CB

I wouldn’t be running to be San Francisco’s next district attorney if I didn’t believe it were possible to do the job in a way that’s consistent with my values, in a way that makes the city safer for all of its residents, not just for some of its residents, and in a way that focuses on treating the root causes of crime and on decarceration.

I think district attorney is a tremendously important and powerful political position from which to do those things. And I think that in running and winning this race, I can be part of a broader national moment that is really testing the boundaries of what’s possible through that office, which for far too long has been abandoned to the most reactionary conservative forces in our society.

There is a movement around the country of progressives running to be district attorneys. A lot of people running today, including myself, wouldn’t have considered running five or ten years ago, because of the way that the office was viewed and the assumed limits of what could be accomplished, and frankly because of the public consciousness about criminal justice reform.

This is the first time in probably fifty years or more that there’s been a broad national consensus that the criminal justice system is broken. Without getting into who has a more radical analysis of the system, Republicans and Democrats agree that what we’re doing is crazy, and that creates space for meaningful change.

My view is that if you want to have that meaningful change, it’s not enough to just pass the kind of legislation that we saw in Washington, D.C. earlier this year, the First Step Act. That law really is a step in the right direction, in terms of providing mechanisms for early release for nonviolent offenders, but it doesn’t go far enough.

That said, it is a bellwether for the direction the country is headed. If that legislation possible under this administration, under this Senate, think about what we can do at a local level in a place like San Francisco.

Our system of mass incarceration is grossly disproportionate to our problem with crime and public safety. In fact, the way we arrest and lock people up actually makes us less safe, creates more crime. For too long politicians have falsely equated victims’ rights and public safety with conviction rates and length of sentence without any regard for recidivism rates or the social and economic cost of locking people up.

It’s not a coincidence that the prison population exploded around the same time as working communities, black and brown communities were organizing in the Civil Rights Movement and against the war in Vietnam. Folks like Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, and Christian Parenti have excellent books contextualizing the prison boom as repressive response to social changes