Friday saw a host of the country’s most influential scholars on crime and criminal justice descend on Berkeley law school to take part in ‘Justice Unveiled’ – a day-long conference the keynote event of which was a debate among five district attorneys from across California on ‘the role of the elected prosecutor.’
The two-hour debate underscored the profound differences between ‘progressive’ and ‘traditionalist’ prosecutors’ conception of the role.
There follows an edited and abbreviated extract of the discussion between Alameda County district attorney Pamela Price, Contra Costa County district attorney Diana Becton, San Diego County district attorney Summer Stephan, Sacramento County district attorney Thien Ho and Riverside County district attorney Michael Hestrin. They were joined by Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow, and Rogue Prosecutors author, Charles Stimson.
“My goals for my time in office were, first, to enhance and improve safety for everybody in my jurisdiction and, second, to improve the public’s trust in the legal system.”
Ex-San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin
Setting the scene for the panel, event co-host and executive director of Berkeley’s Criminal Law and Justice Center Chesa Boudin outlined how he took on the job of San Francisco district attorney in his two-and-a-half year tenure.
“My goals for my time in office were, first, to enhance and improve safety for everybody in my jurisdiction, and second, to improve the public’s trust in the legal system,” said Boudin.
“I went about that in three primary ways: first, I sought to decrease reliance on incarceration – I think a primary response to social problems. Second, I sought to invest savings from decarceration in providing services to victims of all crimes, not just violent crimes, not just crimes in which police make arrests, not just crimes in which victims cooperate with prosecution.
“And third, and perhaps most controversially, I sought to enforce laws even against those in power, whether they be police officers wearing uniforms, corporations engaging in wage theft, manufacturers of guns – not only people carrying them on the streets.
“Those were the things I tried to do every day in office and, in the process, I made some very powerful enemies.
“I’m thankful that I found a home here at Berkeley Law School where I engage in deeper thinking and longer term work than public office allows in this moment in American political history.”
“[O]ur county re-sentencing pilot program…gives us an opportunity to review old sentences that are no longer in the interests of justice and determine whether we should make a referral to a judge to reduce those sentences. We have reduced sentences by over 509 years for individuals in our county.”
Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton
“Many of you probably know I served as a judge for 22 years in Contra Costa County,” said district attorney Diana Becton, “and that has helped and shaped and informed my work as a district attorney.”
Becton was appointed by the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors to serve as district attorney in 2017 following the resignation of Mark Peterson amidst a campaign expenditure scandal. She won election in 2018 and 2022, with her campaign benefiting from substantial support from billionaire George Soros.
“I have centered on transforming our office, ensuring that we focus on public safety, but also a focus on equity, a focus on fairness, and a focus on transparency.
“One of the first things we did was to secure a million dollar grant so that we could provide alternatives for our youth using a restorative justice lens. And so, instead of cycling our youth into the criminal justice system, we’re able to create an opportunity where they get an assessment and their needs are met as they’re held accountable – so that they have an opportunity to lead productive lives.
“We’ve also announced that all of our sexual assault test kits, our backlogs, are all up to date. We’ve created a hate crimes committee so that we can combat the rising incidents of hate crime in our county, established a human trafficking unit in 2018, so that we have an opportunity to combat modern day slavery and those who exploit people for either labor or sex. We worked with Code for America back in 2019 to dismiss old marijuana convictions that keep people from getting housing and jobs.
“We launched our neighborhood restorative partnership, which again uses a restorative justice lens, but in this instance for adults. We received a million dollars so that we could fund our county re-sentencing pilot program. This gives us an opportunity to review old sentences that are no longer in the interest of justice and determine whether we should make a referral to a judge to reduce those sentences. We have reduced sentences by over 509 years for individuals in our county.
“We’re continuing to work very hard to diversify our office. And I know that we have a lot of work to do, but I think, and I would also say just because there was a question about what our challenges have been as well, I would say, in today’s climate, some of our biggest challenges would be the proliferation of guns in our community, the funding that we need to also put in place, the programs that we’d like to put in place, and of course, the increase in organized retail theft.”
