If you can’t make radical change in San Francisco, what future does the progressive prosecutor movement have?It’s long been a truism that attitudes about crime and punishment are cyclical, characterized by pendulum swings of leniency followed by a desire to crack down and lock up everybody indefinitely. Public sentiment mostly depends on whether crime seems to be rising or falling.rather than how safe they actually are; they’re driven not by facts but by emotion, fear and grisly anecdotes.
So I’m all for more hard information about what’s happening, what works and what doesn’t. Boudin notes that legislatures have a tendency to pass laws but not to look back a year or two later to analyze their outcomes. Or they set up pilot programs and then, bizarrely, don’t study the results.L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón promised to hold police accountable. While he has aggressively pursued police misconduct, questions loom.
Boudin is a well-known advocate of progressive criminal justice reform policies. I asked him whether his data analysis would be designed simply to confirm his preconceived notions. He bristled. For my part, I support criminal justice reform, but I’m not an ideologue. I believe we incarcerate too many people who actually need treatment. We make it far too difficult for ex-offenders to reenter society. There are glaring inequities, racial and otherwise, in the bail system and the sentencing process. We’re too tolerant of inhumane treatment and excessive force.