A Republican Central California district attorney made a surprising decision last week to quit the California District Attorneys Association — whose president is Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley — while calling the group “out of touch” in its positions opposing statewide criminal justice reforms.

San Joaquin County District Attorney Tori Salazar is the only one of 58 district attorneys in the state to abandon her membership in the association, which advocates for legislation in Sacramento, conducts training for prosecutors, produces legal publications and regularly meets to discuss criminal justice policy.

“As criminal justice reform sweeps through California and the nation, I witnessed the CDAA oppose most reform-based initiatives, which tells me the association is out of touch and unwilling to find new approaches to criminal justice,” Salazar wrote in a Jan. 8 letter to O’Malley, stating she would not renew her membership.

In a phone interview with The Chronicle between meetings Wednesday at the association’s winter conference in Palm Springs, O’Malley rejected Salazar’s claims, saying the San Joaquin County district attorney has never participated in any of the group’s meetings.

“She doesn’t really have any information or firsthand knowledge of who we are as district attorneys or the work that’s being done by the CDAA,” O’Malley said. “It’s unfortunate. She fires off a letter without having a real basis for the accusations.”

While the association has opposed many recent statewide legislative criminal justice reforms, O’Malley called the group an “evolving organization” with a diverse membership with different viewpoints.

Some of its members are traditional law-and-order conservatives, while others, like Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s new, progressive district attorney, and Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who has filed a barrage of lawsuits against President Trump, are also members.

Boudin was welcomed by a round of applause at this week’s conference, O’Malley said.

Salazar’s decision to leave the association, she said, comes as her positions on criminal justice reform have changed. A Republican and former line prosecutor who once enforced the state’s heavy-handed laws of the past, Salazar said she has increasingly accepted data showing severe punishments don’t always contribute to greater public safety.

The tough-on-crime era — including 1994’s “three strikes” law, in which prosecutors could seek life sentences for a third felony, and Proposition 21 in 2000, which increased punishments for certain crimes and lowered the age juveniles could be charged as adults to 14 — sent thousands of people to prison while disproportionately affecting the poor and people of color, according to a wide body of research.

Criminal justice reform, long seen as a progressive issue, has increasingly been embraced by Republicans who control the majority of state legislatures around the country. Even Trump has supported modest reforms, signing the First Step Act in 2018, which eases some punitive federal prison sentences.

The California District Attorneys Association, Salazar said, still holds on to outdated criminal-justice philosophies from the past and has lost credibility with state lawmakers on nearly every recent reform measure.

The organization’s record in Sacramento, she said, proves it.

The association unsuccessfully fought Proposition 36 in 2012, which modified California’s three strikes law so that only serious or violent felonies qualified as third strikes. It also opposed Proposition 47, which reduced many nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors and raised the threshold for felony theft to $950, and Proposition 57, which allowed parole for some nonviolent felons, changed laws on juvenile prosecution and granted sentence credits for rehabilitation.

The group also tried to suppress SB1437, which reformed the felony murder rule; SB1391, which bars anyone under age 16 from being tried in adult court; and SB233, which prevents law enforcement from arresting and charging sex workers who come forward as victims or witnesses to serious crimes.

“Rather than consider these difficult issues, CDAA has created a culture where ‘we, and we alone’ know what is right and just and the voters are wrong,” Salazar wrote in her letter. “When change is frowned upon, or worse yet, suffocated by slow or reluctant implementation, we fail to represent the very people who have voted for change.”

Salazar canceled her office-wide membership to the association and is joining the National District Attorneys Association and the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, which she said are more in line with her office’s values. Prosecutors in the office can still be members of the state association on an individual basis, she said.

O’Malley said the association’s legislative advocacy doesn’t necessarily reflect its diverse membership, and the group’s reform-minded prosecutors are working to influence the association’s more conservative members. Salazar, O’Malley noted, isn’t aware of much of the work the association does.

“Her absence is her loss,” O’Malley said.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky