Fresh from firing experienced prosecutors for...prosecuting crimes, Hugo Chávez's fair-haired boy in San Francisco, newly elected district attorney Chesa Boudin, is going himself one better and launching a new program to allow criminals charged with felonies and misdemeanors off the hook if they go into "diversion" programs. His condition? Having a kid in the household.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

"I grew up visiting my parents behind bars," Boudin said in a statement announcing the policy. "I know the kind of trauma the sudden loss of a parent can have on a child and the kind of resources that are needed to make that child whole again. This is about taking responsibility, protecting the sanctity of the family, and ensuring innocent children are not condemned to repeat the mistakes of their parents."

Commit a crime with a kid in the room, get off scot-free. Commit the same crime without a kid, and off to the can you go. Amazing, that newfound respect for "sanctity of the family," as if the communist left believed in anything sacred beyond the party. Chesa's parents were sent to the can for driving a getaway car in a terrorist-linked robbery that resulted in the murder of black police officer Waverley Brown, another officer, and a security guard. Based on young Chesa's statement, these killers should have been sent to a diversion program instead of the big house because separating them from their kids after what they did would have been hard on the kids, and never mind how hard their crimes were on the dead cop's kids. Weather Underground terrorist ringleaders Bill "guilty as sin, free as a bird" Ayers and his sidekick, Bernardine Dohrn, ended up raising young Chesa in a wealthy radical Chicago enclave with his parents' "values," but apparently, it wasn't enough.

Now everyone gets off. Drug-dealers, porno-purveyors, perverts, and wife-beaters are going to have a field day, but only so long as they have a kid nearby when they do it. It can't be a kid who lives someplace else, according to the derivative law passed by the far-left fanatics in Sacramento, which makes this sort of thing an "option."

Want to sell meth? Get your baby mamma and the kid in the room, since you're all now "a family," or rather, a "working family," and the worst that can happen so long as Junior is around is "diversion." You can bet there are going to be a lot of kids exposed to crime now that crooks will recognize their useful human shield purpose, and they will now be handy additions from the baby mamma somewhere to the household.

And are these people going to verify that the kids are theirs? Will "stepchildren" do? Or maybe, as the illegals have learned, a little human-trafficking, with kids passed around from lawbreaker to lawbreaker to get around the law, will serve the same purpose. Message: If you're a crook, get yourself a kid in the vicinity.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the D.A.s on the inside are "terrified."

The California District Attorney's Association opposed the law, and sent a letter to Skinner last year highlighting its potential consequences. A misdemeanor charge of contacting a minor with the intent to commit a sexual offense, for example, requires an offender to register as a sex offender and future violations carry state prison terms. "Under SB 394, however, there may be no conviction and thus no registration requirement," Larry Morse, the association's Director of Legislation, wrote in the letter. The new policy was also met with concern from some in the district attorney's office. A source high up in office, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, is "terrified for current and future victims, particularly women and children in abusive homes."

According to prosecutors, the only "diversion" that's going to happen now is that new crimes will get diverted onto more people.

It should worry them because even crooks respond to incentives. This loophole from consequences for crime is roughly equivalent to feds' incentive for illegal aliens to use kids as human shields in order to avoid detention and get free pass into the country. Family separation, see. It's what triggered the border surges and caravans of the last few years — remember all those expensive strollers. For the left, "family values" has its political uses.

The substitution of "diversion programs" is pretty gamy, too.

The Chronicle reports:

The policy will suspend criminal proceeding for 6 to 24 months while a defendant goes through the program that may include parenting classes, anger management, job training, drug and alcohol treatment, and counseling.

The Chronicle reports that the law has supposed safeguards to say anyone accused of abusing the child in the household "won't qualify" for the diversion. But the presence of "parenting classes" and "anger management" in that menu suggests something different. Even the exclusion of child abusers is skeezy, given that it will take a Chesa-approved DA to make that accusation, and no accusation, no problem, diversion there, too. Maybe they get one free kids to abuse and the rest of the kids are permitted to have the parent with parenting lessons in the household. You can bet some child abusers are going to slip through on that one and some kid will end up dead from wife-beater daddy or drug dealer mommy and the news will be full of lamentation, or the whole thing will get ignored as politically inconvenient.

Here's the other thing: Instead of punishment for crimes, the premise of diversion is "education." Since Chesa will approve that education, one can only wonder what kind of education that's going to really be. Knowing his background and approved associates, it could very well be "re-education" rather than actual "training" or "counseling." One awaits the social justice warrior angle that will emerge from those programs. Chesa in effect is likely taking crooks accused of "non-violent" crimes (and few really are given their deleterious effects) and placing them in some kind of re-education in order to create an army of socialists, maybe even the goon squad kind with guns on motorcycles like he experienced in Venezuela, reportedly as a participant according to Venezuelans sources. "Colectivos," they were called.

What a convenient thng to be able to recruit all the city's crooks and have them at your rapt attention as you seek to share your Ayers-ian and Chavista Marxist "values," through re-education in the old Stalinist and Maoist style, the embrace of which will enable the crooks to stay out of jail, and the end product may be an army of Marxist loyalists.

Image credit: Oscar via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.