“How did we arrive at a time when the only thing that we talk about are the rights of the accused? What about the rights of the victims? They’re in our constitution. Section 28. Read it.”
San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan
“If you don’t have the rule of law that is applied equitably, equally, fairly to every human being, rich or poor, whatever color they are, you have absolutely nothing,” San Diego district attorney Summer Stephan told the audience.
Previously a deputy district attorney for 28 years, Stephan defeated her Soros-backed opponent – a public defender – in 2018.
“You can’t feel safe without safety. Absolutely nothing thrives. And if we don’t agree on anything else, I hope you read the Locust Effect books that were written about every country and analyzing what is the difference, why do certain neighborhoods thrive? Why do certain neighborhoods not thrive? And at the very center of it is safety.”
“Every problem we have…we apply a three part lens to it: we call it the three Ps. The ethical prosecution: holding people accountable at the right level, understanding what they did, the harm, and applying the right level of accountability to it. Prevention of that harm: learning lessons and seeing if we can go back, we can build a family justice center that extracts kids and babies from domestic violence and child-abusive homes so that they don’t have to become perpetrators or victims. And then protection: protection of victims of crime, respecting their pain, giving them dignity.
“How did we arrive at a time when the only thing that we talk about are the rights of the accused? What about the rights of the victims? They’re in our constitution. Section 28. Read it. There are rights that victims have and there are also the right of the community to be safe. Why can we not do all three things with excellence or at least try? And that’s what we try to do every day.
“I was elected to represent this community to serve as the district attorney of Alameda County because our community was desperate for police accountability, because we were desperate for ethical prosecution, because we understood that our criminal justice system as it is applied and implemented in our community was broken.”
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price
“For thirty years, I have represented victims in their worst moments and spent decades representing families, children and parents who have lost loved ones,” said Pamela Price – who won election as Alameda County district attorney in 2022.
“I can tell you that as a woman, a black woman in America, I’m an unapologetically black female, and I don’t have to ask people how this criminal justice system affects my people because I’ve lived it. I was elected to represent this community to serve as the district attorney of Alameda County because our community was desperate for police accountability because we were desperate for ethical prosecution because we understood that our criminal justice system as it is applied and implemented in our community was broken.”
“We represent the people of the state of California criminal, civil, and juvenile matters. We bring civil actions in involving consumers, workers, real estate and environmental matters. We are the stewards for the Racial Justice Act under California law….We have victim witness advocates who represent and help us with victims in all sorts of crimes. They provide trauma-informed care and support to every victim as we are able to in our system and help assist them with claims for compensation. We administer re-sentencing and re-entry support programs under California Law for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated residents.
“I’m the first non-anointed, non-appointed district attorney in this county. In over a hundred years, the people of our county have not had the privilege of electing a district attorney. In some places that may not matter, but in Alameda County, it matters to us.
“I have lived through the crime trends up and down. My car was stolen, my car has been stripped, my business was broken into – burglarized while I was inside the place. So I am truly someone who has experienced all different sorts of things in Alameda County, in Oakland. I live in East Oakland. It is a place that I love. It is a community that I love and those who hold us up as the worst place in the country don’t know our community.
“How many of you have heard that Alameda County District Attorney doesn’t charge or prosecute serious criminals? We have seven charging locations where we charge and prosecute serious criminals every day. That comes with the territory. Holding people accountable is part of the job, and we don’t have a problem with that.
“What we have also done is serve more than 22,000 victims in our first year. We have increased the number of victim witness advocates by 35% and diversified that service…We’ve hired people who are relevant to the community that we serve, including more API people, more African American.
“We’ve hired our first mom, indigenous advocates, and our first transgender advocate, and we reduce the period of time the victims have to wait for services, whether it’s through financial compensation or referrals to mental health services, that is the office that I lead.
