Annie Nichol was seven years old on 19 March 1994 when she was brought to the White House to talk to Bill Clinton.

With a stuffed dolphin by her side, the girl spoke to the president about her 12-year-old sister, Polly Klaas, who had been abducted five months earlier from the family’s home in Petaluma, California, while Annie was sleeping nearby.

Annie and Clinton watched footage showing how she’d since booby-trapped her room with bells and ropes to stop intruders.

“Do you think I’m going to live to grow up?” television cameras captured her asking the president.

“You’re a brave girl,” Clinton responded, adding that he was working to make sure people with “serious problems” would remain in prison.

Today, Annie is tormented by the memory. Polly’s kidnapping and subsequent murder fueled a host of “tough on crime” laws and a powerful victims’ rights movement, which pushed America to have the highest reported incarceration rate in the world.

The meeting at the White House, Annie said, was a reminder of how her family’s story was exploited to expand mass incarceration and racial inequality in America.

“I had just lost Polly and someone had given me that question to ask, and it was a message that wasn’t mine. I was a scared kid who had been through something I couldn’t even begin to process. Being put in the position of going to the White House to be on this television program and seeing Clinton start crying, the shame of that experience still overwhelms me. I was the perfect person to be used like that. What’s more compelling than seeing this scared little girl?”

Annie and her older sister Jess are now on a mission to reclaim their family’s legacy and undo the harsh legislation the tragedy that befell them sparked. They say they want a different criminal justice system, one that focuses on preventing violence; accountability, treatment and rehabilitation for people who cause harm; and care and services for survivors.

Their message is urgent, the sisters say, as growing concerns over crime in cities across the US since the pandemic have led to familiar calls for more punitive responses from pundits and some politicians facing midterm elections.

“There’s the trauma of losing Polly and then there’s the trauma of how her death was used to punish other people,” Jess said. “We don’t want our pain to be used to punish anyone else … We’re on the precipice of repeating a really terrible history. And we don’t want people to make the same mistake.”

On the evening of 1 October 1993, Polly was playing a board game at home with two friends when a stranger broke in and snatched her, leaving the two other girls behind.

Jess and Annie, aged 12 and six at the time, recall fragments of the aftermath: the reporters camped outside their door, the “Polly, we love you” T-shirts worn by everyone in town, their visits with Winona Ryder, who grew up in Petaluma.

Two months after the abduction, the kidnapper led authorities to Polly’s body.

Polly’s story led to panic. American media covered every twist in the investigation of the “slumber party that became a nightmare”. Commentators argued the “age of innocence had been lost” and that “the 12-year-old’s awful fate drove home the disturbing message that youngsters are not safe even in their own bedrooms”.

By 1994, voters in California had approved the Three Strikes and You’re Out law, which, inspired by the extensive criminal record of Polly’s killer, established life sentences for all felonies if the defendant had two prior convictions for serious or violent offenses.

Versions of the law, which also doubled the sentence length for second strikes, were adopted in 23 other states. In September 1994, Congress passed the notorious federal crime bill, sponsored by then senator Joe Biden, which included a three strikes sentencing provision.

In California, Three Strikes contributed to an explosion in the state’s prison population. More than 7,500 people were sentenced to life in prison within the first decade after it passed, nearly half of them for non-serious and non-violent offenses.

Annie remembers adults trying to comfort her by talking about locking people up, including an officer who held her hand to the wall of the building where the man who killed Polly was incarcerated: “He said, ‘Look how thick these walls are. Don’t you feel safe?’”

Marc Klaas, Polly’s father (but not Jess and Annie’s), had advocated for three strikes laws. But as the sisters grew older, they became increasingly uncomfortable with the California legislation and their connection to it.

“Since I was 13, I knew it was wrong, and it was stressful to see newspapers on the table for many years, and I kind of stopped looking,” recalled Jess, now 41, on a recent morning in Annie’s backyard. With the sensationalized media and celebrity support, she added, “It didn’t feel right getting attention for Polly’s death and being known and validated for that, and I was repulsed by my own internal identity with it.”

In 2019, Jess watched 13th, Ava DuVernay’s documentary on the history of racial inequality in the US, which featured Polly’s story: “When I saw the sequence from slavery to our current mass incarceration crisis, with Polly’s face right there as one of the major reasons incarceration took off in the 90s, I was stunned.”

“A lot of people see this history as something that is separate from themselves, but in our case we have a really deep connection to this crisis,” Annie, now 35, added. “It’s such an injustice that the sum of Polly’s life was turned into this harm for others. The story that was told about Polly was used to pass these incredibly terrible laws, and it always felt like a distortion of the truth.”

Jess cold called the ACLU of California in 2019, telling a receptionist she and Annie wanted to talk about the law passed in their family’s name and see if there was anything they could do to help repeal it.

The sisters felt some initial apprehension about speaking publicly. They had long been intensely private in part out of a desire not to feed the true crime genre obsession with Polly. They were also aware of their privilege as white survivors whose story had received intense attention and were wary of taking up space while the vast majority of victims of violence are people of color whose cases never make headlines.

They also weren’t sure their voices would matter, a doubt Annie partly attributes to the way the criminal legal system operates: “There is this kind of paternalistic dynamic in the justice system, which co-opts victims’ stories and claims to represent them without actually listening to them or asking them what they want. It’s, ‘We’re going to handle this for you and solve this problem. And now we fixed it’. It leaves victims feeling disempowered. And for a while, we felt powerless.”

