“People know that our shower list fills up quickly,” Beddis said. She says the drop in center is one of only two places unhoused people in Kensington can consistently take a shower. Visitors can also pick up safer use supplies like drug testing strips, get clean clothes and snacks, or simply hang out—lounging and chatting under the center’s neon purple lights and framed posters of the Philadelphia Eagles. 

“It really is a community,” Beddis said. “If somebody spills their coffee, we have our regulars that will jump up and be like, ‘Just give me the mop. I’ll take care of it,’ you know what I mean?”

Kensington and the people who live, work, and use drugs in this small neighborhood on the city’s northeast side have drawn scrutiny in the run up to Philadelphia’s May 16 Democratic primary, which will likely decide the city’s next mayor.

In a tightly-run race animated by issues of crime and public safety, debates on substance use have honed in on Kensington’s opioid crisis and significant unhoused population. All five of the leading candidates say the city needs to end what’s widely described as an “open-air drug market” and increase policing in the neighborhood. At least two of these candidates also propose raising the police budget. 

But local critics of a law enforcement-first approach to substance use worry that it may elevate overdose risks and perpetuate harm against people who use drugs, especially in Black and Latinx communities that already experience more policing. Instead, they hope the city’s next mayor will embrace harm reduction—a set of public health and social justice strategies aimed at protecting the dignity, autonomy, and rights of people who use drugs.

The city government’s response to substance use and the overdose crisis has thus far involved a complex patchwork of departments including police, public health, behavioral health, and homelessness services, and dozens of others, with guidance from the mayor’s office. Meanwhile, grassroots organizers in the city are locked in a years-long battle with state and federal officials to create a space for safer drug consumption. The proposal, championed by a nonprofit called Safehouse, has enjoyed some support from city officials since 2018 but has been delayed by lawsuits and now state legislation, even as similar sites have appeared in New York City. 

The next mayor will oversee the city’s response to the ongoing overdose crisis and shape its policies, wielding powers like its budget proposals, executive orders, or appointing the police commissioner. The mayor’s position on an overdose prevention site may also make or break the proposal in light of some state politicians’ ongoing efforts to preempt the sites. 

“The next mayor must take research about the effectiveness of harm reduction techniques seriously,” said Shoshana Aronowitz, an assistant professor at Penn Nursing who studies racial equity in substance use treatment and works with several harm reduction organizations across the city. 

A skyrocketing overdose crisis

Over 1,200 Philadelphians died of accidental overdoses in 2021—the highest number ever recorded. The potent opioid fentanyl has found its way into stimulants such as methamphetamine and cocaine, and an increasingly unpredictable drug supply, plus a lack of adequate prevention resources are driving up overdose rates citywide, especially in its Black and Latinx communities. A 2021 city report recommended using the phrase “overdose crisis” rather than “opioid crisis” to more adequately capture this impact. 

Much of Philadelphia’s current response infrastructure dates to 2017, when Mayor Jim Kenney convened a task force to determine how to “combat the opioid epidemic in Philadelphia.” The task force’s final report called for easier access to medication assisted treatment, in which doctors prescribe drugs called methadone and buprenorphine to relieve withdrawal symptoms and reduce the risk of overdose. It also advocated increasing access to naloxone, which can help reverse overdoses, expanding drug treatment court, and providing additional resources for housing and jobs training. 

As fatal overdose rates continued to increase, however, Kenney declared an “opioid emergency” in Kensington and directed law enforcement to reduce “open-air drug use and sales.” Since then, the police have increased foot patrols in the neighborhood, seizing cash and drugs and making over 2,500 arrests in 2022 alone.

Since 2020, a harm reduction program within the city’s department of public health has been distributing naloxone and fentanyl test strips through street-based outreach and training Philadelphians on how to spot and reverse overdoses. The city also funds some of the work of a Kensington-based harm reduction nonprofit offering syringe exchanges. And the department of health has committed to reducing overdoses that involve stimulants 20 percent by the end of 2023, according to its strategic plan. 

All five leading mayoral candidates have expressed some vision of treatment for people who use drugs, but Rebecca Rhynhart and Helen Gym’s proposals most resemble this existing plan. Both have expressed support for medication assisted treatment. 

A spokesperson for Gym’s campaign told Bolts the candidate would “improve prevention, [drug] testing, and treatment outreach,” especially in “underserved Black communities in North, Southwest, and West Philadelphia, where overdose rates are rising.”

Candidate Jeff Brown has advocated for drug treatment through the criminal legal system. 

“Drug court [is] a very effective way to have a good outcome, because you monitor their substance use. If they fall off the wagon, they have a choice. Do you want to go to jail for your crimes, or do you want to go back to treatment?” he said at a recent candidate forum about public health.

But Aronowitz warns that not all treatment options are created equal. “We know what doesn’t work,” Aronowitz said, “And that is expecting people to just quit cold turkey and be fine, because we know that that’s associated with extreme overdose risk.” 

“When a politician says we need more access to treatment, that’s not enough,”she continued. “We need to know if they’re going to fund the things that work and defund the things that not only don’t work but are potentially harmful.” 

The battle over Safehouse

Advocates doing harm reduction work in Philadelphia are pushing the city government to expand its focus on keeping people alive, beyond offering treatment, and they have fought to establish an overdose prevention site in Philadelphia, an effort the city government nominally supports. Such sites, also known as safe drug consumption sites, are places people can use pre-obtained drugs more safely, in the presence of staff trained to spot and reverse overdoses. 

As of July 2022, more than 120 overdose prevention sites existed in ten countries across the world, and no fatal overdoses had ever taken place in one. But they remain controversial in the United States. So far, only two such sites exist in the country, both in New York City, where staff have reversed more than 700 overdoses in the less than two years since they were created. Rhode Island legalized the creation of a pilot site in summer 2021 and is set to open one in early 2024. California governor Gavin Newsom last year killed legislation that would have allowed San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles to establish their own sites. 

In Philadelphia, efforts to open such a site have been caught for years in a protracted battle pitting harm reduction advocates and some city officials like DA Larry Krasner against the U.S. Justice Department, some state politicians, and opponents in law enforcement, business, and residential communities across the city. 

The struggle dates to a recommendation from Mayor Kenney’s 2017 opioid crisis task force to explore creating a space for safe consumption. In 2018, a nonprofit called Safehouse launched with the aim of opening a site in the city. But soon after, a U.S. Attorney appointed by President Donald Trump sued Safehouse invoking a federal law which prohibits “maintaining drug-involved premises” where criminalized drugs are manufactured, distributed, or used. 

In February 2020, the federal judge’s ruling in Safehouse’s favor led the group’s leaders to announce the site’s imminent opening in South Philadelphia. But after vehement opposition from neighbors, the plans folded in just two days. In 2021, a federal appeals court reversed the ruling that had cleared the way for Safehouse to open, relaunching the legal battle.

The plan remains uncertain at this time. Settlement talks between Safehouse and the U.S. Justice Department have been ongoing for over a year. Local opposition exploded last month, when a group including the police union and business associations filed a petition to step in as party plaintiffs in the lawsuit, fearing that the Biden Administration would reverse its position. 

Opponents to the site scored a decisive win earlier this month when Pennsylvania’s state Senate voted to ban overdose prevention sites anywhere in the state on a bipartisan 41-9 vote.

The bill was sponsored by Democratic Senator Christine Tartaglione, whose district includes parts of Kensington. She told The Philadelphia Inquirer that she opposes “prolonging and allowing a system of state-sponsored addiction in Pennsylvania.” 

