Prosecution Reform

Rachel Barkow, an NYU law professor and faculty director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law, had this to say on Twitter today.

I'm so happy to see Emily Bazelon's great book, Charged, reaching a wide audience and explaining the importance of prosecutors in addressing mass incarceration. Electing prosecutors who understand the importance of their decisions is critical. If prosecutors focus on what works to promote public safety, they would change a host of current practices:

• Cash bail would be abolished and pretrial detention would become the exception, not the norm.
• Prosecutors focused on public safety would understand how long sentences can produce more crime, not less, because of how difficult they make reentry. And they would work to ease reentry as this great @nyucrimlaw report explains [link in the original].
• Prosecutors concerned with public safety would call for reforms to the use of police use of force because killing unarmed civilians is disastrous for community safety and trust in the police.

I explain how critical it is to hold prosecutors accountable in my book, Prisoners of Politics. But I also explain that even if we elect prosecutors focused on all this, it won't be sufficient to end mass incarceration.

It is critical to reform our laws calling for excessive sentences, to have real second look mechanisms like parole and clemency, and to give judges discretion to check prosecutors.

It is also essential to have a bench that isn't just dominated by former prosecutors, and to include people with public defense and civil rights experience.

And we need to have agencies in place that look at data and evidence to get us policies that actually work to make us safer and that minimize human suffering from the use of punishment. We use that for other safety goals, from the environment to occupational health.

We should be using that agency model for criminal justice as well to get better outcomes. It will take a variety of institutional changes to undo mass incarceration. Prosectors are a key part, but we can't ignore the other necessary institutional changes. 

I planned to post this before I went to the Stand with Ilhan demonstration outside Mulligan's local appearance. Before Notre Dame started burning. But I decided to stick with the plan, despite all of that news, because getting pulled away by other stories is exactly why criminal justice reform (like education and even the climate crisis) never becomes the major focus that it should be.