“One of the questions I was asked was, what’s the challenge of becoming the new district attorney at a time when the homicides in Oakland have spiraled out of control? Part of that challenge has been the challenges of the Oakland Police Department. Two weeks after I walked into the office, the mayor and the police chief had a disagreement, and we have been without a police chief for more than a year.
“We have held tobacco companies accountable in historic settlements. The first ever ban on that applies to online, online and retail sales. We have held food supplement people who cheat people and deceived them. We’ve held them accountable. We’ve prosecuted that. We locked a robust notification program for real estate fraud, which often targets our seniors.
“We got a judgment against Tesla for hazardous waste disposal because that’s polluting all of our community. In just yesterday, I announced that we got a judgment or felony guilty plea against a corrupt city manager.
“And we have taken on responsibility of holding our sheriff accountable and addressing the number, high number of suicides and the lack of medical treatment in that facility.”
“We are the voice for the voiceless, the conscious of the community, the protector of the public.”
Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho
“I was born in Vietnam, and when I was a young child, my parents and I escaped Vietnam on a fishing boat,” said Sacramento County district attorney Thien Ho – who was elected in 2022 after two decades as a prosecutor.
“After the fall of Saigon, I spent six months in a refugee camp. When my family and I came to this country, we had nothing but the clothes in our back. I didn’t even understand a single word of English. I went out to speak English by watching Bugs Bunny cartoons.”
Of the role of the prosecutor, Thien explained that: “We are the voice for the voiceless, the conscious of the community, the protector of the public.”
Ho addressed the sometimes unglamorous reputation of prosecutorial work among the next generation of lawyers and law students.
“The last time I was at Berkeley,” he said, “I was talking to a student [at a recruiting event] and asked that student these questions: who will stand up for the child that was molested? A prosecutor. Who will stand up for the undocumented mother who was beaten by her husband? A prosecutor. Who will stand up for the elderly Asian man that was shoved down as a victim of a hate crime? A prosecutor. And who will hold the hand of a grieving mother whose son was shot in a drive-by shooting and shepherd her through the valley of darkness? A prosecutor.
“I want to also make sure that we have intervention and prevention with our juveniles who are arrested for gun violence. But I’ve also been very clear that there is also accountability. If you commit sexual violence, gun violence, domestic violence, you will be held accountable. And it’s in that constant balance between the two that we make sure that we meet the core mandate of public safety and also the fair administration of justice.”
“I believe that the need for justice is not socially constructed. I think it’s deep seated in this human condition. It transcends race, it transcends nationality. It transcends culture.”
Riverside County District Attorney Michael Hestrin
Michael Hestrin has been a prosecutor in Riverside County for nearly three decades, the last decade of which he has spent as elected district attorney.
“On a day-to-day basis…I believe the job of the district attorney is to seek justice in each and every individual case,” said Hestrin. “And so there is a limit to the aggregation of crime statistics and how much that will inform what I would say and how I would choose to seek justice in individual cases. It’s a cold comfort to say to someone, ‘I’d like to see justice in your case, but the data just doesn’t support it’ – and I’m not going to do that.”
“I believe that the need for justice is not socially constructed. I think it’s deep seated in this human condition. It transcends race, it transcends nationality. It transcends culture. We all have a sense when we’ve been wronged, when our loved ones have been wronged, even a minor wrong…we all have a sense that that’s not right.
“And it’s an injustice. And we expect, I think reasonably, for the government to do something about that. It gets dangerous if we ever get to a point where we lose that expectation because what follows then is vigilantism, and that’s worse. So the government has to step in and seek justice. And I see that as my primary role.
“My secondary role is to keep the public as safe as I can. Obviously, I don’t have control over everything. Crime happens. And as stated earlier today, there’s a lot of factors that go into crime and why it spikes and why it goes up and why it drops. But I’ll tell you this, I do believe that policies matter to people that are inclined to break the law. They look at the policies and they make decisions – not always rational, but it has the aggregate effects on crime rates and on what people do.”