The bill now sits in the state House’s Judiciary Committee. If it passed the chamber, it would move on to Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat who has indicated he opposes safe consumption sites.

Meanwhile, five Philadelphia city council members introduced a local bill on May 11 that would prevent an overdose prevention site from being created anywhere in their districts, an area amounting to about half the city. Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, whose district includes Kensington, led the effort, saying that such a site would only worsen the neighborhood’s struggles with drug consumption. 

“We cannot continue to allow them to find ways where they can continue to remain in the same cycle,” she told Inquirer. The bill would still need to get a committee hearing and be voted on by the entire city council—a process that may not happen before the council’s summer recess beginning in July—before going to the mayor to be signed. 

In public statements and court filings, Kenney’s administration has supported efforts to open an overdose prevention site, and remains supportive even in light of the new city and statewide bills. Whether the next mayor supports Safehouse would likely be critical to its chances given that the proposal is assailed from many quarters.

Among mayoral candidates, Helen Gym, a former teacher and city council member embraced by activists on the left, is the only one to have directly stated support for an overdose prevention site, though she did so before the protracted legal battle over Safehouse. 

“[Safe injection sites] are among the most promising new approaches to come forward while we work to end the opioid crisis. I support establishing one in Philadelphia,” Gym said in 2017. Her statement at the time added momentum for the proposal by giving it a prominent supporter on the city council. Gym has recently offered more circumspect answers in public comments, and did not respond to Bolts’ question about whether she currently supports opening a site in the city.

Another leading candidate, former city controller Rebecca Rhynhart, expressed measured support for the proposal. “I won’t take a tool that experts say saves lives off the table,” she told Bolts. “But I would not put a safe injection site in any neighborhood that does not want one.”

“I think that the debate over safe injection sites in Philadelphia has clouded the bigger issue which is what is the comprehensive plan for dealing with the opioid crisis in our city,” she added. 

Three other major contenders—real estate mogul and former councilor Allan Domb, grocery store magnate Jeff Brown, and former councilor Cherelle Parker—all oppose the sites. Parker has been a strident opponent since Safehouse’s efforts to open a site in early 2020, when she participated in the city council’s mobilization against the opening. 

“We should not be participating in a ‘I know what’s best for you’ decision making where we use safe injection sites as solutions,” Parker said in a debate on April 18.

Policing a public health crisis

The role of policing has proved broadly divisive in the mayoral primary, and yet the five leading candidates support increasing police presence on the ground in Kensington, distancing themselves from advocates who worry it would exacerbate criminalization. 

Gym and Rhynhart each said they would do so by reallocating existing police funds to prioritize Kensington, while increasing the police budget overall is a central component of both Domb and Parker’s platforms.

A spokesperson for Gym’s campaign told Bolts the candidate will take a “public health and resident-focused, community-led response,” mentioning a focus on neighborhood improvements, trauma support, and mobile crisis units, but did not detail how increased policing will fit in. 

Rhynhart’s campaign website states that she will attempt to disrupt public drug use by focusing on dealers, with a mix of warnings for “non-violent dealers” and arrests for “those committing violent acts.”

Sheila Vakharia, who helps lead research at the Drug Policy Alliance, warns that the line between people using drugs and people selling drugs is much more fluid. 

“There’s this idea that there is this big bad demon-ish seller and this poor victim user and oftentimes the seller is racialized. The victim is also racialized, but differently,” Vakharia said. “And oftentimes all of this can create heroes and villains.”

To both Aronowitz and Beddis of Savage Sisters, ending the overdose crisis requires a solution beyond what has been proposed by any candidate in the Philadelphia mayor’s race: addressing the toxicity of the criminalized drug market. They argue instead for access to a safe supply of criminalized drugs in a way that clinical and community-led programs have modeled across Europe and Canada, but which has not been piloted in the U.S.

“The way we regulate alcohol is safe supply,” Aronowitz said. “We make sure it’s not poison, and that when you take a drink, you can reliably know how much alcohol is in it.” 

But even if those goals are still far off, at the very least, they say, the city government should meet communities impacted by the overdose crisis with resources and care—not criminalization.

“Our friends have necrotic limbs. Can’t access treatment. Can’t access housing. Can’t access compassionate pain management. Can’t even get a shower,” Savage Sisters’ founder and executive director Sarah Laurel wrote on LinkedIn last month.

“It’s time we respond to this public health crisis accordingly.”

The post How Will Philadelphia’s Next Mayor Tackle the Overdose Crisis? appeared first on Bolts.

“We’re here today with the candidate that our movement backs,” he said. That candidate, Helen Gym, sat in the front row wearing a bright red suit. “[T]he reason that we back this candidate is because Helen Gym is someone to not only listen to us, she not only said, ‘Here’s my public safety campaign, what do you think of it?’ But rather said, ‘Hey, I need a public safety campaign, can you help me build it out?’” 

In a crowded field of nine Democratic candidates vying for office ahead of the May 16 primary, Gym is one of five with the fundraising and popular support to be truly viable. The primary is considered a de facto general election in this deeply blue city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a margin of nearly seven to one. All of the leading candidates are pretty evenly split in recent polls, and unlike in Chicago, there are no runoffs here. So, the next mayor of Philadelphia could win with less than thirty percent of the vote. With just two weeks to go, campaigns are ramped to full speed. 

At the event in March, Gym spoke of violence tearing apart neighborhoods, emphasizing her overall public safety platform centered on investing in communities most affected by violence, bolstering trauma-informed services, and remodeling the police department.

“In the face of unmitigated violence that’s happening to our young people, to Black and brown youth all across the city of Philadelphia, it is our mission to be able to show a new path for how we’re going to save the city,” she said, “and deliver a vision for safety—and investment across Philadelphia—that does not drag the clock back on civil rights.” 

She added: “If it was about funding our police department… we should have the safest city in America.” (The Philadelphia Police Department’s nearly $800 million budget this fiscal year is the largest of any city agency and has grown by $150 million since 2016 when the current mayor took office.)

A Gym administration would be the most powerful seat held by Philadelphia’s burgeoning progressive political machine which has been strengthening since Donald Trump’s presidential victory in 2016. Since then, the left has delivered a number of blows to the typically centrist Democratic establishment in Philadelphia. The election of District Attorney Larry Krasner in 2017—and his reelection four years later—has been the highest-profile victory, but a slew of other leftists have taken office at the neighborhood, city, and state level including the city’s first Working Family Party councilperson, two prominent community organizers elected to the state house, and a number of progressives at the helm of some of the city’s numerous Neighborhood Advisory Committees. 

The next mayor has their work cut out for them. Homicides over the last few years have reached a historic high, schools are closing because of asbestos contamination, people are dying from opioid overdoses at relentless rates, and economic disparity along racial lines is on the rise. At a time when the stakes for voters are so high for public safety, public education, and inequality, the fact that Gym is a viable candidate proves how far the city has come in taking left-wing politics seriously, explained Steph Drain, Philadelphia political director of the labor-aligned Working Families Party, which endorsed Gym. “[Jim] Kenney was considered progressive in 2015,” said Drain, referencing the current mayor. “But we are now recognizing that we are able to have someone who is actually progressive and not just settle for someone who is a moderate.” 

Some local activists have expressed frustration with Philadelphia politicians for their relative inaction, for example not standing up sufficiently in defense of Krasner’s criminal justice reforms when they’ve been assailed by state Republicans and other critics. To get an ally in the mayor’s office, they say, could be a game-changer to transform the city further. “It says that the progressive movement has teeth,” Drain said.

Gym was first elected to city council in 2015, becoming the first Asian American woman to sit on council after ascending over the past two decades through Philadelphia politics, from public school teacher, to activist, to elected representative. She was reelected in 2019 with a dramatic lead over other at-large council members, winning more votes than any other candidate for city council since the 1980s. She ran as an activist councilmember and ferocious defender of social justice causes, especially inequities in the public education system. She kept this profile up as a councilmember—one time going so far as being arrested at the state Senate with other activists demanding better funding for Philadelphia schools. During her tenure, she spearheaded a number of successful initiatives such as improving monitoring of lead in public schools and installing hydration stations, establishing ‘fair workweek’ regulations, and ending contracts with troubled juvenile detention providers where staff abuse ran rampant.

Critics accuse her of grandstanding, focusing on headlines more than policy. “You can’t go to get something passed in the Senate,” said another mayoral candidate, Cherelle Parker, in a recent forum. “[I]f you’re going to roll around on the floor, use a bullhorn, shout at the senators, and tell them they’re morally bankrupt.”

But Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval, who cut his teeth as a labor organizer and endorses Gym, rejects the notion that politicians need to leave their activist hat at the door in order to legislate effectively. “People who come out of social movements as organizers have a mode of coalition building and communicating among people who may not otherwise see eye to eye,” he said. He demonstrated this concept by passing a $125 million home repair program during his freshman term in a Republican majority legislature, with allies from across the aisle. 

Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016, delivering him to the White House. In Philadelphia, this moment galvanized grassroots organizations, many who supported Bernie Sanders during the primary of that election cycle, to come together and work in concert. In fact, former Sanders staffers and canvassers founded the leftist political group Reclaim Philadelphia, which has propelled several members to office, including Saval. 

“After the 2016 election, we saw the birth of Reclaim, the expansion of the [Democratic Socialists of America], empowerment of the [Working Family Party], these organizations with largely socialist ideals,” said Drain. “The momentum from Bernie Sanders delegates and voters transferred over to these political institutions. We’ve gained power.” 

Since then, community organizers have worked in tandem to support candidates who care about issues like environmental and racial justice. In 2017, over 30 of these groups formed the Coalition for a Just DA and hit the ground knocking on doors to usher Larry Krasner into office. The groups represented a wide array of communities most affected by the carceral system: LGBTQ people, sex workers, immigrant families, formerly incarcerated individuals, and victims of violent crime. That coalition has since disbanded, but a number of the original organizations are backing Gym. 

Holbrook said that the decision to back Gym was an easy one, based on history. “The relationship that she’s built with the left goes back years—to the years she was an activist in the community.” 

If she wins, Gym could govern alongside a veritable progressive flank in city council. Because so many current city council members left office to run for mayor, a wave of freshmen councilmembers will be ushered in next term. Five of the seven at-large seats up for election are open without incumbents; the race to fill them has drawn a large and diverse pool of candidates—with a distinct camp running as progressives, potentially upending the ideological balance in Philadelphia city government.

The only other mayoral candidate seen as liberal is former City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart, who has roots as a Wall Street banker. Without a track record on city council, it’s hard to know how Rhynhart would govern, but during her tenure as comptroller, she did take on the establishment by conducting ruthless audits of agencies such as the Philadelphia Police Department. Her office’s report revealed deficient systems of accountability, inefficiencies in operations, and made her an enemy of the Fraternal Order of Police local chapter. However, on the campaign trail, she has positioned herself more as a technocrat, deft at navigating bureaucracy, friendly to business, and more aligned with the local political establishment. She boasts endorsements such as three former mayors, including Michael Nutter, who aggressively advanced stop-and-frisk during his tenure—and continues to support the tactic—and is a vocal critic of Krasner for being “anti-police.” 

Rhynhart also supported a controversial new curfew banning unchaperoned teens from a downtown mall after 2 p.m., which opponents see as a return to draconian policing of youth. Gym, who opposes the curfew, said so at a recent candidate forum. “We cannot criminalize young people.” 

As of April 28, the Democratic party itself has not endorsed any candidate. “The Democratic establishment here is in this fractured state,” Drain said. “But the progressives have figured it out from the beginning, moving in lockstep while the establishment is devouring itself.”

The West Philadelphia church gathering is emblematic of that cohesion. Last month Gym announced her public safety platform flanked by Holbrook and a number of other activists. “This conversation about public safety is one that is about investing in communities and actually stopping cycles of violence,” she said.

Public safety is the banner issue of Philadelphia’s campaign for mayor. According to a recent poll by the market-research firm SRSS and The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, nearly 90 percent of Philadelphians believe crime should be a top priority for the city’s mayor. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Philadelphia has seen a devastating uptick of gun violence. Last year, the city recorded 516 homicides, a slight decrease from the year before but still surpassing the previous record of 500 set in 1990. Nearly nine out of ten murders between 2020 and 2022 were committed by firearm. The violence was heavily concentrated in communities of color, which have historically been under-resourced. 

The mayor will decide who leads the Philadelphia Police Department, propose the size of that department’s budget, as well as how funds are allocated to anti-violence programs.

The plan Gym has laid out prioritizes crime prevention with ambitious measures such as universal access to mental health treatment in neighborhoods most affected by gun violence, guaranteeing job placement assistance to young people in those neighborhoods, and ensuring that recreation centers are open nights and weekends—a plan she brought up directly in contrast to the new mall curfew for unchaperoned teens. She proposed deploying mobile mental health crisis units, staffed with social workers rather than police, 24/7. The plan focuses on the root causes of violence, namely poverty and trauma, rather than a carceral response. 

Gym’s public safety plan doesn’t increase the number of police officers in the department, but reorganizes how they are deployed. She endorses a community policing model that increases the number of cops on the street in high-crime neighborhoods; her case is that it would allow officers to form relationships with community members to improve relations. But critics of this approach say it could simply lead to more arrests and harassment in already over-policed sections of the city. When it’s been deployed in other cities, community policing has been criticized for still ostracizing Black and Latinx youth, even as police prioritize the concerns of other older residents in the same neighborhoods. 

“There’s always tension when we start talking about more policing in these already over-policed neighborhoods,” said Holbrook, who is also executive director of the Abolitionist Law Center. “As a movement, we are going to continue to navigate them.”

Gym’s critics in the mayoral race say that the cash-strapped city cannot fund her plans for public safety or other areas. Parker called Gym’s education plan “imaginary,” and said, “What taxes will you raise? What services will you cut?”

In response, Gym’s campaign says that her plans will not be funded by extra dollars off the average Philadelphian’s back, but primarily by leveraging state and federal funding that is available, for example, expanding job training programs that already rely on federal funds, and utilizing resources such as Medicaid to give low-income citizens access to mental health care.

“Other candidates in the race have promised to cut taxes across the board while also promising things like year-round schooling, neighborhood infrastructure improvements, hundreds more police officers, and expanded workforce development with minimal details on what that would look like—notably, these candidates rarely get asked how they would fund or implement such programs,” a spokesperson with Gym’s campaign wrote in a statement to Bolts. “While Helen’s vision for investing in people and neighborhoods and prioritizing residents in neighborhoods hardest hit by gun violence is a departure from the status quo, she is by no means the only candidate proposing new or different city services.” 

Gym has said that she would create a new commission to conduct a “comprehensive review” of existing tax policy, with an eye for instituting some reforms. And if necessary, reallocating city funds away from other areas to improve the services that Gym prioritizes is also on the table. “If the only way we can find money to clean a vacant lot in Nicetown is by spending less on center city or Rittenhouse square, Helen is prepared to do that,” the spokesperson wrote. 

