All criminal justice reform is local.

• Author: Edelman, Gilad

DONALD TRUMP'S ELECTION ENDS HOPES FOR FEDERAL ACTION TO REDUCE MASS INCARCERATION. BUT THE REAL PROBLEM, AND THEREFORE THE SOLUTION, LIES WITH LOCAL PROSECUTORS.

On the same day that they narrowly chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in November, voters in Nueces County, Texas, also elected Democrat Mark Gonzalez--a Mexican American defense attorney with "NOT GUILTY" tattooed across his chest--to be district attorney. Gonzalez had easily defeated the incumbent in the primary in March. Curious to hear about his plans as the county's new chief prosecutor, I called him the week after the general election. He had ideas for policy reforms--for instance, he plans to give defense attorneys open access to all files concerning their clients' cases--but he seemed most eager to talk about something harder to pin down: changing the culture of the office.

"We want to bring back the humanitarian perspective," he said. "There's a current culture where they think everyone accused is a scumbag, and that is not the case. These guys aren't all scum. Even if some of them are scum, their moms aren't. Their dads aren't. Their brothers and sisters and wives, who most of these guys have, aren't. So I'll bring a little bit of humanity to that office."

Gonzalez is one of at least ten criminal justice reform candidates who won local races for district attorney, including in Houston, Chicago, and even Birmingham, Alabama. Several candidates, though not Gonzalez, were backed by the liberal billionaire George Soros. Some owed their victories to incumbent scandals; still, they proved that it's possible to campaign and win on a promise to be less punitive.

District attorney elections have only recently emerged as a focus of the criminal justice reform movement, spurred in part by outrage over the failure of prosecutors to bring charges against police for killing unarmed black men. But district attorneys (sometimes known by other titles, like county prosecutor or state's attorney) have control over far more than prosecuting cops. The phrase "criminal justice reform" encompasses many ideas, but at its heart is the goal of ending mass incarceration. The U.S. prison population has risen meteorically since the late 1970s, only recently stabilizing, even though crime has fallen dramatically since the early 1990s. America has easily the highest incarceration rate in the world: 716 of every 100,000 residents are locked up, according to the most recent statistics, which comes to about 2.3 million people in prison or jail any given day. (Compare that to 118 of every 100,000 Canadians.) We have one-twentieth of the world's population but one-quarter of its prisoners. Black and Hispanic people, about a third of the U.S. population, make up nearly 60 percent of prison inmates.

While criminal justice reform has recently become a surprisingly bipartisan issue, the election of Donald Trump--who plans to appoint as chief law enforcement officer Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, who was blocked from a federal judgeship in the 1980s for, basically, being too racist--looks like a major setback. A BuzzFeed article published in the week after the election captured this feeling with the headline "The Election Might Have Killed Criminal Justice Reform."

Hardly. It's true that the election spells the demise of the bipartisan criminal justice Senate bill, and a Sessions-led Department of Justice could be disastrous in many ways. But the election of Donald Trump may end up having very little effect on mass incarceration. The federal government just doesn't have much power over prison populations: the vast majority of incarcerated people are locked in state, not federal...