In February, the murder of Whittier police officer Keith Boyer was initially blamed on Proposition 47, although the man charged in the killing had in no way been affected by the new rules. With little to no evidence, many police chiefs and sheriffs have publicly asserted that upticks in California crime are tied to 47. It didn’t matter that overall the reforms appeared to be safely addressing the state’s mass incarceration problem one murder derailed the effort.Ĭalifornia finds itself wrestling with the same sort of political challenge with regard to its prison reforms, especially Proposition 47, which in 2014 reclassified several drug and property felonies as misdemeanors. But when a single parolee, Darrell Dennis, committed a murder, the parole board cut back releases so aggressively that by the end of 2013, Arkansas’s prison population had risen 17%, to a new high. In 2011, Arkansas passed a comprehensive criminal justice reform bill that caused its prison population to drop quickly by almost 10%. The Horton effect continues to play out again and again. No matter how successful an “early release” prison program is, one single failure can impose huge political costs. Although the impact of the ad on the outcome of the election has been overstated, politicians quickly learned its lesson. Bush in his successful presidential campaign against Massachusetts Gov. But in 1988, Horton’s case was used in an infamous attack ad launched by George H.W. Horton was an outlier - more than 99% of those allowed to go home on leaves returned without incident. A year later he brutally raped a woman and assaulted her boyfriend. Horton was an inmate in Massachusetts who in 1986 absconded from a weekend-leave program. This problem is so well known it has a name: the Willie Horton effect.

Locked In by John F. Pfaff