Some other candidates’ messaging around public safety calls back to the “tough on crime” heavy-handed policing common in US cities throughout the 1990s—part of a national trend in political rhetoric that some have identified as a backlash against the historic uprisings against police brutality in 2020. “In some of these debates these candidates have sounded, if not centrist, and then somewhat more conservative than what you’d expect from a bunch of Democrats running in a big city,” Patrick Christmas, chief policy officer of the good governance group the Committee of Seventy told Bolts.

Parker has proposed hiring 300 new police officers, also with an emphasis on increased community policing. Three of the five leading contenders are open to some form of stop-and-frisk—which a judge found to be used in racist and unconstitutional ways here in 2011. The Philadelphia Police Department is still under court monitoring for its use of pedestrian searches.

“Under a Parker administration, every legal tool available, every constitutional tool available to our Police Department will be employed to ensure that we end this sense of lawlessness,” Parker told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “And I’m no flip-flopper about it.”

Allan Domb, a real estate magnate and current at-large city councilmember, wants to triple the department’s recruitment budget and vows to thwart what he sees as a “culture of lawlessness” in the city.

Messages centered around police reform, often boiled to the phrase, “defund the police” have become a toxic concept in this election cycle. Gym, even as she tries to ward off accusations from the right that her proposed reforms would make the city less safe, has bowed to some of their pressure. “I am not coming in to dismantle departments that I myself run,” she told Al DÍA. But her supporters on the left have made it clear that, should she win, they will work to make sure she ushers in transformational changes on policing and justice.

Drain is drawing inspiration from the left’s victory in Chicago’s mayoral election in April. “I think that we saw that with Brandon Johnson, we have these education activists who are running these elections in cities that are dominated by the establishment,” they said. “It shows that Philly organizers are making it happen and it could happen in these large cities that haven’t seen change historically.”

The post Philadelphia’s Progressive Movement Aims for the Mayor’s Office appeared first on Bolts.

Many states hold their local elections on odd-numbered years—a schedule that depresses turnout and that some places are fighting to change. That means that, if you’re interested in the shape of your criminal legal system, critical storylines are already taking shape: These local and state offices enjoy the brunt of the discretion to shape incarceration and policing. DAs and sheriffs, in particular, decide which cases to prosecute and with what severity, exercise nearly unfettered control over jail conditions, and choose how they partner with federal immigration enforcement.

There are nearly 500 elections for prosecutors and sheriffs scheduled for 2023, a Bolts analysis finds—and the first filing deadlines are coming up in just weeks. 

These elections are largely concentrated in Louisiana, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, with just a few sprinkled in Florida, New Jersey, and Washington State. (The full list is available here.)

Other local offices that shape criminal punishment and policing are also on the ballot next year, including three governorships, at least two supreme court justices in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and hundreds of state lawmakers, local judges, and mayors.

Local elections are often very late to take shape, so in most cases the field remains undefined. At this time, the likeliest elections to draw the stark contrasts we have seen in recent cycles—with candidates disagreeing on whether to intentionally aim to reduce incarceration, or what goes into advancing public safety—include prosecutor races in New York City and upstate New York, Pittsburgh and the Philly suburbs, and Northern Virginia, as well as mayoral races in Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver, and across Texas. Sheriff races across Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia may draw some scrutiny to immigration and detention conditions.

Bolts will follow these races throughout the year. Today, I am kicking off our coverage by laying out six big questions that will define the cycle: 

1. Can reform-minded prosecutor candidates hold their ground in Virginia, and make inroads elsewhere?

The last time the counties that are electing their prosecutors in 2023 voted for these same officials, in 2019, the results made for a striking split screen. Virginia saw one of the widest set of wins to date for candidates who campaigned on reducing incarceration. After winning  in a string of populous suburban counties,  they formed a statewide coalition called Virginia Progressive Prosecutors for Justice—at the time an unprecedented step—that advocating for lawmakers to abolish the death penalty and mandatory minimums, among other reforms. But their positions drew heavy heat from the right, including judicial pushback and failed recalls as well as criticism from the left over false promises. 

Now, those first-term incumbents are up for election again. They include Arlington’s Parisa Dehghani-Tafti and Fairfax’s Steve Descano, both in Northern Virginia, who drew attention in 2019 for ousting a pair of incumbents in Democratic primaries, as well as Albemarle’s James Hingeley, Loudoun’s Buta Biberaj, and Prince William’s Amy Ashworth. Several of these incumbents are now facing challengers, intra-party strife, or conservative anger, and the results of the 2023 cycle will determine the political strength of the state’s reform prosecutor coalition  going forward.

In New York and Pennsylvania, though, the 2019 DA elections saw advocates of criminal justice reform largely stagnate due to the sky-high number of uncontested elections and some high-profile losses. 

Pennsylvania’s marquee election in 2023 is likely to be the DA race in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), where longtime Democratic DA Stephen Zappala is a vocal critic of criminal justice reforms amid significant racial disparities in his office. In 2019, Zappala beat multiple progressive challengers, though progressive organizers have made major progress in Pittsburgh in the intervening years, including winning a ballot measure meant to curtail solitary confinement and electing decarceral judges in 2021. 

Other DA races in Pennsylvania include counties like Cumberland and Lancaster that took a distinctly punitive approach to the opioid crisis, and populous Philly suburbs like Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery. Philadelphia’s reform DA Larry Krasner is not up after cruising to re-election in 2021; he has remained relatively isolated so far among DAs in the state, a far cry from the dynamic in Virginia, and 2023 will be the next test of whether his allies can change that.

In New York, where most prosecutors have been relentlessly critical of a landmark package of pretrial reforms, at least two former presidents of the state’s DA association are up for re-election this year—in Monroe County (Rochester) and Onondaga County (Syracuse). Another DA who has battled against state Democrats’ bail reform, William Grady of Dutchess County (Poughkeepsie), has said he is retiring after 40 years as DA.

Bronx DA Darcel Clark has drawn a reform challenger who says she is running to “end mass incarceration” four years after securing re-election unopposed. Also on the 2023 calendar: Queens, the site of the extraordinarily tight 2019 race that saw Melinda Katz become DA after defeating socialist organizer Tiffany Cabán.

In Mississippi, I have my eyes on the Fifth District, which covers seven counties in the central part of the state: DA Doug Evans drew national opprobrium and condemnation from the U.S. Supreme court for his decadeslong effort to prosecute Curtis Flowers six times for the same crime—a crusade exposed in the podcast “In the Dark.” Even with that exceptional spotlight, Evans ran unopposed in 2019 and remains in office, with little accountability, today. 

2. Will sheriffs and jailers face accountability?

The 2022 midterms showcased once again that, with some exceptions, sheriffs tend to secure re-election even when they link up in far-right networks, signal their eagerness to disrupt the federal government, or prepare to disrupt local elections. Next year will bring a different cast of characters to the forefront. There’s Sheriff Adam Fortney of Snohomish County, Washington, in the Seattle suburbs, who faced a recall effort in 2020 for quickly disregarding statewide COVID rules even while ramping up other arrests.

There’s Sheriff Sid Gautreaux, in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s most populous parish, who runs a jail with infamously dangerous conditions. Or there’s Sheriff Mike Chapman in Loudoun County, Virginia, who has drawn scrutiny for accepting campaign donations from private contractors that work with his office, a common practice among jailors. The vast majority of sheriffs in Louisiana and Virginia will be elected in 2023, creating a window for local jails to draw more public attention.

