Several states have decriminalized marijuana for recreational use. More than a half-dozen states have passed laws restricting the use of cellphone-tracking technology by the police.
Lawmakers across the country are experimenting with a range of criminal justice reforms, driven by protests, a reckoning with the effects of mass incarceration and anger over police killings. But this legislative momentum has mostly stalled in an unexpected place: New York, a state led by Democrats that outlawed the death penalty more than a decade ago and did away with the last of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, which mandated strict sentences for low-level drug offenses, in 2009.
There has been hardly any legislation under the rubric of criminal justice reform passed in Albany since the governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, came to office in 2011, or in New York City since the Democratic mayor, Bill de Blasio, and many members of the City Council came to office in 2014 promising to overhaul police-community interactions.
A state antishackling law passed in 2009 was expanded last year to prohibit the shackling of pregnant inmates under most circumstances. But in recent years, few laws have been passed to decriminalize behaviors, shorten prison or jail sentences, or restrict police actions. A strict medical marijuana law passed in 2014. Before that the last notable legislative action of this kind was in 2010, when the state forced the New York Police Department to stop maintaining a database of people who had been stopped by the police but were not found to have engaged in wrongdoing.
As a growing list of police departments from Ferguson, Mo., to Baltimore are being rebuked for unconstitutional practices, some leaders in Albany and at City Hall have embraced the mantle of progressive criminal justice reform. But they have stopped short of enshrining broad change in law.
Their reluctance is, in some ways, tethered to an enduring unease about public safety in New York, particularly in New York City. Statistics show street crime at historic lows, but many people say in polls that crime is worsening. Any effort to place new limits on law enforcement or to reduce punishments could prove perilous for politicians should a spike in crime occur.
“We have to be fair to victims of crime,” State Senator Patrick Gallivan, a Republican who leads the Crime Victims, Crime and Correction Committee, said in defending the state’s unusually low age of criminal responsibility, 16. “And we need to hold people accountable.”
Though Governor Cuomo has backed raising the age to 18, the legislation has not moved forward. New York remains the only state other than North Carolina to routinely prosecute 16-year-olds as adults.
