Criminal Justice Reform

Public safety through justice, not punishment.

The American criminal justice system locks up more people than any other country on Earth, costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and consistently fails at the one thing it claims to deliver: public safety. Decades of "tough on crime" politics have given us mass incarceration, militarized policing, and entire communities surveilled and punished into precarity, while the actual sources of harm in this country, from corporate fraud to wage theft to environmental devastation, go largely unaddressed. We can do dramatically better. The path forward starts with rethinking what public safety actually means and who gets to provide it.

Addressing the Roots of Crime

Most low-level street crime is, fundamentally, crime caused by poverty. People steal because they are hungry. People sell drugs because legitimate work does not pay enough to live. People act out of desperation, addiction, untreated mental illness, or trauma that no amount of policing will resolve.

The single most effective public safety policy this country could adopt is meeting people's basic needs. Livable wages, guaranteed housing, accessible healthcare, mental health and substance use treatment, and well-funded community programs all reduce crime far more reliably than additional police officers or longer sentences. The evidence on this is overwhelming, and yet we keep pouring resources into the back end of the problem (prisons, surveillance, enforcement) while not even considering front end solutions that could center dignity, care, and compassion. 

I will fight to invest in the conditions that actually produce safety, the same investments that show up across my platform: universal healthcare, housing as a human right, livable wages, public education, mental healthcare, and the social services that keep communities stable and connected. 

Rethinking the Role of Police

Police officers in this country have been asked to do far too many jobs they were never trained for. They respond to mental health crises, domestic conflicts, homelessness, school discipline, and substance use emergencies, often with predictably bad results. A profession built around the use of force is not the right tool for problems that are fundamentally about housing, healthcare, and human services.

I support shifting many of the functions currently assigned to police to civilian agencies, community-based organizations, and trained specialists who can actually address the underlying issues. That includes:

• Mental health crisis response handled by trained mental health professionals, not armed officers. Programs like CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon, and similar models in dozens of other cities have demonstrated that this works, that it is safer for everyone involved, and that it costs less than the status quo. 

• Homelessness response handled by social workers and outreach teams connected to actual housing and services, not by officers tasked with moving people from one block to the next. 

• Traffic enforcement reformed to reduce armed encounters over minor violations, which have produced an enormous share of the police killings in this country and which fall heavily on Black and brown people. 

• School safety handled by counselors, social workers, and trained de-escalation staff rather than school resource officers, whose record of disproportionately punishing students of color has been well documented. 

• Substance use treatment handled by healthcare professionals, with addiction treated as the public health issue it is rather than as a criminal one.

This is what "defund the police" actually means in practical terms: not eliminating public safety, but making public safety focused, appropriate, and humane by routing problems to people who can solve them. Police should focus on the cases where their training and authority are genuinely necessary, with adequate resources to do that work well.

Redirecting Enforcement Toward the Biggest Sources of Harm

Even within traditional law enforcement, our priorities are upside down. Federal and state agencies pour resources into low-level drug enforcement, immigration raids, and policing of poor neighborhoods, while the largest sources of harm in this country, by any honest measure, get a fraction of the attention.

Wage theft costs American workers more than all robberies, burglaries, and other property crimes combined while the agencies responsible for enforcing wage and labor laws are chronically understaffed. Consumer fraud, predatory lending, securities fraud, and corporate price-fixing extract enormous sums from working families every year, with criminal penalties that would be embarrassing if they were not so destructive. Climate destruction, toxic pollution, and corporate decisions that knowingly poison communities kill more Americans than street crime, but we devote shockingly little attention to them. 

I will fight to redirect federal law enforcement priorities and funding toward the actual largest sources of crime in this country: corporate wage theft, consumer fraud, securities fraud, environmental crimes, and the corporate misconduct that does the most damage to ordinary people. The Department of Labor, the FTC, the SEC, the EPA, and similar agencies need real enforcement teeth, real funding, and real authority to bring criminal as well as civil actions against the executives and corporations responsible for these harms. 

Creating Police Accountability

Police officers in this country are protected by a doctrine called qualified immunity, which makes it nearly impossible to hold individual officers civilly liable for misconduct, even when they violate clearly established constitutional rights. Qualified immunity has produced a system in which serious abuses go unpunished, victims are denied recourse, and the worst actors face no real consequences.

We need to eliminate qualified immunity. Officers who follow the law and act in good faith have nothing to fear from accountability. Officers who do not should face the same consequences any other person in this country would face for the same conduct.

I also support requiring law enforcement officers to carry personal liability insurance, with premiums tied to their individual conduct records. Right now, when an officer engages in misconduct, the public pays the settlement out of taxpayer dollars, the officer faces no personal financial consequence, and the underlying behavior is structurally rewarded. Personal liability insurance shifts the cost to the officers themselves, creates real financial incentives for good conduct, and gives departments a self-correcting mechanism through their own peers. Officers will hold each other accountable when their own livelihoods depend on it.

Beyond these structural reforms, I will support:

• Independent civilian oversight of police departments with real investigative authority and the power to discipline officers for misconduct. 

• Federal standards for the use of force, with clear restrictions on chokeholds, no-knock warrants, and the use of military-grade equipment. 

• A national database of officer misconduct that follows officers across departments, ending the practice of fired officers simply moving to the next jurisdiction. 

• Demilitarization of police forces, including ending the federal programs that transfer surplus military equipment to local police departments.

Ending the Prison Exception for Slavery

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in this country, except as punishment for a crime. That single clause has been used for over 150 years to justify the forced, often unpaid labor of incarcerated people, who today produce billions of dollars worth of goods and services for both private corporations and public institutions while earning pennies an hour or nothing at all.

That exception has also become a structural feature of the immigration enforcement crisis we are living through. Immigrants detained without due process are being put to work in detention facilities, providing cheap labor to private prison companies and to the federal government itself, while the political class points to their presence as justification for further enforcement. 

I support amending the Constitution to end the prison exception entirely. Forced labor is forced labor, regardless of who is being forced. A country that calls itself free cannot continue running a system of slavery hidden inside its prisons and detention centers.

Cultivating Decarceration 

The United States incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world. We hold more than two million people behind bars on any given day, and we cycle millions more through the system each year. Most of those people are not violent threats to anyone. They are people convicted of drug offenses, technical parole violations, low-level property crimes, or simply the inability to pay bail, fines, and fees that the criminal justice system imposes as a condition of liberty.

I will push for Congress to pass laws that help states and localities with:

• Ending cash bail, so that pretrial liberty does not depend on a person's bank account. 

• Decriminalizing drug possession at the federal level and treating addiction as a public health issue. 

• Sentencing reform to end mandatory minimums, reduce sentences for nonviolent offenses, and allow meaningful judicial discretion. 

• Creating robust reentry support, including housing, employment, healthcare, and education, so that people leaving incarceration have a real chance to rebuild their lives rather than cycling back through a system designed to reabsorb them. 

• Restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions, including those currently incarcerated, as part of the broader democratic reforms in my platform. 

• Ending federal contracts with private, for-profit prisons. Profit motives have no place in a system that decides who is deprived of liberty.

Making Safe Communities

Public safety is one of the most basic things a government owes the people it serves. The current system is failing at that obligation while spending unprecedented sums and inflicting unprecedented harm. We can build a country where people are actually safer, where their basic needs are met, where their communities are stable and connected, and where the institutions of justice address the largest sources of harm rather than the smallest.

That country is not an impossible pipe dream. The pieces of it already exist in cities and states and countries that have done the work. What is missing is the political will to build it at the scale this country needs. I am running because I believe that work is possible and crucial.