Note that Pennsylvania sheriffs have far more limited powers than elsewhere as they typically do not run local jails, which are managed directly or indirectly by other local offices, many of which are on the ballot in 2023. A string of deaths at the Allegheny County jail, located in Pittsburgh, and complaints that the lockup is violating a voter-approved ban on solitary confinement are now issues set to define the race for the county’s next chief executive.

3. Will immigrants’ rights advocates continue to curtail local collaboration with ICE?

When Donald Trump was president, voters in Democratic-leaning counties ousted public officials who cooperated with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But ICE forged new relationships with Southern jails to make up for it, and sheriffs rushed to profit off renting vacant jail space for ICE to detain migrants and asylum-seekers. In 2023, nearly all sheriffs will be on the ballot in Louisiana and Mississippi, states that  proved to be difficult terrain for critics of those ICE arrangements four years ago.

Still, immigrants’ rights advocates have opportunities in some blue-leaning areas to build on their 2022 successes and elect new officials who oppose collaborating with ICE.

Just four counties with 2023 sheriff races participate in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act like federal immigration agents in jails. Three of them voted for Joe Biden over Trump: Duval County (Jacksonville), Florida; East Baton Rouge Parish (Baton Rouge), Louisiana; and Rensselaer County (Troy), New York. (The fourth, which voted for Trump, is Culpeper County, Virginia.)

Still, recent history suggests that efforts to curtail cooperation with ICE will be tricky in all three blue-leaning counties. Republicans defended the sheriff’s office in Duval in a special election just last month. In East Baton Rouge, the GOP sheriff easily prevailed in 2019 with endorsements from prominent Democratic officials. And in Rensselaer, the only county in all of New York State that’s part of the 287(g) program, the Republican incumbent ran entirely unopposed four years ago.

4. Will there be more interest in city halls to reform policing?

Since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the most ambitious electoral platforms for changing or reducing policing have emerged at the municipal level—but so has the most stringent backlash. In the absence of federal elections, 2023 may be the year those dynamics again take front stage with many of the nation’s biggest cities set to hold mayoral races, including five cities of more than one million: Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, and San Antonio. Many others will vote for their city councils.

These elections will feature incumbents who have tended to clash with protesters, such as Chicago’s incumbent mayor Lori Lightfoot; Democrats with a tough-on-crime reputation, such as John Whitmire, a Texas state senator running for Houston mayor; and candidates who have championed shifting resources from policing to other social services, such as Leslie Herod, who is running for mayor in Denver, or Cabán and other left-leaning council members who are up for re-election in New York. Watch out for whatever contrasts emerge around police budgets and ordinances that criminalize homelessness.

5. Will reform initiatives survive state elections in the South? 

In 2023, the elections that may change who runs state governments will largely be concentrated in the South, and the GOP has room to extend their power in what’s already their strongest region. 

In Virginia, the GOP governor and attorney general’s tough-on-crime posturing have run into the Democratic-run state Senate, which has rejected the former’s appointments to the parole board and killed the latter’s proposal to crack down against the state’s reform prosecutors. Should they flip the Senate in 2023, the GOP would gain full control of the state government and could press forward on those matters. 

In Kentucky, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear will seek a second term in difficult conditions given the state’s conservative bent. On his third day in office, he issued an executive order enabling hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians with felony convictions to vote; his re-election bid may decide the fate of his initiative since the GOP has reversed a similar one in the past.

The GOP also hopes to gain full control of Louisiana’s government; Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards cannot run for a third term, in a state where a short-lived bipartisan agreement to lower incarceration shattered within years of him signing a landmark reform package in 2017. 

6. How will judicial elections shape criminal punishment in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin?

In 2021, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia progressives made the unusual choice of organizing around local judicial races, and it paid off with a wave of wins by candidates who ran on curtailing bail and reducing incarceration. Next year, there will be more elections for the local bench in both places. 

Also in 2023, all Pennsylvanians will get to vote in a supreme court election to replace Max Baer, a Democratic justice who died this fall. The court, which is sure to retain a Democratic majority, has vacillated on criminal justice matters. One of Baer’s final opinions came in a September ruling that brought relief to defendants with mental illness, though the court has also disappointed reformers by rejecting cases challenging the death penalty or felony murder statutes. 

While Pennsylvania’s election won’t be resolved until November, one of the year’s most important races looms in April: A state supreme court seat on the ballot in Wisconsin may hand the majority to the liberal wing. Such a flip would affect criminal justice cases that have long divided Wisconsin justices, but the fate of the state’s 1849 abortion ban also looms large. Wisconsin’s staunchly GOP legislature is locked into place by aggressive gerrymanders; unlike neighboring Michigan, there is no mechanism for citizens to put a popular initiative on the ballot. That leaves state litigation, and April’s judicial election, as a rare path for Wisconsinites to curtail the policing of reproductive rights. 

The post What Off Year? Hundreds of Local Elections Will Define Criminal Justice Policy in 2023 appeared first on Bolts.

Philadelphia’s police union and other detractors of criminal justice reform bet big against District Attorney Larry Krasner. They triggered the expectation, deeply-ingrained in public consciousness, that tough-on-crime attacks are what sell politically and that backlash from law enforcement spells doom for progressives who hope to upend the criminal legal system.

Instead reformers gained new ground in Philadelphia’s elections on Tuesday. Far from firing Krasner, voters gave him new allies.

Krasner triumphed 66 percent to 34 percent in the Democratic primary against Carlos Vega, a former prosecutor who attacked him for being too lenient and who was backed by the police union. Krasner won by even more lopsided margins in Philadelphia’s predominantly Black wards. He still faces Republican Chuck Peruto in a November general election, but he is heavily favored in this staunchly blue city. And he may be able to count on a more favorable judiciary going forward.

Seven of the eight open slots on the Court of Common Pleas, which handles major criminal proceedings in the city, went to candidates endorsed by Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive group that supported Krasner in the DA race. (These candidates will also go on to the general election, but winning the Democratic primary makes them likely to prevail. No Republicans filed for these positions.)

Krasner over his first term faced resistance from some judges, similar to the pushback that courts around the country have put up against reform-minded prosecutors. 

But Tuesday’s results signaled that the same activists who have transformed DA races in recent years are succeeding at putting the spotlight on other facets of the system as well. In Philadelphia, they pressured judicial candidates, typically prone to rhetorical platitudes that ignore the power of the office, to share their views on issues that have marked Krasner’s tenure and embrace reform-minded policies.

Since Krasner’s win in 2017, the list of prosecutors who have been elected on similar vows to reduce incarceration has grown year after year, reaching counties small and big, urban, suburban, and rural. In 2020, progressives won judicial elections with the goal of “flipping the bench” in Las Vegas and New Orleans. And yet the expectation that this movement’s downfall is just around the corner has not waned, fueled this year by the notion that voters will surely respond to a nationwide uptick in crime by blaming racial justice protests and criminal justice reforms, rather than the punitive practices that reformers like Krasner say have harmed communities and their economic livelihoods.

Many candidates who emerged victorious in Philadelphia’s judicial elections signaled during the campaign that they were sympathetic to those reform arguments.

Nick Kamau, a former public defender who now works in private practice, was asked an open-ended question in a candidate survey about his priorities as judge. He volunteered that he would be more skeptical of police. “Too often judges accept the testimony from law enforcement officers and Commonwealth expert witnesses without scrutinizing the veracity of the testimony,” he said. 