Hestrin noted that the one-two punch 2011’s AB109 – the Realignment Act – and the passage of Proposition 47 in 2014 had profound implications for public safety in his county.
“In my county, after AB109 – realignment – we could no longer send a really large bulk of felony offenders to state prison. They were ‘realigned’ in to our local jail, and our jail was completely full a week after AB109 was passed.”
“And so our Sheriff has to release offenders to keep the jail population [down]. He does that every day and makes decisions on who are the least dangerous.
“And then Prop 47 gets passed on top of that.
“I’m going to give you an example of, say, car theft. Car theft in California is a felony punishable under 1170(h) by incarceration in the local jail. So someone gets arrested, they come into the system, and my prosecutors prosecute. And let’s say that, through plea bargain or through trial, that offender, either by the judge or again by plea bargain it is deemed that, hey, justice in this case is one year incarceration, 365 days, maybe more if they have priors.
“In Riverside County, that individual will do about seven days of that sentence. And then that person will be released. And there’s no probation, there’s no follow up, there’s nothing. They’re released and there’s nothing that we can do.
“And so what’s happened in the last 10 years is that car thefts have gone through the roof in my county, and I don’t look at it as a statistical anomaly or something that I could just explain away because we’re talking about real people, a single mom trying to get her son to school, she lost her car. Those are real world consequences of these laws and these policies. So I care a lot about them, and I want the tools as a prosecutor to keep my community safe and also to protect people’s trust.
“I think one of the things that I’ve always wanted to emphasize, as well as having safe communities, is to make sure that we are emphasizing the effect of mass incarceration on communities of color and how that has really affected and decimated our communities of colors in this country.”
Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton
“So I think one of the things that we heard that was quite consistent with our speaker is that all of us are interested in community safety,” said Becton as the opening remarks concluded.
“I think one of the things that I’ve always wanted to emphasize, as well as having safe communities, is to make sure that we are emphasizing the effect of mass incarceration on communities of color and how that has really affected and decimated our communities of colors in this country.
“And so, for me, when I’m thinking about the criminal justice system, and I’m thinking about what safety looks like for every community in our county, I believe that we have to take into account the policies of the past that may have contributed to the mass incarceration and make sure that it’s part of our community safety plan – that we’re also trying to address those issues so that we don’t continue to perpetuate those same policies going forward.”
“Every prosecutor we elect values public safety,” replied Thien Ho, “But we approach at it with different lens.”
“We looked at the statistics and in the City of Sacramento, the police department, for example, 85% of their reports derived from calls for service. Somebody calls 911, the police arrive, and at that point the criminal justice system begins to get engaged.
“And when we looked at overall the percentages of where those calls for service are coming from, when we’re talking about minority communities, underserved, underrepresented in all those areas, what is the difference between that versus a community that is not a minority or community of color? I tell you the difference is, at least in Sacramento is 500% increase, not a hundred, not two, not 400 – 500%. So when we talk about public safety and everything that comes from it, let’s not forget who it affects both sides of the aisle.”
“Riverside County is not San Francisco, it’s not Alameda…and the residents deserve to elect a prosecutor that is going to reflect their values and their priorities, and I believe they have.”
Riverside County District Attorney Michael Hestrin
Michael Hestrin commiserated, at least to an extent, with the position other district attorneys found themselves in.
“D.A Price, has obviously been caricatured by political opponents and she had to make the point that ‘we do prosecute cases’, which I can empathize with because, down in Riverside County, sometimes my political opponents try to caricature me as wanting to throw everyone in prison and throw away the key, which is not true,” he said.
“We have robust collaborative courts. I believe in diversion. I think that criminal justice system can be used innovatively and effectively to make sure people get treatment: we have homeless collaborative courts, we have domestic violence, we have drug courts, we have veterans court, all kinds of things.
