Talarico’s Anti-Police Past Resurfaces With Plan To ‘Make Prisons Obsolete’

This election season has included a lot of talk about the openly socialist candidates winning Democratic Party primaries in New York and other deep-blue regions of the country.

But in Texas, US Senate hopeful James Talarico is spewing many of the same far-left ideas from a package that might appear less extreme to some voters.

Now that he’s facing GOP Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a steady stream of those prior remarks are coming back to bite him.

As the Washington Free Beacon highlighted in a new report:

Talarico’s remarks came during a 2022 speech he delivered to a group of Texas inmates graduating from a high school diploma program. After approvingly quoting the prominent prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore—Talarico described her as an “anti-prison activist” who said “prisons are a catchall solution to our social problems”—he laid out his vision for a “world without prisons.”

“Prisons allow us to ignore the consequences of systemic racism and global capitalism,” Talarico said. “If we took just half of what we spent on wars, prisons, and policing and spent it on education, health care, and jobs, we could make prisons obsolete.”

“It’s hard to imagine a world without prisons,” he continued. “But it was also hard to imagine a world without telegrams and cassette tapes. Just because it was hard to imagine doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. We won’t build it overnight, but dreaming is the first step.”

In an X thread that included a video clip of his remarks, the Free Beacon noted Talarico’s recent effort to distance himself from the defund-the-police movement that he seemed to actively endorse just a few years ago.

That coverage sparked significant social media engagement:

I'm starting to think Talarico isn't a real person but was created in a lab by Republican campaign consultants.

— Don Wolt (@tlowdon) June 24, 2026

It's the same crap that's been shoved down our throats for decades. We pay dearly for it through high taxes and uncontrolled criminal activity. Go Ken!

— Art Hall (@ArtHallTx) June 24, 2026

Talarico is trying to change his colors and look like a tough man.

He's having trouble getting his cowboy suit on backwards.

— Jerry Boyd (@jerrybo20) June 24, 2026

In light of that evidence, notice how Talarico responded in April to claims that he supported defunding police, per Fox News:

The latest to be unearthed is from the 2019 interview, in which Talarico decried plans to increase police officer presence in schools without also placing more emphasis on mental health.

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“We’re all concerned about school safety and recent school shootings, and that concern, in some ways, has been channeled unproductively toward militarizing schools and toward kind of leaning into a culture of violence and adding more law enforcement officials into campuses,” he posited.

As a solution, Talarico, a former middle school teacher, touted the first bill he introduced as a member of the Texas House of Representatives, which would have mandated a set ratio of mental health workers for every police officer placed in a school. He stressed that “if a crime has been committed, a law has been broken or there’s an immediate danger to students, of course, we want our law enforcement officials to address it,” but emphasized that “law enforcement officials shouldn’t be conducting behavior interventions.”

Republican National Committee spokesman Zach Kraft called the bill “a scary combination of two of James Talarico’s favorite things,” which he said are “defunding the police and pushing his woke agenda on kids.”

Kraft told Fox News Digital that “Texans will have the same answer for Talarico at the ballot box that he had for police: ‘We don’t want you here.'”

However, JT Ennis, a spokesperson for Talarico’s campaign, characterized the GOP criticisms as a falsehood.

“James opposes defunding the police and has a proven track record voting to send billions of dollars to support law enforcement,” Ennis told Fox News Digital.

Explaining his bill on the Trey Blocker Show, Talarico said it “directly addresses the school-to-prison pipeline” and “hopefully will create a balance between security and hardening, which has been proposed in some of the proposed school safety plans, and what has been proven to be effective, which is creating a safe and healthy school climate.”

“Everybody from the Department of Education to Secret Service has said that’s the best way to prevent school shootings, is to have relationships with your students on campus, not to create a moat around your campus,” he said.

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He stressed that police “shouldn’t be counseling students.”