Amid celebrity performances, rousing speeches, and thousands of people descending on Chicago for the annual Democratic National Convention this week, Democrats adopted little-noticed but significant changes to criminal justice language in their official party platform.
In the 2024 party platform, there is no mention of police brutality. “We need to fund the police, not defund the police,” the text reads—a marked shift from previous progressive messaging. Though the platform calls for things like restricting state and local practices such as solitary confinement, it simultaneously argues that there needs to be more police on the streets in order to protect communities. Democrats also do not have opposition to the death penalty on their platform for the first time since 2012.
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By comparison, in the Democratic Party’s 2020 platform, they dedicated an entire section to “reforming our criminal justice system,” explicitly calling out mass incarceration, saying the criminal justice system is “failing” the nation, calling for an “overhaul [of] the criminal justice system from top to bottom” and stating that “police brutality is a stain on the soul of our nation.” It also focused heavily on community-oriented policing. There’s no mention of “mass incarceration” in the 2024 platform, but it does point out President Joe Biden’s investments in job training, addiction recovery, and reentry services for those incarcerated across the country.
The changes mark a shift for the party, says Baz Dreisinger, professor of English at City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, particularly as Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor, now leads the presidential ticket. Although the 2024 party platform was approved before Biden dropped out of the re-election race and endorsed Harris in his stead, the party voted to adopt the platform this past week.
“It made me emotional reading the older version, because of how far we’ve come in the language, in terms of talking about criminalizing poverty, none of that language really is in the new edition. There’s very little talk about ending mass incarceration as a whole,” says Dreisinger. “The explicit statement of ‘we want more police officers on the ground’ is a pretty dramatic thing to include and it’s obviously a very deliberate appeal to a fearful America.”
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“The platform was drafted through an inclusive process that involved advocates and experts from across our party, including longtime criminal justice leaders, and reflects so many of the core values of the Democratic Party,” a DNC spokesperson said. “This Platform serves as a vision for the Party, and although the Platform is robust, it’s not comprehensive.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.
The shift in the Democratic Party platform between 2020 and 2024 on criminal justice issues is in part a reflection of a different national environment. In 2020, George Floyd’s murder sparked a massive national reckoning with systemic racism and police brutality.
“It was a reflection of where the country was at that time; we had just witnessed horrific murders at the hands of police at that point, and there was a growing movement for police reform,” says Maritza Perez Medina, director of Federal Affairs at Drug Policy Action, advocacy partner to Drug Policy Alliance.
As national talking points move away from the “defund the police” movement—which gained popularity on the left in the aftermath of Floyd’s murder—the Harris campaign is trying to “reflect what they’re perceiving that the public wants,” Medina says. The 2024 platform states that “no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana.” However, as Medina notes, the 2020 platform went a step further than this, stating: “Democrats will decriminalize marijuana use.”
While Harris’ background as a prosecutor was seen as a liability in 2020, now she is leaning into that history, calling this race between her and Donald Trump as being one between a “prosecutor and a convicted felon.” Some advocates believe Harris campaign’s utilization of the prosecutor/felon dichotomy will turn off voters who have experience with the criminal justice system. “The whole ‘felon’ line is a miss on their part in that you are trying to attract masses of folks who have been impacted by people in their lives who have felonies or who have been incarcerated,” says Lisa Monet Wayne, executive director at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
Still, other groups believe the changes in language in the party platform don’t indicate a major shift in the Democratic Party’s priorities. Nina Patel, senior policy counsel with the ACLU, sees 2020 as an inflection point for American history, and though the 2024 platform has different language, she says it still aligns with ACLU’s long-term goals and campaigns. These include recognition that no one should be in jail for possession of marijuana, the call for the passage of the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, and acknowledgement of the role that job training, housing, and addiction recovery plans play in alleviating the harms of mass incarceration.
“There’s probably a lot of analysis going on right now between, like, a line by line comparison of what is and isn’t between the two platforms, but I will say that the Biden Administration mobilized in a way we hadn’t seen before,” Patel says. “You have to look at the overarching goals within what those properties are working on and working towards.”
For Dreisinger, though, the language is important: “Our fight for justice is about not just legislation, but the language, rhetoric, and culture of how we talk about these issues,” she says. “What you see here is like a dramatic lowering of the bar of how we talk about this stuff.”
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