“Where we disagree is maybe on some of the policies or on the extent of the policies. But I’ll say this, I’ve been reelected three times. My constituents support my policies and we have local control in terms of the criminal justice system. That’s how it should be.
“Every jurisdiction’s a little different. Riverside County is not San Francisco, it’s not Alameda, it’s Riverside County. And the residents deserve to elect a prosecutor that’s going to reflect their values and their priorities, and I believe they have. So I don’t throw stones at other jurisdictions because they elected their prosecutor. They have every right to do that, and that’s the strength of our system. It’s not a weakness.
“You can’t stop holding people accountable because there’s been injustices in the past. There have been injustices, but it doesn’t mean that we then forgo the injustice to the current victim that must be addressed while repairing, while working towards improving systems and improving justice.”
San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan
“I think there’s a lot of agreement,” said Summer Stephan. “I think the one distinction that I believe some offices believe that swimming upstream – which we need to do in order to look at the root causes and try to solve the problems to make sure that kids that are growing up with trauma…that are being recruited for gangs, that they have opportunities – that you have to do that also while addressing the crime that’s happening right now. So I think we may have different emphasis on whether you do both or you do one more than the other. And I think they both go together.
“You can’t stop holding people accountable because there’s been injustices in the past. There have been injustices, but it doesn’t mean that we then forgo the injustice to the current victim that must be addressed while repairing, while working towards improving systems and improving justice.
“And I think one other thing that maybe not quite on the question, but something that’s been really important to me and that’s really hard to do when you’re elected, it’s really, really easy to only listen to the loud voices and believe that this is what the community wants. It’s very easy to listen to the people who are, what they call themselves advocates, and I respect advocates, but they spend their whole life advocating. So I listen to those people, but I also listen to the people that if you didn’t actually go to them, they’re not going to tell you anything. They’re too busy trying to put food on the table, protect their kids, pick them up from school, make sure that everybody’s provided for it. They’re not going to tell you how they feel about criminal justice.”
“The only people who were in the conversation was law enforcement,” reflected district attorney Pamela Price on how public safety was conceptualized in the past.
“And we conceded that as Americans, we let law enforcement tell us what public safety was and then it changed. And a lot of different voices are now in the conversation. And so no…there is no one way for us to serve our community or to have public safety or to get there.
“We need to have these conversations as painful and difficult as they are. We need to recognize that no one person has a solution. And certainly for us as prosecutors, we have to deploy all methods to try to serve our communities.
“I believe that my community has the right to elect a prosecutor. And I agree that every community should have that right. That puts us sometimes in the unenviable position of being the manager as well as the politician because we’re elected, which means we become – certainly from Chesa’s experience and my experience – we have become the punching bag for those who want to have a political conversation about what justice looks like. And that’s unfortunate. It’s a disservice to our communities when the focus becomes focusing on those of us who have a different lens. And there was no conversation about how or unethical prosecution was in Alameda County for the last hundred years. That’s not fair.”
Hestrin weighed in on his approach to fentanyl dealing in his jurisdiction.
“We have hundreds of families that are losing loved ones because of fentanyl. And, as I began to look into this, I came to believe that ‘overdose’ no longer described what was happening. I think it’s more akin to a poisoning.
“Fentanyl is so lethal that it has its existence and its proliferation on the streets has changed everything about the drug trade.
“I’ve had families in my office asking me: ‘we know the person that gave this poison to my daughter, she died, we can prove that he knew that it was poison…why isn’t that murder?’
“And that set off a chain reaction and I came to believe that it could in certain instances be murder. So my office has filed 34 second degree murder cases in the last two and a half years. And obviously we don’t file it in every case, but I think it is appropriate if somebody knows how dangerous this drug is and they choose to continue to pedal that poison and somebody dies, that’s a second degree murder – the same way that DUI is second degree murder and that’s done all over the state.”
