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1. A few words in response to Attorney General Bill Barr’s speech today, lambasting reform prosecutors.
2. I think Barr, other so-called “tough on crime” prosecutors, and the media get some critical things wrong about our prosecutor reform movement and what it stands for.
3. They want to depict us as “soft on crime,” lawless –or, more charitably, in favor of balancing “safety” with “justice.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what we stand for.
4. We are not merely in favor of a “softer” approach. Yes, we are critiquing the “tough on crime” ideology –and pointing out that it *is an ideology, not a true description of law enforcement in the era of mass incarceration.
5. And we are also articulating (and in some cities employing) a different theory of public safety – one that not only is less cruel, less costly, and more effective – but one that, I believe, will actually make us safer.
6. Our case against the Bill Barr, “tough on crime” ideology of mass incarceration has three main pillars:
7. First, the era of mass incarceration has been one of endless low-level arrests/prosecutions for Drug War and Broken Windows offenses. This has been the primary focus of law enforcement for the last 30 years.
8. There have been literally hundreds of millions of low-level arrests. We have spent billions upon billions of dollars policing, prosecuting, judging, caging, people for these low-level offenses.
9. In counties across America, massive systems that employ thousands of people – police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, bailiffs, court reporters, sheriffs, corrections officers, etc. – have been built to grind people up each day for these tiny crimes.
10. We've done this despite the fact that these crimes are very often the result of poverty, mental illness, drug addiction, homelessness, desperation, trauma. Conditions that we know are not made better – and are often made worse – by arresting, prosecuting, and caging people.
11. Often the punishments for these minor offenses are relatively light, and these people – frequently very vulnerable people – are soon back on the street, having been further destabilized and traumatized, made worse not better, often to get caught up in the system again.
12. We believe there is a better way. Treat the underlying condition. Help these people. Give them counseling, treat their addition, provide basic housing and other social programs. Caging them does nothing to address the underlying problem.
13. In fact, caging them often makes them worse not better. It makes further criminal behavior more likely not less.
14. Our second critique of the Bill Barr "tough on crime" ideology of mass incarceration relates to how the Bill Barrs of the world treat the most serious crimes – crimes like rape, murder and shootings.
15. One of the great ironies of the "tough on crime" crowd is how even as they beat their chest telling us how tough they are, they care remarkably little about solving serious crime.
16. In fact, one of the great ironies of the "tough on crime" era, is that it is during this era that clearance rates for serious crime have *plummeted. At this point, we solve less than 50% of serious, violent crimes in America.
17. And this has happened even as technology – like DNA testing and the proliferation of video cameras – have made it vastly easier to solve violent crime.
18. This failure to clear rape, murder, shootings, is a decision. Those serious crimes require real effort to solve. And the “tough on crime” people have just not made solving these crimes a priority.
19. In other words, the “tough on crime” types think the sky will fall if we don’t prosecute pot smokers, or homeless people, or the hungry man who steals a sandwich, but they cannot be bothered with the rapes and murders.
20. Our movement rejects this wild misunderstanding of public safety and seeks to refocus law enforcement energy and resources on holding people accountable for the crimes that matter most.
21. Third, even as we favor holding more people responsible for serious crime, we reject the Bill Barr "tough on crime" ideology that throws people away, incarcerating them far more than public safety demands.
22. During the era of mass incarceration we have sentenced people to prison for far too long, throwing around years and decades like mere footnotes. When compared to the rest of the world and our nation's own history, our punishments for serious crime are often out of whack.
23. Instead of throwing people away, our movement favors rehabilitation. We believe that people can and often do grow and change.
24. Data supports this. People frequently age out of crime. People who commit violent offenses at 16 or 21 or 25, are often good and useful members of society at 35 or 40.
25. Our current system ignores this incredibly valuable human potential. It devalues human growth. It squanders human talent and initiative.
26. Our movement favors prisons that support rather than inhibit rehabilitation. We support more measured sentences. We seek more parole, more clemency, more second-looks, more compassionate release.
27. The Bill Barrs of the world act like the sky will fall if we do this. To them, only the harshest sentences will suffice. The irony is, in their world, half of all violent crimes are never solved, and so the median violent criminal in Barr’s world gets zero days in jail.
28. So it’s really quite something that *he criticizes *us for being “soft on crime,” for favoring more measured sentences. In his world, more than half of all violent crimes go unsolved and the perpetrator is never held accountable at all. Kind of ironic, no?
29. In any event, what I was hoping to covey through this thread is that the reform prosecutor movement isn’t really “soft” at all. We are articulating a different vision of what public safety looks like and a different theory of how it might be achieved.
30. Bill Barr – mass incarceration fearmongerer that he is – will continue to portray us how he will. But I hope the press comes to understand that we are offering a very clear, coherent critique of the “tough on crime” ideology and providing a compelling vision of our own.
31. Our vision critiques “tough on crime” as costly, ineffective, cruel, racist, community destroying. But it also offers a vision of public safety that refocuses us on the crimes that matter most, crimes that the “tough on crime” crowd have been willfully ignoring for decades.
