WASHINGTON -- On the campaign trail, the idea of locking up drug criminals for life is a lot less popular than it was a generation ago.
The 2016 presidential race has accelerated an evolution away from the traditional tough-on-crime candidate. A Republican Party that's long taken a law-and-order stance finds itself desperate to improve its standing among minority voters, and Democratic candidates are also being drawn into national conversations on policing, drug crimes and prison costs.
The "Just Say No" message of the Reagan administration and the "three strikes" sentencing law developed a decade later under President Bill Clinton have given way to concerns over bloated prison costs, the racial inequities of harsh drug punishments and how police interact with their communities.
"You don't have everyone saying they're tough on crime," said Inimai Chettiar of the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, which advocates reducing prison populations. "Instead, you have people offering different policy solutions."
The Paris attacks have at least temporarily thrust national security to the forefront of the presidential race, but criminal justice issues have been periodically popping up in a year of tumult in U.S. cities. In the Republican field, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has been seeking to "break the cycle of incarceration for nonviolent ex-offenders."
The push to rethink sentences for drug offenders is coinciding with the Black Lives Matter movement and its debate about police treatment of minorities, a heroin crisis that's brought renewed attention to addiction and a homicide spike in some big cities.
Republican Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor and a former federal prosecutor, has preached treatment rather than prison for drug addicts and spoken sympathetically of a law school friend who died after getting hooked on painkillers. But when it comes to discussing policing, he accuses Democrats in Washington of "allowing lawlessness to reign" and tells law enforcement "I'll have your back."
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a fellow Republican, criticizes harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders. But last month he voted against legislation that would have made nonviolent drug offenders eligible for shorter prison sentences, saying he was concerned it could also benefit violent felons.
And while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has endorsed a review of the criminal code and decried "selective enforcement" of the law, he wrote in an essay for a Brennan Center book this year that drug laws had helped restore "law and order to America's cities" and that shorter drug-crime sentences should be approached with caution.
Support for more lenient sentencing from Republican members of Congress and wealthy conservative backers such as the Koch brothers has made it easier for budget-minded presidential candidates to support sentencing policy changes. It's not clear, though, how much benefit candidates gain from pressing the issue with average voters, said Fergus Cullen, former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party.
Some leading candidates, such as Donald Trump, hardly mention the issue on the campaign trail, and Ben Carson, the sole Republican participant in a recent candidate forum on criminal justice, said he was still waiting to see evidence of racial bias by police.
"The Republican primary voters are not a soft-hearted bunch when it comes to criminal justice issues, and I don't think there are a lot of voters to be had," Cullen said.
Democratic candidates are more unified in their embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement and of overall change to the criminal justice system.
After Baltimore's riots in April, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic front-runner whose husband promoted a more conventional tough-on-crime stance, called the criminal justice system "out of balance" and urged an end to "mass incarceration." More recently, she proposed lifting restrictions on getting marijuana for medical studies and said it should be reclassified by the government to allow federally sponsored research into its effects.
Her rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, has called for accountability for police officers who "kill people who are unarmed" and suggested moving forward with marijuana legalization.
It's all a big change from a generation or two ago.
"The threat of someone waging a 'tough-on-crime' campaign as their calling card is, I think, very much diminished from what we might have seen 20 years ago," said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, which advocates sentencing policy changes.
A Section on 11/27/2015