The ACLU connected the sisters to policy experts at Stanford university, and they began to learn more about Three Strikes: that it was originally proposed as the “street sweeper” law, but was deemed too extreme until Polly’s death; that it had been disproportionately applied to defendants with disabilities and mental illness; that some people have received two strikes for the same incident; that defendants got life sentences for stealing pizza and baby shoes; and that research had repeatedly suggested there was no evidence that Three Strikes reduced crime or deterred violence. Today, 45% of people serving life sentences with three strikes in California are Black, while Black residents make up only 6.5% of the broader population.

In 2020, after the uprisings sparked by George Floyd’s murder, the sisters started meeting with other crime survivors who were disenchanted with America’s criminal justice system.

One of them was Tinisch Hollins, who lost two of her brothers to violence and serves as executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, a survivors’ advocacy group. Hollins grew up in San Francisco and remembered when her mother made her watch news reports about Polly so she would be aware of the potential for abductions.

“The terror that my mother had when she called me to watch the news of Polly Klaas was the same kind of terror that friends and family had when they talked about loved ones who had been arrested and were potentially going away to prison forever. There was this looming possibility that you could become a victim of the system in the same way you could become a victim of crime.”

The sisters came to view Three Strikes as a symptom of systemic problems and started publishing op-eds advocating for an alternative approach to justice.

They also launched A New Legacy, a podcast named after their hopes to chart a different legacy for Polly; they interview people fighting to undo mass incarceration, including people previously imprisoned under Three Strikes.

“There’s an underlying assumption that the thing that victims want is the harshest sentencing for the people who caused harm. And that’s really the only option,” Jess said. “It’s this revengeful ‘eye for an eye’ culture. I’ve come to realize we don’t really have a ‘department of corrections and rehabilitation’. It’s a ‘department of punishment and revenge’.”

Jess and Annie’s advocacy is coming at a pivotal moment. While crime levels remain below the historic highs of the early 1990s, the pandemic has seen devastating spikes in gun violence across the US, and polls have shown that Americans report feeling less safe.

Some police officials, pundits and media crime reporting have placed the blame on reform efforts, including “progressive prosecutors” who have sought to reduce incarceration, the “defund the police” movement and efforts to dismantle cash bail so people aren’t jailed because they can’t pay a fee.

There’s no evidence any of these reforms have caused crime or violence to increase – and there is research suggesting the contrary – but in the lead up to the midterms, Republicans and some Democrats have argued for an increased police presence, expanded punishments and a rollback of reforms.

“Hearing the kind of fear-based rhetoric that is taking over headlines and that politicians are spouting is so familiar with what we grew up with,” Annie said. “It would be so easy to fall back on all these failed solutions just because there were rising crime rates during a pandemic when people didn’t have safe places to go, school programs were shut down, and people lost their jobs and homes. These pro-incarceration agendas tend to exploit people’s fears and make people imagine really terrible things. But arguably the worst thing that could ever happen to a family happened to us. And if we can imagine a better future then I think that’s something everyone can imagine.”

They’re not alone among survivors. The children of a murdered pastor in Tennessee recently opposed prosecutors’ decision to charge the 15-year-old suspects as adults, saying it’s not what her mother, an activist, would have wanted; the woman who helped create the sex offender registry after her son was abducted has since argued it has gone too far and is ineffective; and some murder victims’ relatives have argued against the death penalty and in favor of the defendants’ release after years behind bars.

Jess and Annie have been talking to survivors about what they actually need and want; their family had access to financial support, but they’ve met many survivors of color who were denied victim compensation from the state, including victims of police killings, who aren’t considered eligible. Many survivors fall into financial crises amid grief and the aftermath of violence and need time off or relocation help.

Survivors also want prevention. The sisters said they would like to see the US reallocate a significant portion of the estimated $180bn that the country spends on police and prisons each year toward community resources, including violence intervention, mental health care, restorative justice and services for survivors, such as faith-based programs or trauma therapy: “Unaddressed trauma is one of the major root causes of crime and violence in this society, and it absolutely supports public safety to provide these services to survivors,” Annie said.

Annie said she has also heard stories of survivors finding peace in forgiving the people who hurt them. But she is not one of them: “It’s easier for me to feel hatred than compassion for the person who killed Polly. At the same time, I know that before there was a man who did unfathomable harm to our family, there was a boy who was hurt and abused and neglected and abandoned by the social structures that were supposed to help him. And I would rather have a system that would help and protect that child from becoming someone capable of murdering a little girl than one that only seeks to punish him after taking our sister’s life.”

Speaking out has provided some catharsis for the sisters after years of struggling to process their trauma.

“I was in hiding for so long,” Jess said. “And it has been incredibly healing to come into this work and share our story and advocate for something that matters rather than hiding from shame of the aftermath of Polly’s kidnapping. For us there’s a full-circle healing coming out. It’s wonderful to be in service.”

They also hope people think more critically about the impact of true crime and media sensationalism: “There is healing in reclaiming agency over our story, because for the longest time it felt like it wasn’t ours,” Annie said.

But as Polly’s name continues to be invoked, in podcasts, videos or by politicians and advocates, there’s one part of their story the sisters are keeping to themselves: their memories of Polly. It’s all they have left of her.