Our criminal justice system is failing all of us. It is not keeping us safe. It is contributing to a vicious cycle of crime and punishment.
Chesa Boudin
The problem with money bail, for those who aren't familiar with it, is that it puts a price tag on freedom. It says to someone who is wealthy that no matter how dangerous you are, you can buy your way out.
Reconciliation and forgiveness can actually help all of us move on in a healthier, happier way.
By incarcerating someone who is homeless or addicted or who suffers from mental health challenges, we only further destabilize that person and create situations where they are more likely to commit crimes in the future.
We should start with the basics: Police officers are unlikely to be held accountable if the prosecutors investigating and potentially prosecuting them feel indebted to them.
Stop and frisk - whether done while walking down the street or while driving a car - is a civil rights violation.
We've been addicted to incarceration as a primary response for decades, whether or not it's a good use of resources, whether or not it's humane, whether or not it is effective at keeping us safe, rehabilitating or healing victims.
My mother negotiated a plea deal, and my father went to trial. I think one thing we notice in their case that kind of stands out is how, in some ways, arbitrary the outcomes in the criminal justice system can be. And they did basically the same thing, identical thing.
My father, David Gilbert, is in prison in New York. He is lucky that he has a single cell, not shared with another person. His cell is about eight feet by eight feet.
There's an awful lot about our criminal justice system that is dysfunctional. Everyone who sets foot in a criminal courtroom will see myriad ways the system is dysfunctional.
The status quo tough-on-crime policies of the '90s and 2000s are not working and are not popular. And it provides me with hope about the possibilities for San Francisco and this whole country in terms of moving away from our dependence on prisons and jails to solve social problems.
The failure of both Congress and state legislatures to respond to the murder of George Floyd with any meaningful action reminds us that our nation's attempts at reform can often amount to nothing.
We need to do a better job identifying what's contributing to the crime and making sure we hold people accountable in a way that addresses that root cause.
People are shaped in myriad ways by their upbringing and family. We also have agency in our lives, the people we become, and the lives we lead.
My family taught me radical politics from the beginning, but I also learned to prove myself in elite institutions.
Different victims, different survivors of different crimes will choose to pursue different paths. And hopefully, over time, we can collectively transform our culture into one that prioritizes healing and prevention instead of simply focusing on punishment.
In San Francisco, I am proud to say that one of my first mandates as district attorney was that my staff would never ask the court to impose money bail. If we believe someone is too dangerous to be released, then it doesn't matter how wealthy they are - we should ask the court to detain them.
What we're doing in San Francisco and what we're doing with other criminal justice partners across the state and across the country is anything but indiscriminate. We are being careful. We are being focused and surgical in our efforts to decrease the jail population.
Politics has always been personal for me. You know, growing up, I was in a very politically conscious household. We engaged with intellectuals and artists and academics from around the world who were thinking critically about politics and the intersection of politics and public life.
I want to give every victim of every crime in San Francisco the right to participate in restorative justice if they choose to.
Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.
In any campaign you make a lot of promises and you talk about a wide range of issues. When you're elected, the work of accomplishing those goals has to be sequenced. You can't do everything at once.
Homelessness, open air drug use and mental illness - which we all see in this city - are things we've been relying on the DA's office and the jails to deal with. That's really expensive, inhumane and ineffective.
I've been really consistent throughout the campaign and since I won that I want to prioritize victims rights and I want to prioritize healing.
I was in diapers when my parents left me with the babysitter to participate in an armored car robbery. They never came home.
The fact that more than 50 percent of Americans have an immediate family member either currently or formerly incarcerated tells you a lot about just how defining a feature of American culture incarceration has become.
My earliest memories are going into prisons. Going through metal detectors, getting searched by guards.
When my parents were arrested, I was a year old. And like so many children with incarcerated parents, I experienced a range of traumas connected to the separation. I was angry. I was ashamed. I had developmental delays, behavioral problems.
Because like so many people who were victimized directly or indirectly by crime, I blamed myself. If I hadn't been able to find closure, I never would have overcome those early developmental challenges.
One of my priorities is giving victims the right to choose different paths to restoration and to healing. It's prioritizing having restitution available for economic harm, having victim services for the trauma and also recognizing that victims are far more than simply pieces of evidence to be used in order to secure a lengthy prison sentence.
All it takes is a single person coming into or going out of the jail or prison with COVID-19, and the entire jail will likely be infected. Most jails have people living in very close quarters.
We should not have people in prisons and jails who aren't a violent threat.
As a law-enforcement official, as a politician, you are always going to have in the back of your mind the fear that someone you release will end up committing another crime, potentially a serious crime, during a period when they otherwise would have been incarcerated.
My parents are all people who have taken a stand for what they believe in over and over again. That to me is a fine example - even if I disagreed with some of their choices.
I don't expect to ever put my family background to rest but I do expect to be taken seriously as a scholar, a writer and a Latin Americanist on my own terms, not defined through my parents and their history or politics.
Being a foreigner - especially a white and relatively wealthy one - in poor, underdeveloped countries is inherently fraught.
Unlike many travel books I didn't set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.
Local prosecutors must use the power and discretion afforded them to carry out sweeping reforms that will protect the public - especially Black communities - from police violence. Our system's integrity depends on it.
If police departments won't remove officers who lack integrity, prosecutors should ensure that no one is prosecuted based on those officers' unreliable accounts.
