While polls about political candidates dominate the news cycle in the weeks before the midterm election, one poll with a modest sample size shows that supporting criminal-justice reform could make office seekers more popular with voters.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona recently commissioned a poll to measure Arizonans' support for political candidates who back criminal-justice reform versus a traditional "tough on crime" approach.

The poll, conducted by the San Francisco-based research group David Binder Research, found that likely voters in Arizona overwhelmingly support ideas such as easing the struggle former convicts who seek jobs or housing, and ending the war on drugs. The support for those two issues were 79 and 64 percent, respectively.

The poll also asked likely voters to choose between two candidates with opposing views of our current criminal-justice system.

Candidate 1, it said, believes the current system "is unnecessarily ruining lives and wasting money by locking up too many people in prison for too long, with little benefit for public safety. This candidate believes that our criminal justice system can be made fairer, safer and cheaper by reducing the number of people in jails and prisons and reducing racial disparities."

Candidate 2, meanwhile, believes the number of people "locked up in jails and prisons is fine and that, if anything, we need to spend more money on jails and prisons to ensure that all criminals do time behind bars. This candidate believes that reducing the use of incarceration would be dangerous, and that racial disparities in the criminal justice system, if they exist, are simply a result of where crime is occurring and not a problem that can or should be fixed."

A total of 54 percent of participants chose the former, 40 percent the latter.

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The ACLU of Arizona's political director, Tony Cani, said the non-profit conducted the poll to show current and future politicians that reforming the criminal-justice system to reduce prison populations and the racial disparities of said populations is a widely supported platform.

"We wanted to show how there's broad public support toward making smart, meaningful reforms to the criminal-justice system that will make it smarter, more cost-effective and help keep Arizonans safe," Cani told The Arizona Republic.

The ACLU published a report last month condemning Arizona's rising prison populations and suggested halving sentence lengths for numerous crimes and investing the savings in anti-recidivism programs.

Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery argued that doing so wouldn't reduce crime and prisoner-reform programs had to occur within the prison system.

But Cani said the widespread public support could be enough to break through the partisan gridlock.

"Not a lot is working in government right now," Cani said. "I think the public is really aware how hard it is to get meaningful changes accomplished at the state (and) federal level."

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Caucasians made up 71 percent of the poll, Latinos made up 17 percent, Asians made up 3 percent, and 2 percent of those polled were African-American.

Party affiliation broke down as follows:

Republican: 43 percent.

Democrat: 33 percent.

Independent: 23 percent.

Other party: 1 percent.

Although the poll was commissioned by a non-profit commonly seen as left-leaning, evidence suggests the poll is fairly reliable.

Nathaniel Rakich, an elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight, gave several reasons why this poll seems to check out: because it polled likely voters as opposed to registered voters; half of the people were contacted by cellphone; live telephone interviewers asked the questions rather than robots; and the poll was bilingual.

Rakich said the one issue he had with the poll was its 400-person sample size.

"It's not a small sample size but it's not a huge and robust one," Rakich said. "They could have cut down on that margin of error if they had sampled more. A lot of these really strong polls that we see sample 1,000 or more respondents."

Rakich said a question's wording can also affect how someone answers.

For example, while 81 percent of respondents supported criminal-justice reform versus 9 percent opposing, Rakich said the question was broad enough that the respondents might differ on exactly how the law is reformed.

Reach the reporter at 602-444-2474 or perry.vandell@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @PerryVandell.

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