The Legislators Working to Thwart the Will of Voters

Updated on March 27 at 9:57 a.m.

When Kris Steele joined the Oklahoma house of representatives in 2001, he noticed that whenever a matter of criminal justice came up, legislators felt it was necessary to appear “tough on crime.” As a result, the state kept enacting harsher sentences and making more crimes punishable by jail.

In 2016, after leaving government, he spearheaded two ballot measures to reverse that trend. Both passed. But 2017 has seen legislators in states around the countries moving to try to reverse ballot initiatives passed by voters in Novembers election, seeking to roll back minimum-wage increases, tax increases, and other matters. In other cases, legislators are seeking to make it harder to place such initiatives on the ballot in the first place. And so despite his victory at the polls, the fate of Steele’s two measures remains uncertain.

Steele is a self-described conservative Republican, but the longer he sat in the legislature, the more he questioned the logic of ever-more-aggressive laws. He noticed that even though the sentences got tougher and tougher, and incarceration rates in the Sooner State rose and rose, sitting at No. 2 in the nation, and jails got more and more overcrowded, the state wasn’t seeing markedly lower crime rates or safer neighborhoods. (Oklahoma was unusual in making simple drug and property offenses felonies punishable by jail time.) The taxpayer tab for imprisoning so many people kept growing, and ex-cons struggled to find gainful employment because of their records.

“I began to say, wait a minute, I’m not going to be part of this sort of paradigm that is based on shallow and often hollow rhetoric,” Steele recalls. “A lot of elected officials measure their political worth or value based on those kinds of policy decisions. The body tends to make decision in relation to corrections policy