“Alameda is a progressive community, so we recognize that there is no one, the police are not the answer for our public safety. They are not the only actor and the only way that we’re going to have public safety, we understand that we have to deal with our mental health crisis, which we do.”
Alameda Country District Attorney Pamela Price
Chesa Boudin invited District Attorney Price to talk specifically about the challenges she is facing in Alameda County. This is against the backdrop of opponents suggesting they have secured sufficient signatures to force a recall election.
“I watched shootings and violent crime – and homicides in particular skyrocketed, nearly doubled – in Oakland and other parts of Alameda County during the pandemic,“ said Boudin. “One of the things that just struck me is the challenge of stepping into office in the midst of a surge that predates you and for which many are seeking to hold you accountable. And never ever in the press, about homicides in Oakland in 2020 or 2021 was the D.A.’s name mentioned. Talk a little bit about those challenges and how you tried to respond.
“You are completely accurate,” replied Price. “Before I was elected, my predecessor was not held accountable for every bipping, every retail theft, every anything. I mean, there was a lot going on – that we experienced in the pandemic and even before the pandemic – there were things that were disturbing in our community that were happening.”
“And yet, unfortunately, as long as I’ve lived here, we have had pretty much a media desert where there’s been very little coverage of what’s actually happening here.
“Our mainstream corporate media is based in San Jose or San Francisco. And so it was only after my election that suddenly everyone became this lens got shining this light on Alameda County and, yes, suddenly I’m responsible for things that started many moons before I got there. The challenge is talking to my community, reminding them what the district attorney’s role is because, you were at the heart of a movement or an effort in San Francisco that shined a light on for your community and the nation about the district attorney. It wasn’t necessarily accurate, but at least there was a conversation.
“We never had a conversation in Alameda County about what the district attorney does or does not do. And so as a result, our community was vulnerable in some unknown ways about characterizing what the district attorney was or was not doing. We have had the opportunity now after a year in office to begin to educate people about what the DA’s role is and actually what I am doing as the first elected district attorney in a hundred years.
“Hopefully we’re going to turn the corner in terms of some of the crime trends that we have seen and as well as our law enforcement’s capacity to address it that Summer points out. We can’t do anything until the police actually go and solve the crime.
“in Oakland that the solve rate for homicides in Oakland is extremely low. As a resident of this community, I can tell you, if we call 911, you don’t know what you’re going to get. That makes a difference. That has nothing to do with the work that is happening in my office. But D.A. Stephan is right. I don’t point fingers at any of my law enforcement colleagues. I meet with them monthly as well. We are all trying to find ways to create public safety and to serve our community. Alameda is a progressive community, so we recognize that there is no one – the police are not the answer for our public safety. They are not the only actor and the only way that we’re going to have public safety, we understand that we have to deal with our mental health crisis, which we do.
“Our county is one of the highest rates of mental health crisis inside the jail and inside our medical system. And until we address that, it’s going to have an impact on the quality of life for all of us. The same in Alameda County. The rent is too damn high and that’s because people can’t afford to live here, but they are from here and they are not leaving here. So if they’re living on the street and they don’t have a place to go to the bathroom or a place to take a shower, you can expect you’re going to see them in a Walgreens or in a CVS…You’re going to see them walking the streets at night and riding the bus and the bar because they don’t have a place to go. And until we address that, we’re going to continue to see a cycle of harm and hurt across this community.”
“There is nothing progressive about the progressive prosecutor movement – at least not if you define the word progressive in the traditional sense as ‘changing things for the better’ or ‘improving the system’.” – Charles Stimson
Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow Charles Stimson
“There is nothing progressive about the progressive prosecutor movement,” said the Heritage Foundation’s Senior Legal Fellow Charles Stimson, “at least not if you define the word progressive in the traditional sense as ‘changing things for the better’ or ‘improving the system’.”
“Rather its policies enable and improve the lives of defendants at the expense of victims.”
