Last week, the new top lawman of the United States promised to forge an era of hardline “law and order” around the country, even as Americans across party lines support very different, less punitive approaches to questions of justice and young people, according to a new study.

The poll, published by Youth First, a national campaign working for juvenile justice reform, found that 78% of Americans support shifting the youth justice system from a focus on incarceration and punishment to prevention and rehabilitation.

“The polling underscores the breadth and depth of support for efforts to decarcerate in the juvenile justice system,” said Liz Ryan, the executive director of Youth First. “There is broad bipartisan support among voters and it shows that no matter where you live in the country and no matter what your relationship to the justice system, there’s support.”

The report comes at a pivotal moment in the criminal justice reform movement. The newly confirmed attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has billed himself throughout his career as a traditional “tough on crime” prosecutor and legislator, even in an era that has been defined by bipartisan support for alternatives to incarceration.

Last year, in opposition to a bipartisan bill that would have decreased mandatory minimum sentencing, including for nonviolent drug crimes, Session said: “The wise approach is to slow down and evaluate the trends before accelerating prison population decline.”

Minutes after he was sworn in as attorney general last week, Sessions said the US was experiencing a “dangerous permanent trend” in rising crime, even though homicides have fallen to half their rate in the 1990s as part of a two-decade decline in crime.

On juvenile justice, in particular, Sessions has been a fierce advocate of prison-oriented strategies. In 1994, as Alabama’s attorney general, Sessions championed tough penalties “that emphasize discipline and responsibility to deter non-violent first-time offenders from further crimes”. Sessions also suggested youth “work camps”, treating violent repeat juvenile offenders as adults and reallocating federal funds to create more jail space for young people.

When he moved on to the Senate, Sessions’s emphasis hardly wavered. The senator used his position atop the chamber’s subcommittee on youth violence to advance those ideas. In a 1999 floor speech, Sessions called for federal funding of youth “detention space”, for instance.

“I have been met sometimes with resistance from those who say the answer to juvenile crime is more prevention programs,” Sessions said. “I really am not opposed to prevention programs, but I believe many of these programs that work through the juvenile court system are indeed the best prevention programs that you can have.”

The study by Youth First found strong and growing public support for very different approaches. Only 22% of respondents said the youth justice system should “focus on punishing youth who have committed delinquent acts”. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said that incarceration is not required to teach a youth who commits an offense to take responsibility for his or her actions.

“Because there’s broad bipartisan support among policymakers, and now as you can see, by voters, we hope that is what the attorney general and his staff would keep in mind as they move forward setting their criminal justice agenda,” Ryan said.

However, it is not clear how much influence Sessions is likely to have on juvenile justice nationwide.

As of the government’s last count in December 2016, there were just 20 inmates in the federal system under 18 years of age. Virtually all of the roughly 50,000 juveniles incarcerated in the US are under the jurisdiction of state and local justice systems. “Because juvenile justice is really a purview of the states, that’s where most of the policy is made and most of the resources are,” Ryan said. Activists and state lawmakers have helped engineer a more than 50% reduction in youth incarceration in the past 15 years.

But while the federal department of corrections directly oversees very few of the nation’s juvenile prisoners, what it can do is set examples and exert strong reform pressures. For example, when Barack Obama’s justice department ended the use of solitary confinement for juveniles in January 2016, experts said it was likely the ban did not actually affect anyone currently in custody. What the measure accomplished, they said, was set a standard at the federal level that could impel states to follow. Sessions’s record suggests that reform-minded states may have to follow each others’ examples, rather than look to the justice department.