Now the executive director of the Straight Ahead, the political action wing of the Abolitionist Law Center in Philadelphia, Holbrook has decided that if judges cannot be arbiters of pure justice, they can at least be representatives of a new type of politics — one that is more attuned to the injustices of America’s criminal justice system. And Holbrook is not alone. In a handful of cities around the country, criminal justice reformers are organizing to get reform-minded judges elected to local benches, setting in motion a movement to “flip the bench” in favor of more progressive judges. At a moment when politicians at the national level are cautiously backing away from more aggressive proposals to reform the nation’s criminal justice system, the movement to flip the bench offers an alternative forward path for reform — albeit one that most challenges the left’s conventional view of elected judges as instruments of tough-on-crime policies.

Holbrook and his fellow reformers face an uphill battle. In the vast majority of counties around the country, tough-on-crime messaging continues to dominate judicial races, and voters remain largely in the dark about the function and responsibilities of their local magistrates — let alone the role that progressive judges could play in a broader criminal justice reform agenda. On top of that, reformers are having to contend with the complexity of the different systems that states and local counties use to select judges, a dynamic that makes it difficult to scale grassroot movements up beyond the local level.

Yet despite these less-than-optimal political circumstances, the movement has shown some early signs of success. In early 2021, Holbrook’s organization formed a coalition with four other criminal justice reform groups to endorse a slate of eight candidates running in the Democratic primary for spots on the court of common pleas in Allegheny County, the county in western Pennsylvania that includes Pittsburgh. In the May primary election, five of the coalition’s candidates won. In neighboring Philadelphia, the criminal justice reform group Reclaim Philadelphia put forward its own slate of eight candidates for their county’s court of common pleas, seven of whom won. Both counties lean heavily Democratic, and the reformist candidates are expected to prevail in the November general elections.