Myths and Realities: Prosecutors and Criminal Justice Reform
brennancenter.org
brennancenter.org
A fairly obvious example, imo - if police know their local prosecutor wont prosecute certain crimes (theft, property damage, drunk and disorderly), police tend to stop trying to arrest people for those crimes, and the overall rate for those crimes will go down (in the data at least). The victims on the other hand, tend to get little comfort from the nice looking excel charts.
Ive lived in enough west coast cities over the last decade to have a pretty solid understanding of how this particular game gets played, but I'd love to be proven wrong; Lets just see all the data eh?
This is why you have to use something like victimization surveys, which appears to be what their data source has done.
The criminal justice system has taken some reasonable reforms in the last decade (e.g. Illinois' removal of cash bail), but all of these reforms have come from outside pressure groups, not an internal moment of realization.
There is no incentive for prosecutors to improve. A 2003 report by the Center for Public Integrity examined over 11,400 allegations of prosecutorial misconduct between 1970 and 2003, leading to dismissals in 2,012 cases. Despite this, only 44 prosecutors faced disciplinary action, with seven cases dismissed, and none were disbarred. Only one prosecutor in US history that I'm aware of has ever been criminally convicted for misconduct. The attorney disciplinary board in Illinois informed me they will no longer even accept complaints of misconduct against prosecutors, only defense attorneys.
King County (containing Seattle) would like a word with you. Our local non-prosecutor managed to get our crime going up and up, even while the national crime rates are going down.
We are lucky that they are so, because progressive reformers in the prosecutor's office have unleashed unparalleled destruction. See, for example, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco or Pamela Price in Oakland.
See, for example, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco or Pamela Price in Oakland.
Let's not forget either that SFPD staged a soft strike until Boudin was recalled — for instance the cops that stood by and watched as a marijuana dispensary was robbed in 2021. It's more than a bit disingenuous to suggest that the police aren't responsible for their own inaction. OPD's tried similar behavior, but they've been under federal receivership for a few decades now so that's expected.
Boudin's successor, Brooke Jenkins, famously had her initial transition meetings run by Breed's staffers. That's pretty much the opposite of stamping out corruption.
Folks got up in arms over Boudin trying to get his father out of jail but largely remained mum on Breed twisting arms (including Jenkins') to get her brother out of jail. Price got pilloried for only pursuing a maximum sentence of a hundred odd years in a murder trial.
There's a lot of selective outrage, and yeah it's frustrating (but not surprising on HN).
I think these kinds of posters are probably new to the city and young, but also probably don't engage with culture much, and seem to spend a lot of time on social media.
I was well along in age before becoming aware that prosecutors have a far greater impact on our justice system than courts and juries, via plea deals, adding or dropping various charges, letting statutes of limitations run, and so on.
I know some people may not agree, but an oft-overlooked component of crime and law enforcement is culture. American crime, at least in part, is what it is today from our country's own defiant and ignorant understanding of what freedom is. "You can't tell me what to do with a gun." "You can't tell me to get out of my own car." Combine it with an unhealthy dose of American exceptionalism and social circumstances that contribute to crime and we get stupid like sovereign citizens, election denialism, and hilarious black-or-white efforts to villify law enforcement. Our country breeds criminals and idiocy in the classroom almost as much as bad parenting because we're told over and over that this is the best and most free place in the world and children in africa are starving. It's in our collective psychology. So every social pain is both a source of cognitive dissonance and King George III back from the dead to tax our freedoms. This is evident to me in the way the law in other countries is both written and enforced. Japan's violence is a far cry from ours. Canada isn't some paragon of legislation, yet their crime rates are very low. Interestingly enough, Canada's indigenous people make up a disproportionately HUGE amount of their incarcerated, but no one cares. But American cops were just born bad and are taught only to shoot the black people. As if law enforcement doesn't come out of the exact same pool of people who become office workers who screw around when they probably should be working, teachers who diddle their students, and negligent engineers who cheated their way through school. School shootings in America exist because they're a cultural touchstone for malignant attention and perverse notoriety, yet the issue is reduced to being either mental illness or guns. The fact that nobody can touch our guns is a symptom of the death caused, not the source of the issue.
