There’s a strange and disturbing trend in American criminal justice: prosecutors who are more solicitous of criminals than their victims and the people who elected them.
There’s a strange and disturbing trend in American criminal justice: prosecutors who are more solicitous of criminals than their victims and the people who elected them.
Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities, by Zack Smith and Charles D. Stimson (Bombardier Books, 256 pages, $19.99)
T he best thing about Zack Smith and Charles D. Stimson’s Rogue Prosecutors is that it presents a comprehensive examination of the progressive-prosecutor movement in the United States. This book makes clear that nationally based leftist organizations, backed by generous financial contributions from George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg, and Patty Quillin, wife of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings (didn’t know about the last two, right?), are driving a highly focused ideological mission to radically alter the criminal-justice system. Smith and Stimson have exposed a rather secretive national campaign to upend traditional criminal prosecution in the United States. As they demonstrate, this campaign is a real threat to public safety — perhaps even, as they say, “a cancer on the body politic.”
Rogue Prosecutors is comprehensive in devoting a chapter to each of eight different district attorneys in big cities across the country: Marilyn Mosby of Baltimore, Kim Foxx of Chicago, Larry Krasner of Philadelphia, Chesa Boudin of San Francisco, Kimberly Gardner of St. Louis, George Gascón of Los Angeles, Rachael Rollins of Boston, and Alvin Bragg of Manhattan. Half of these — Mosby, Boudin, Gardner, and Rollins — have already been deposed or have simply moved on, usually under pressure from local police, politicians, and, in Boudin’s case, the public, who recalled him from office. But there’s no assurance that such prosecutors won’t be replaced by others who are equally “woke” or, as Smith and Stimson describe them, defense-oriented attorneys in disguise.
So this is an ongoing battle. And not one to be taken lightly. The authors estimate that 72 million Americans, one in five, live in rogue-prosecutor counties, including almost half of our 50 most populous cities.
How did this happen? Is the progressive agenda really that popular? After all, nearly all county prosecutors must be elected. The answer is that the prosecutorial candidates may be woke, but the electorate is sleeping. Many of our biggest cities are one-party (Democratic) jurisdictions in which, as a practical matter, the primary election determines the winner. Primary turnout is notoriously low, so throw lots of Soros money into the mix — Smith and Stimson estimate he spent a mind-blowing $40 million dollars on these campaigns and — voilà! — you end up with a progressive prosecutor.
What, exactly, does that mean? There is, among progressives, a common set of beliefs (readily refuted) and a common policy agenda to achieve their ends. The beliefs, neatly encapsulated by Smith and Stimson, are that “we have a mass incarceration problem in our country” and that “our criminal justice system is systemically racist.” Both claims are false. As I’ve demonstrated in my work (shameless plug ahead) The Myth of Overpunishment, the United States does not overincarcerate, given the number of crimes committed — more than 18 million a year reported by crime victims, leading to only 577,000 annual imprisonments. Nor are many minor offenders imprisoned. Over 55 percent are in for serious crimes of violence after repeated arrests, and less than 4 percent are sentenced for mere drug possession. The punishments are not overly harsh either: Two-thirds of state prisoners serve less than two years.
The racial claims are overblown as well. African Americans have exceptionally high violent-crime rates, which explains why nearly half of all murder victims are black even though blacks are around 12 or 13 percent of the U.S. population. Furthermore, in almost nine out of ten cases, the killer of an African American is also black. So, as Smith and Stimson assert, minorities are damaged by the failure to aggressively prosecute, especially when the defendant is black.
That brings us to the common policy agenda of the RPs (rogue prosecutors). Since they believe that mass incarceration is real and that the justice system is racist, they try to reduce incarceration, especially when minorities are involved. Consequently, they decline to prosecute many misdemeanors; they also oppose cash bail for arrestees, avoid sentencing enhancements even for the use of weapons, support sentence reductions and parole release for prison inmates, and oppose deportations for convicted criminal aliens and removal of those illegally in the United States. In short, these prosecutors are committed to leniency in gross as a matter of office policy — not just for the deserving few but for the blameworthy who are ultimately apprehended after repeated lawlessness. As Smith and Stimson put it, to the rogue prosecutors, “the police are the criminals, traditional prosecutors are to blame for ‘mass incarceration,’ and defendants are the victims.”
This really does turn our adversarial system on its head. Instead of one side championing the victim and the public while the other advocates on behalf of the defendant, with justice the outcome of this clash, we have in effect two defense attorneys who leave the victim and public abandoned. This isn’t the justice system we painstakingly erected over centuries. It is, instead, a politicized system designed to promote a cause — a cause built on a profound misunderstanding of the actual operation of the justice machinery.
Is this corrupt version of the justice system producing more crime, as Smith and Stimson claim? It is logical to think so. If offenders believe that they won’t be punished, or that they will be given a wrist slap at most, they have an incentive to commit more crime. The leniency of the RPs mainly affects relatively minor offenders; the serious lawbreakers still go to prison (usually), albeit for lesser punishments. The question is: Will these lower-level offenders and under-punished felons move on to more-serious crime?
Smith and Stimson think so, and they point to the huge rise in crime rates, especially in 2020 and 2021. The trouble is, these were pandemic years and times of racial turmoil following the death of George Floyd, and these events caused crime to spike all over the United States, and not only in RP jurisdictions. I predicted that the crime spike would abate by 2023, and so far my crystal ball seems to be working. If we blame rogue prosecutors for the crime upturn, are we also going to credit them for the downturn?
Take Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney, characterized by Smith and Stimson as one of the “most dangerous” prosecutors. Krasner was sworn in, in 2018, so he can’t take credit for the relatively low numbers in 2017, but the authors blame him for the high crime from 2018 to 2021. However, what about the declining crime numbers in 2022, and the even greater decreases in the first five months of 2023? Are we to attribute the recent drop in crime to Krasner’s policies?
The criminologist in me knows that crime spikes or declines for many reasons, including pandemics that empty jails and immobilize police. And what about the strengthening or weakening of the criminal-justice system through the election of mollycoddling DAs? Sure, that’s part of the picture. But not all of it.
I’d like to see some systematic studies of rogue prosecutors. For instance, one could compare, over the same period, crime rates from similar cities with and without RPs. That would give us a sounder basis for concluding that progressive policies cause crime to rise. Smith and Stimson did not provide this kind of analysis in their book, but maybe that’s a job for criminologists.
Whether or not we have hard proof that rogue prosecutors raise crime rates, however, Smith and Stimson have done a great service by pulling together what we do know about this strange and disturbing trend in American criminal-justice: prosecutors who are more solicitous of criminals than of their victims and of the people who elected them.
Barry Latzer is an emeritus professor of criminal justice at New York’s John Jay College and the author of The Myth of Overpunishment: A Defense of the American Justice System and a Proposal to Reduce Incarceration While Protecting the Public.