Stimson – the co-author of the book Rogue Prosecutors – outlined the issues as he saw it and put his questions to the panel.
“I think we all agree with the goal of providing people the services they need and hoping that they become productive members of society.
“Longer prison sentences actually lower recidivism rates. Don’t take my word for it: the U.S. Sentencing Commission has seven separate studies that have shown just that. Don’t tell that to the York Times – they had a famous headline in the mid-nineties that said ‘crime keeps falling, but prisons keep on filling’. No kidding!
“The intellectual heritage of this movement – and I wish Larry Krasner and George Gascon would’ve joined us because I think they are really at the forefront of this movement – is animated by two primary beliefs. First that the entire criminal justice system is systemically racist. And second, the way to fix that is, to quote NYU law professor Rachel Barkow, ‘reverse engineer and dismantle the criminal justice infrastructure’ and the most cost effective way to do that, to quote Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine, is to ‘change who occupies the prosecutor’s office and choose prosecutors who will open the locks of prisons’.
“The ingenious nature of this movement is that the D.A’s – the gatekeepers of the criminal justice system – that she and she alone decides who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t. These [races] are low visibility, low dollar affairs so, politically speaking, spending a little bit of money can go a long way. The movement is inspired and animated by prison abolitionists Angela Davis and her followers. Remember she wrote this book – Are Prisons Obsolete? – and she starts off ‘imagine a world without prisons’. So that’s a nice thought in theory, but that’s not the way the world works
“Today there are about 70 progressive prosecutors around the country representing about 60% of the nation’s population. And as you can see from these distinguished D.A.’s here, every D.A. has his or her own way of running their office. But the primary through line in these progressive prosecutors are things like: refusing to prosecute most misdemeanors, refusing to charge resisting arrests, watering down felonies, refusing to add enhancements or allegations that would support those enhancements to charge sheets, refusing to prosecute violent juveniles as adults, directing line prosecutors not to charge a defendant with crimes that would have an adverse effect on immigration status, prohibiting line prosecutors from filing three strikes, not allowing prosecutors to attend parole hearings. Almost all of those policies inure to the benefit of the defendant at the expense of victims.
“As Professor Kate Stith has explained, the logic of criminal law is to punish offenders to deter and capacitate them from harming others. However attractive this approach may be in academia, absolving offenders from responsibility for drug trafficking, violent crime and repeated criminality clearly disserves the interests of the vast majority of community residents who do not break the law. The 97% of inner city neighborhood residents who keep their end of the social contract, that is to say don’t commit crimes with the understanding that the government will protect them against those who do are entitled to expect and have every right to demand that the government keeps its end of the social contract of that bargain. So here’s the question, how do you in your role as the DA, uphold your end of the social contract? And I’m so I look forward to hearing your answers.”
“I recall reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and that was the first time that I think those of us who understood how unjust the system had been towards black and brown people saw it in writing. And so I think that I’m always disturbed when through one lens the only people who have are relevant in the conversation continue to be white men.”
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price
“I’ve never heard you or anyone else do an analysis of the last five years of my predecessors administration of justice as we watched crime rates soar in Alameda County. So when you can present that to me, then we can have a conversation. And also understanding you have an opinion, and you have your right to your opinion, but as you acknowledge, 60% of the country has a different opinion because they have elected progressive prosecutors to preside over the administration of justice in this country.
“I dispute that we do not believe as progressives that we are trying to improve the administration justice and how our communities are kept safe. I can tell you my community – for the last 40 years we have not expected government to keep us safe because we lived under the ‘Oakland Riders’. Okay? I can also tell you that the genesis of this movement is not Larry Krassner or George Gascon. I recall reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and that was the first time that I think those of us who understood how unjust the system had been towards black and brown people saw it in writing. And so I think that I’m always disturbed when through one lens the only people who have are relevant in the conversation continue to be white men.”
“But what I do think we should be honest about is that, for example, African-Americans are 13% of the population in this country, but over 50% of the homicide victims. So when I’ve engaged on issues of race in the criminal justice system, you have to remember that.”
