting the rules of what is politically possible. In Philadelphia, voters elected criminal justice crusader Larry Krasner as their district attorney. Krasner made his name as a civil rights lawyer notorious for suing police – 75 times, by his own count.

Almost immediately, Krasner announced the District Attorney’s office would not prosecute marijuana possession cases because of the immense racial disparity and nonexistent public risk. Crime didn’t spike. In fact, the jails are now less crowded than before Krasner’s tenure. Fewer families are torn apart by court dates. Fewer people sit in jail simply because they are too poor to buy their freedom from the city.

In Maryland, a bipartisan coalition including Republican governor Larry Hogan ended cash bail statewide. A year later, fewer people were sitting in cells. New Jersey virtually eliminated cash bail in 2016, with critics admitting a year later their fears of a “crime wave” were misguided.

Stamos and Morrogh failed to heed the growing focus of the Democratic base on fundamental questions of racial and economic justice. Stamos in particular drew fire for prosecuting a juvenile for the clearly indefensible crime of – oinking at a police officer.

Stamos also drew fire for remarks in 2018 where she inexplicably and repeatedly denied the existence of mass incarceration. She called mass incarceration “a term that is used to delegitimise what we do because there isn’t a prosecutor in this country that engages in mass incarceration”.

There is a shocking level of tone-deafness in claiming mass incarceration is a myth when the United States houses 25 per cent of the global prisoner population despite making up only 5 per cent of the global population. During Stamos’s tenure in Arlington, the daily jail population increased by 17 per cent.

That is mass incarceration.

Our current national epidemic of imprisonment is so heavy in its financial, moral and physical costs that it remains one of the few areas where Democrats and Republicans have come together to pass meaningful and overdue federal reforms. In Virginia, the Democratic base has made it clear there is no longer a safe harbour for prosecutors who deny or are slow to implement restorative justice reforms.

The two dozen Democratic presidential contenders should take note of what happened in Virginia last night. A double-digit majority of Americans now support not only legalising recreational marijuana, but also expunging the criminal records of those imprisoned for its possession and use.

That second part is key – legalising marijuana does nothing to amend the damage caused by the war on drugs unless we also wipe clean the mountain of criminal records its prohibition created. The Quinnipiac poll revealed 80 per cent of Americans now admit the war on drugs was a costly, brutal mistake perpetrated largely on black and brown communities vilified as junkies and pushers. We owe it to those harmed to restore what we can of their dignity and reputation.

Anyone seeking to lead the United States will find themselves at the helm of a nation shouting for more restorative justice and less mass incarceration. Candidates who can’t hear or don’t heed that growing call will face a rude awakening come primary day.