Kamau received the most votes in the 16-person field. (The top eight secured nominations for eight slots.)

Betsy Wahl, another former public defender who won on Tuesday, answered the same question by saying she would “ensure that my courtroom is a model for reducing mass incarceration by utilizing all possible alternatives to detention.” She added that she would also guard against an “excessive” reliance on probation; Pennsylvania burdens people with court supervision at record rates.

“Far too many people are living under oppressive limitations on their freedom,” Wahl said. 

These questionnaires were created by the Judge Accountability Table, a coalition of local groups that are working to change the legal system, including Reclaim Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Bail Fund, DecarceratePA, and the Abolitionist Law Center.

A similar effort succeeded this week in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh). Local reformers championed a slate of eight candidates who were running for that county’s Court of Common Pleas on platforms that included curbing sentencing, bail, and evictions. Five won the Democratic primary on Tuesday, including Lisa Middleman, a public defender who unsuccessfully ran for DA there in 2019 by saying she wanted to join forces with Krasner.

“Historically judges have used the discretionary power of the Court of Common Pleas to breed this system of mass incarceration,” Wasi Mohamed, a founding organizer with UNITE, told The Appeal: Political Report last month. “Now we have people who are actually advocates against it wanting to take these seats.” 

How judges use this discretionary power is directly relevant to the policy debates that have shaped Krasner’s tenure and defined his re-election bid. This too is where Tuesday’s results in Philadelphia vindicate his outlook.

Krasner, for instance, has set up an immigration counsel in the DA’s office who is meant to focus on how to charge some immigrant defendants or negotiate pleas with them in a way that shields them from deportation, which is a consequence that some criminal convictions carry for noncitizens. Vega attacked Krasner at a debate last week over such maneuvers, which judges can resist by rejecting deals that have been crafted to be immigration-neutral.

In their questionnaires, Kamau and Wahl both expressed support for this approach. “The judiciary must be mindful of the consequences of an adjudication or conviction for an undocumented person,” wrote Wahl.

Wahl also said “addiction is a disease and should never be criminalized.” As the Political Report analyzed last month, Krasner has outright dismissed a growing share of drug possession cases. Wahl also wants to see safe injection sites, as does Krasner. 

To tackle the city’s sky-high rate of people on probation, Krasner has capped the length of probation terms his office seeks. Vega was opposed to this cap, the Political Report reported in March, and here too judges can hinder the goal since they hold the ultimate power to sentence. 

Michele Hangley, another candidate who prevailed in Tuesday’s judicial primary, acknowledged in her questionnaire that “Pennsylvania imposes extraordinarily long periods of probation … [that] often make individuals more, rather than less likely to reoffend.” As a judge, she said, she would “take the issues with lengthy probationary tails into account when imposing sentences.” 

Reclaim Philadelphia had also endorsed one candidate for the city’s Municipal Court, which handles lower-level and initial proceedings in criminal and civil cases; that candidate won. Another slot went to a candidate who talked about the need for tenants to have legal counsel. Evictions are a growing issue in judicial elections. 

As progressives gain more power in local government, though, it will mean that Krasner has less room to blame shortcomings on other parts of the criminal legal system that have stalled change in the past. (He will still have to deal with the state attorney general, many judges with little interest in reform, and hostile Republican lawmakers.) The departure of Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney William McSwain, a chief antagonist of his first term, removes another layer of institutional opposition.

Krasner drew criticism from reformers throughout his first term for practices like seeking excessive bail in some cases, not going far enough in outright ending the prosecution of drug possession, and allowing that deportation should be on the table for some immigrant defendants. He has also faced calls to cut the budget of his office to help reduce the footprint of the criminal legal system in a manner that can outlast the politics of one DA.

Candidates elsewhere in the country—many of whom say they have drawn inspiration from Krasner—are proposing bigger reforms than he has on some of these issues, whether in promising to outright decline entire categories of cases or vowing to push for major budget cuts. 

Even the audacious proposition Krasner embodied—that fiery outsiders might be able to come in to shake up DA offices—has come to feel far more routine. The more provocative efforts are now happening in the battle for other offices such as judgeships, sheriffs, and even high bailiffs.

The reform movement has moved past needing Krasner as its emblem, and that’s perhaps the biggest victory for progressive advocates showcased by Tuesday’s elections.

The post Wins for Larry Krasner and New Allies Signal Reformers’ Growing Reach appeared first on Bolts.

It’s Election Day in Pennsylvania, and it’s a big one for criminal justice. Here’s your guide to how The Appeal has covered these elections in recent months.

Philadelphia is voting for its DA, and Larry Krasner’s reforms face a major test

Since he was elected district attorney of Philadelphia in 2017, former civil rights attorney Larry Krasner has become an emblem for the nationwide movement to upend the criminal legal system from the inside. The movement’s proponents have pointed to his victory and policies as inspiration; its detractors, which included officials in the Trump administration, have cited Krasner into one of their leading foils for progressive approaches to criminal justice.

Today Krasner faces a primary challenge from Carlos Vega, a former prosecutor whom he fired when he came into office. The Appeal delved into Philadelphia in recent months. Among its coverage is a three-part Political Report series delving into the contrasts and policy ramifications on three specific issues: probation, drug prosecutions, and immigration.

Pittsburgh is voting for its mayor, and the incumbent’s record faces scrutiny

Pittsburgh is experiencing a major housing crisis that the pandemic has aggravated. And the incumbent mayor faced a lot of criticism for his handling of the police response to protests last summer. Today those are major issues in the Democratic primary between Mayor Bill Peduto and state Representative Ed Gainey, who is running as a progressive.

Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) will also decide a referendum on prohibiting solitary confinement in jails

Solitary confinement is used in prisons and jails around the nation—plunging people into torturous conditions, often for very long periods—and it fuels the crisis of deaths in jails. To date few state or local governments have adopted restrictions on solitary confinement. (New York recently became the first state to ban its use for more than 15 consecutive days.) These abuses have led activists in Allegheny County to organize a ballot initiative to change jail conditions.

Progressives hope to make a splash in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia’s judge elections

Despite their tremendous power in the criminal legal system, local judges still largely escape the spotlight that has been turned in recent years on prosecutors. In 2020, though, progressive activists focused some of their energies on boosting judicial candidates who were often public defenders.  The candidates ran on reducing sentencing and avoiding bail, with some success in New Orleans, Cincinnati, and Las Vegas.

Will that budding movement continue gaining strength in Pennsylvania today? In Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) and Philadelphia, the state’s two most populous urban centers, activists have turned usually neglected judicial elections into key political battles. The Appeal covered their stakes—and explained what judges even do—in recent months.

The post Your Guide to Criminal Justice in Pennsylvania’s Elections Today appeared first on Bolts.

The opposition campaign against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, fueled heavily by the local police union and a group of former officers, has intensified in the lead-up to Tuesday’s primary election. “Our officers have given us carte blanche to spend whatever we need to spend to be able to remove this cancer from the District Attorney’s Office,” local Fraternal Order of Police president John McNesby told the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Billboards along I-95 call for Krasner to be fired, and earlier this month an FOP-sponsored ice cream truck stationed outside the DA’s office offered soft-serve as a reminder to voters of Krasner’s “soft on crime” policies. An accompanying truck was adorned with an anti-Krasner poster. 

“The FOP is spending a lot of money and throwing their weight around,” said Reuben Jones, a prominent Philadelphia activist who is formerly incarcerated. “The ice cream thing sounds so ridiculous but that’s the stuff that gets people’s attention.”