Riverside County District Attorney
“I argued strongly against the progressive prosecutor approach for my county,” said Hestrin. “I thought it was the wrong approach and I thought it would weaken public safety and I thought it would lead to people having worse outcomes.”
“And let me just mention – race has come up here and I don’t think we should shy away from race. We have a long history in this country of discrimination and racism. There’s no question about that. We can’t gloss over that.
“But what I do think we should be honest about is that, for example, African-Americans are 13% of the population in this country, but over 50% of the homicide victims. So when I’ve engaged on issues of race in the criminal justice system, you have to remember that. As a prosecutor, when I was handling homicide cases, so many of the victims that I worked with were black families and they wanted justice. The social fabric of their community had been torn to shreds and they didn’t come to this quest for justice primarily because of their race. Obviously their race played a significant role in their life experience, but they wanted justice and they were looking to me and to my office to fight for them.”
“I do want to bring a little bit of a global perspective,” said Ho. “First of all, we have had a long history of racism and discrimination in this country and that has, in many senses, and over the years, filtered way into our justice system, into our government, into everything. However, I will say this: having come from a country in which you don’t have a right to free speech, you don’t have a right to free religion, you don’t have a right to even an attorney to represent you or due process – I’ve told the story before of how my grandmother was executed by the communists, when they came into that part of the region, without a judge, without a jury, without a prosecutor.
“And so our system of justice here is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it is the best system of justice in the world and our system here in this country, at least we have the opportunity to sit here and have vigorous debate.”
Responding to Stimson, Chesa Boudin said: “You made this point at the very beginning about longer sentences leading to safer communities or reductions in crime. And on the one hand, I couldn’t disagree more. On the other hand, you’re stating something that’s so obvious that how could anybody disagree with it? I mean, if everybody in society were in prison forever, we would’ve no crime in the community.
“So of course putting more people in prison for longer on some level reduces certain kinds of crimes. Certainly if we don’t count the crime and the violence that occurs within prisons. On the other hand, we know that people who’ve been in prison for the longest periods of time are the least likely to recidivate and that we keep people in this country in prison way beyond any significant statistical risk to public safety.
“It doesn’t really have to do with safety so much as with the desire for vengeance and retribution and with the history of racism in this country.
“I worry having not read your book that it misrepresents mischaracterizes and misunderstands what the progressive prosecutor movement’s about. The progressive prosecutor movement is not about putting defendants over victims.
“We do not as prosecutors to represent victims of crime. We do not. We represent all of the people in our jurisdictions, including the people we’re prosecuted, including the people they harm, including the police who arrested them, including the Chamber of Congress and the ACLU with everybody else who lives there committed, who represent all of them. And so to pretend that the only people whose voice matters is victims, disregard our constitution and disregard our ethical duty that we swear to the bar of the state of California.
“But more problematic for their theory of what leads to safety is that the highest murder rates in the country and the highest murder rates in the state of California are not in progressive prosecutor jurisdictions. They’re in red states and red counties. And you look at where crime went up the most in 2020 and 2021 and 2022. It’s not places like San Francisco where we presided over a historic decrease in incarceration.
“We closed the jail, we reduced the number of children in cages by 70%. We reduced the number of people in state prison out of our town, but over 25% we didn’t see an increase in violent crime. We saw a decrease. We created a virtuous cycle where less incarceration meant less crime. The places that saw homicide and other violent crime and property crime skyrocket were red jurisdictions and red states, places that seek the death penalty at the drop of a hat.”
“There is a blue city murder problem,” insisted Stimson. “We wrote a long peer reviewed paper called The Blue City Murder Problem. And the top three cities with the top homicide rates in this country – some of which are in Red States – 27 are run by Democrats, two by Republicans and one by an independent.
“And the city with the highest homicide rate is where I was the prosecutor in D.C.”
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