Last week’s second Republican presidential debate demonstrated a remarkable shift in the politics of crime and punishment.

At the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a building named for one of the country’s most staunch advocates for the war on drugs, Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — the son of another drug war backer — stated on national television that he had smoked marijuana. He didn’t give any qualifications; he didn’t claim to have disliked it, done only it once or not inhaled (though he did apologize to his mother).

More noteworthy, Bush and other leading candidates for the Republican presidential nomination used the debate stage to call for criminal justice reform. Businesswoman Carly Fiorina was perhaps the most strident, noting that the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Libertarian favorite Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul sharply but expectedly called for more rehabilitation and less incarceration for drug crimes, and other candidates, such as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Bush, touted the benefits of drug courts and treatment as an alternative to incarceration. Christie called the war on drugs a “failure.” Implicit in this discussion was not only agreement that we have too many people in prison but also a competition for the most effective solution.

On the other side of the political spectrum, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley are beginning to unveil their criminal justice plans. Clinton called for an end to mass incarceration in her first speech as a candidate. Just last week, Sanders unveiled a plan to ban private prisons and reinstate federal parole.

This is an encouraging change from past presidential elections. At least since Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign, politicians have tried to outdo one another as to who could be harder on crime and criminals. Perhaps most infamously, George H.W. Bush‘s Willie Horton ad helped secure his election by pushing the narrative that Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was to blame for the release of a violent criminal into society. The ad sealed into conventional wisdom that politicians must be tough on crime to win elections.

This logic wasn’t unique to conservatives. Bill Clinton promised harsh responses to crime during his 1992 campaign and delivered two years later with his crime bill, a piece of legislation that contributed to today’s mass incarceration problem by giving states billions of dollars to increase their prison populations and expanding federal three-strikes and mandatory minimum laws. By now, even Clinton has stated that the bill “made the [mass incarceration] problem worse.”