Prosecutor's are little more than a reflection of the cultural expectations and demands of a given area. Articles like this are therefore both laughably myopic in their conclusions and a little dangerous in the way they perpetuate this tug of war we seem to be in. That said, I'm glad there are efforts from new prosecutors to reduce both disparity in treatment of people and legitimate efforts to eliminate waste and unneeded suffering in reducing crime. But the solution isn't a decision not to prosecute ABORTION, for which there are probably like 10 cases a year for. We'll never come up with consistent cause and effect relationships with this kind of whack a mole policy making. America needs to start thinking differently, starting with an admission that where there are people there will be criminals and understanding those criminals is more important than any other effort to reduce injustice for anyone.
Black people have lower chances to be shot during a police interaction than White people.
Arests: White - 5,335,610 Black - 1,992,510
Deaths due to police shootings (2018): White - 626 Black - 228
Or 1 in 8523 arrests for the Whites versus 1 in 8723 arrests for the Blacks.
Sad truth.
Until governments wall off large sections of their land to form "free zones" similar to nature preserves, so that temporary or permanent expatriations become viable options in lieu of man cages or executions, this is not an actual justice system but a war-machine. The War on Crime has been the most abused and bastardized excuse for expanded state-gang power, feeding on peoples fears of a little bad guy so they need big bad guy to protect them (for a small tax, or you get the cage... no third choice other than be killed in a shooting fight). Criminal justice should not be about revenge but instead safety and rehabilitation. Caging a human animal involuntarily instead of merely excluding it from the rest is still barbaric. When someone going in for decades says he'd rather be dumped at the international border for equally long (or permanent) expatriation, you and taxpayers should be excitedly jumping with joy that $50,000/yr is going to be saved. If you feel bad because he did a no-no against you and now he's in Mexico sipping malgaritas? Grow up, or get a gun to go down there and fix it yourself! Quit giving power to religious institutions (the State is a religious institution, or homomorphic to it).
The impulse to "Take nice things away" from someone to make them miserable for something which I am sure they never agreed to in the first place needs to be stricken and actively prosecuted as prisoner abuse. A non-abusive SHU would have the victi... err prisoner, move his belongings which can keep him occupied into that solo cell. When a prisoner refuses to work, you do not take away his private entertainment devices from his room. That is abusive behavior, if he had the choice he would run away from you or shoot you for assaulting him in taking his TV and locking him in a SHU with nothing but his cloths for weeks.
I swear on the fabric of the universe itself that, if I end up on a jury trial for someone accused of assaulting law enforcement, I will most likely jury nullify unless it was literally a patrol man saying hi and instantly getting punched, or something. We don't have the institutional power to put you in cages similar to the ones you use, so we have to hack the system other ways and since a juror does not need to justify himself in being unconvinced a single juror can stop your human mulcher dead.
Finally, go lock yourself up for a few months, tell me how anyone slighly brain-broken is going to be helped by that (let alone recover for many).
All these games we play, are to attempt to supercede natural law: you attempt to predate me, I attempt to kill you in self defense. I don't mean legal defense, according to Criminal Code X.YZ, but natural defense like the gazelle getting lucky impailing the lioness. This only works so long as people in general have something to lose at the end of your gun, give some a 6-mo terminal diagnosis or the possibility of life in a cage if caught and they may opt to naturally defend themselves (and like the French I agree with this sentiment, and reserve jury nullification for it).
> There is no clear relationship between pro-reform prosecutors and increased crime.
[edit] the apparent appeal of these is that they tend to push a “you’re already doing great by Doing Capitalism, and the best thing you can do is keep doing what you were inclined to do anyway, which was more of that, because other solutions don’t work” message to their readers, which has obvious conscience-assuaging appeal and utility as PR/cover for future actions for the rich & powerful. These books happen to also surprisingly-often launder other right wing stuff like bigotry or anti-criminal-justice-reform positions alongside the straightforward flattery.
No one's saving a felony docket by eliminating the need to prosecute niche crimes like aviation fraud or abortion or unlawful dog breeding.
No one can undisputedly connect bail reform with an increase or a decrease in crime or pre-trial recidivism.
No one can glean statistics from major cities only, conclude they are not harmful, and then imply reform must not be harmful for rural areas. There are usually more prosecutors elected in rural areas than populated ones.
Crime is tightly situational, geographically tied, culturally bound. Policies therefore must also be situational, geographically tied, and culturally bound. Some things might be universally bad. Those should be excised everywhere. But things that are not universally good should not be endorsed universally. I got the impression here that the writer wants some reforms to be endorsed universally.