In 2016 campaign, both parties want reform in justice system

A Republican Party that's long taken a law-and-order stance finds itself desperate to improve its standing among minority voters, and Democratic candidates are also being drawn into national conversations on policing, drug crimes and prison costs.

With criminal justice issues intruding into election season, the "Just Say No" message of the Reagan administration and the "three strikes" sentencing law developed a decade later under President Bill Clinton have given way to concerns over bloated prison costs, the racial inequities of harsh drug punishments and how police interact with their communities.

The push to rethink sentences for drug offenders is coinciding with the Black Lives Matter movement and its debate about police treatment of minorities, a heroin crisis that's brought renewed attention to addiction and a homicide spike in some big cities.

[...] last month he voted against legislation that would have made nonviolent drug offenders eligible for shorter prison sentences, saying he was concerned it could also benefit violent felons.

[...] while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has endorsed a review of the criminal code and decried "selective enforcement" of the law, he wrote in an essay for a Brennan Center book this year that drug laws had helped restore "law and order to America's cities" and that shorter drug-crime sentences should be approached with caution.

Some leading candidates such as Donald Trump hardly mention the issue on the campaign trail, and Ben Carson, the sole Republican participant in a recent candidate forum on criminal justice, said he was still waiting to see evidence of racial bias by police.

After Baltimore's riots in April, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic front-runner whose husband promoted a more conventional tough-on-crime stance, called the criminal justice system "out of balance" and urged an end to "mass incarceration."