Since taking office in 2018, Krasner—a firebrand not shy of the spotlight—has become a national darling for criminal justice reform. One term isn’t enough time to completely overturn a deeply entrenched system, but Krasner has made strides. As a result of his policies, the size of the court-supervised population shrank by more than a third, the number of people who spent at least one night in jail declined by 22 percent over the first year of his cash bail reform, some immigrants have more protections from ICE, and his conviction integrity unit exonerated 20 wrongly convicted prisoners.

This is a sharp turn away from prior administrations. David Rudovsky, a longtime civil and criminal defense lawyer in Philadelphia, said in an email that a succession of Philadelphia chief prosecutors’ policies over decades  “led to mass incarceration, an insistence on the death penalty in a wide range of cases, a war on drugs that was counter-productive and resulted in high racial disparities of those prosecuted and sentenced, and a pattern of defending almost every conviction regardless of evidence of innocence or violations of the rights of the person convicted.”

On Tuesday, Philadelphia voters will decide if they want to continue on the new trajectory that Krasner initiated—primaries in this deeply blue city are typically de facto elections. And the pressure is high; this election is widely seen as a referendum on progressive prosecutors in Philadelphia and nationwide. 

The outcome is “critically important” to the national movement for criminal justice reform, says Jamila Hodge, director of the Reshaping Prosecution Program at the Vera Institute of Justice. “DA Krasner is probably one of the most well-known names when it comes to the progressive prosecutorial movement,” she said. Should he lose, “It could have a chilling effect on whether or not a person in another jurisdiction decides to run, to challenge the status quo.” Essentially, Krasner is so recognizable that his defeat could slow the momentum of the progressive prosecutor movement. 

Locally, though, activists are emphasizing the issues at stake over the symbolism of Krasner’s campaign.

“As much as it’s about Larry, it’s not about Larry,” said Sean West Damon, an organizer with Free the Ballot, a social justice alliance that supports Krasner. “It’s a referendum on the politics of mass incarceration that have led Philadelphia to being one of the most incarcerated cities in the country.”

Krasner’s bid for re-election comes at a time when the decades-long decline in violent crime in America has been upended by a confluence of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, that defies simple explanation. Murder rates spiked in cities across the country. Last year in Philadelphia, 499 people were murdered, a number 40 percent higher than the year before and the highest since 1990. The number of people shot rose by 53 percent in a single year according to the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, and are up 83 percent since 2017, the year before Krasner took office. There is no evidence that Krasner’s policies caused the spike in violence, but that may not stop some voters from retreating to the status quo of a punitive, tough-on-crime approach.

During his campaign, Vega has expressed general support for criminal justice reform while asserting that Krasner’s policies have harmed public safety. In a debate this month, Vega blamed the bloodshed in recent years on Krasner’s low conviction rates for gun cases and his cash bail policies that have led to fewer people in jail. 

But he told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial board: “I’m not going to reverse any policies.” Later, in a tweet, Vega said “that does not mean I don’t have my own policies in plans.”

The Appeal has reported on policies of Krasner’s office that Vega said he would reverse. In an interview with The Appeal: Political Report, he said he would resume charging for drug possession, except marijuana, and rely on traditional diversion courts, whereas Krasner’s policy is to drop possession charges if a person attends just one addiction treatment meeting. And Vega said he would not cap probation and parole sentences, a Krasner policy that has drastically reduced the number of people under supervision. 

Vega spent most of his career as a prosecutor under the administration of Lynne Abraham, whose hardline tactics and penchant for seeking the death penalty earned her the moniker the “Deadliest DA.” Abraham served from 1991 to 2010.

Recently, he has come under fire for his involvement in the civil case for exoneree Anthony Wright, who spent 25 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. Vega was one of two assistant DAs who retried Wright even after DNA evidence cleared him. Throughout his campaign, Vega has distanced himself from the case, saying that he came in at the 11th hour. The Innocence Project rebuked Vega’s claim that he had minor involvement.

Rudovsky, who was part of the team that handled the case, said he believes that Vega’s participation in the Wright retrial is “reflective of what you would get if he was DA. … Which is, I think, a return to the old regime.”

Many decarceral advocates share that view and are campaigning for Krasner to make sure that their hard-fought progress isn’t rolled back. Krasner has faced criticism from the left for not going further to reduce the use of cash bail and for continuing to charge some teens as adults—though he does this less frequently than his predecessors.

 “I don’t want to pretend like everything worked out the way we envisioned,” said Jones. “But the one thing I know is that without Krasner in office, we wouldn’t have made the progress that we made … the only way we can continue to work is to get him re-elected.”

The post The Battle for D.A. Is Testing Philadelphia’s Commitment to Reform appeared first on Bolts.

When President Donald Trump ramped up his campaign against cities that adopt sanctuary policies to protect immigrants from ICE, the Philadelphia district attorney’s office found itself on the front lines.

Larry Krasner, a former public defender and civil rights lawyer who was elected DA in 2017, worked with the office of Mayor Jim Kenney to expand the city’s existing sanctuary protections. In 2018, they cut ICE’s access to a local law enforcement database. Within his office, Krasner instituted policies to curb immigration consequences such as deportation for some immigrants accused of crimes.

But Philadelphia officials and the Trump administration continued battling. The Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain attacked the officials for their sanctuary policies, drawing a rebuke from Krasner, and the Department of Justice tried to withhold grant funding from the city. A judge struck down the attempt. Despite Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, cooperation with ICE still looms large in local politics, and it has emerged as a campaign issue in the DA election this year.

In the Democratic primary on Tuesday, Krasner faces Carlos Vega, a former prosecutor who is running with the support of the Fraternal Order of Police, Philadelphia’s police union. 

In a televised debate on May 5 hosted by the city’s NBC affiliate, the candidates sparred over ICE and a DA’s responsibility in upholding Philadelphia’s sanctuary status. 

“We want a prosecutor, not a social worker,” Vega said in the course of his answer.

“This is a sanctuary city,” Krasner said. “The mayor declared that.”

Whoever wins the Democratic primary will face Republican Chuck Peruto, who has also taken issue with Philadelphia’s sanctuary policies, in November.

“Worst case scenario, a lot of these measures get rolled back and we’re gonna see a spike in deportations again,” said Miguel E. Andrade, an activist and the former communications director of Philadelphia based immigrants’ rights group Juntos.  

In the May 5 debate, the two Democratic candidates were asked how they would use prosecutorial discretion regarding immigration laws. 

“We set up the first ever unit to make sure we could protect victims who are undocumented, witnesses we needed who are undocumented, but also in appropriate cases defendants whose criminal violation was minor but who faced unreasonably large consequences from immigration,” Krasner said. He noted that his office had helped break a 10-year contract “in which the city would immediately expedite information to ICE.”

Vega said in response that Krasner was harming the city “in terms of his dealing with undocumented people who have committed crime” by reducing charges on some immigrants who are “violent predators.” He added he would not share information with ICE regarding victims of crimes who may be immigrants. “Those people who are unleashed on my community, they are going to be prosecuted,” he added, “and if the federal government comes in and lends a helping hand, then so be it.” 

Asked in a follow-up if he would share information when ICE asks, Vega responded, “If it’s the information as to a defendant, yes.” He added, “But they don’t have to ask for that: That is in the computer banks of the police department.” 

“But if they want you to give it to them, you will?” the moderator asked once more. 

“Yeah, I have to, I have to follow the law,” Vega replied.

ICE does have robust data-gathering pipelines that penetrate sanctuary protections across the country. Law enforcement agencies put information such as biometrics and other data into networks that feed into ICE databases and alert the agency to information that it can use to target immigrants, such as people with outstanding orders of removal.

Still there are plenty of policies and decisions that local officials are making that limit the amount of data ICE is able to extract. Those are guardrails that new officials could lift. 

“Just because they have access to other databases doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do the work to limit their access,” said Andrade. “Why would you not … force ICE to use their own resources instead of Philadelphia municipal resources to do their dirty work for them?”

Vega’s campaign did not answer requests for comment on his views on immigration policy. The FOP, which has endorsed him, also did not reply to requests for comment.

Krasner moved to restrict the data that ICE can see soon after taking office. In August 2018, he worked with Mayor Kenney to block ICE from Philadelphia’s Preliminary Arraignment Reporting System (PARS). PARS is a database that records information about people arrested in the city. 

Through PARS, ICE was going after people arrested by the Philadelphia police who it suspected of breaking immigration laws, regardless of whether they ended up being accused or convicted of crimes. PARS does not list immigration status, but it does reveal whether an individual was born outside the United States. ICE is known to investigate foreign-born individuals caught in the nets of law enforcement as an alternative to knowing their legal statusa replacement, even though many foreign-born people are citizens or have legal status; movements in other places have tried to to stop law enforcement from asking about people’s birthplace or sharing that data. 

As of 2017, nearly 13 percent of Philadelphia’s population was born outside the United States. And the city’s ICE field office was arresting immigrants with no criminal convictions at a rate significantly higher than that of any other region. 

“Many immigrants are scared to participate in our criminal justice system because they are fearful that they or their loved ones will be deported,” the DA’s office said at the time to justify its decision to end PARS access. 

“Quite frankly, cooperating with ICE at this time makes our city less safe,” the statement added.

During his first term, Krasner also created an immigration counsel position in the DA’s office to protect some defendants from being deported as a result of a criminal conviction. 

The counsel’s job, as reported by WHYY in 2019, is to consider swapping charges and tailoring plea agreements to avoid triggering immigration consequences for some offenses including shoplifting, soliciting prostitution, or assault. 

Criminal convictions can prompt deportation proceedings, even for people with legal status. But whether they do will hinge on the sentence (jail terms can have immigration consequences if they last at least 365 days) and the exact charges prosecutors use. Most Pennsylvania theft statutes are grounds for deportation, for instance, but not all. This gives prosecutors the option to pursue charges and sentences that either shield noncitizens or threaten them with removal.

Krasner hired Caleb Arnold, an attorney who previously worked for an immigration law firm, to fill the role. When deciding whether to intervene in a case, Arnold weighs a number of factors, including the severity of the allegations, time spent in the U.S., dependent family members, and criminal records. 

High-level crimes like murder aren’t eligible for Arnold’s consideration. “When people are charged with low-level offenses and pose no risk to public safety, they should not face a threat of deportation,” Brandon Evans, Krasner’s campaign manager, said in an email exchange with The Appeal. 

Krasner said during his debate with Vega that “there are cases where it is appropriate for someone to be deported, because the crime is serious. And that’s fine.” 

Vega often draws a connection between his opponent’s approach to criminal justice and increased violence, pointing to the spike in shootings and homicides in Philadelphia in 2020. And during the debate, he did this in the course of his answer on ICE and immigration laws. “I’m here to protect people. You can’t even go to Macy’s on a Sunday morning without being raped,” he said. 

Evans said it would be “absurd” to suggest a link between the shootings and the DA’s sanctuary initiatives. “The office isn’t cutting plea deals where people charged with homicides receive misdemeanor convictions to avoid collateral consequences,” he said. 

Studies have shown that there is no detectable causal relationship between the presence of undocumented immigrant populations and crime.

And immigrants’ rights activists make the case that it is cooperation with ICE that endangers safety. Andrade fears that losing sanctuary protections could harm public safety as communication further breaks down between undocumented people and the police. 

Katia Pérez, an activist with Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive organization in the city, echoed those worries, mentioning her own experiences. Her mother was undocumented for the first eight years that she lived in the United States. And Pérez’s stepfather was abusive.

“The police weren’t called,” Pérez said. “She was afraid they would ask questions. And situations like that are not unique.” 

Pérez says Krasner is off to a great start. But she would like to see the DA’s office and other city officials push reform further.

“The threat of deportation should never be on the line,” Pérez said.

The post Philadelphia D.A. Candidates Debate ICE Cooperation Ahead of Election Day appeared first on Bolts.

Caroline Turner wants to reform the criminal legal system from the inside out—a familiar refrain to those following the progressive prosecutor movement. But Turner doesn’t want to be a top cop. She wants to be an arbiter of justice, which is why the former public defender is running for judge in Philadelphia.

“Judges have the power of life and death,” Turner told The Appeal: Political Report. “You can throw someone in jail with little evidence, they lose everything.” She says she would instead take steps to reduce incarceration.

On May 18, Philadelphia voters will choose eight judges to serve on the city’s Court of Common Pleas, which oversees the most serious cases, and three for the Municipal Court, which deals with lower-rung cases such as traffic violations and evictions. Turner is one of 20 candidates vying for the 11 open seats, a pool that advocates say has more candidates trending leftward than in past elections. And she’s one of nine candidates endorsed by the powerful leftist political organization Reclaim Philadelphia.

“This group of candidates are a more progressive lot than last time around,” said Katia Pérez, a mass liberation organizer for Reclaim. 

Several of the judge candidates who have gained support from activists have a background in public defense and are running on platforms that stand in stark contrast to the “lock ’em up” campaigns of the past. Reducing the use of cash bail, avoiding lengthy sentences, and bolstering tenant protections in eviction cases are some of the promises they’ve made on the campaign trail.

No judge candidate is likely to be “completely in line” with the abolitionist values that Reclaim holds, Pérez says. So when it comes to making endorsements, “we want to know, do they understand that in Philadelphia specifically—the poorest big city [in the U.S.]—what comes with poverty? A lot of trauma. A lot of mental health issues, a lot of health issues. Homelessness. When we were talking with these candidates we wanted to be sure they understood who would be standing in front of them.”

This is the second cycle where Pérez and her colleagues have recruited lawyers to run for the bench and endorsed candidates. The group arrived at its endorsements after interviewing candidates and people familiar with their work, then sharing the findings with Reclaim’s roughly 600 members, who voted on which candidates to support. This approach differs from the political hobnobbing that Pérez says usually characterizes these elections. 

Similar shifts are evident in a small but growing number of jurisdictions including New Orleans, Clark County, Nevada, and Hamilton County, Ohio. “We’ve seen some real progressives elected to the bench. So I think that as … people organize better and start to really focus on that place of power, there is a lot of potential coming,” said Premal Dharia, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Institute to End Mass Incarceration. “I’m excited to see the beginning of what looks like a real movement around judges.” 

—

In 2018 a group of progressive community organizations, including Reclaim, formed the Judge Accountability Table to inform the public about judicial candidates. The coalition held virtual forums in March where every candidate, including some without activist endorsements, agreed that cash bail was weaponized against poor defendants. “To me it is the result of systemic discrimination and racism,” said Wendi Barish, a labor and employment lawyer who is part of the Reclaim slate. 

George Donnelly, who works for the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Caucus and has helped Reclaim recruit judicial candidates, says that’s a big departure from the status quo. “You look at the bench now and it’s largely people from private practice and prosecutors. …  They don’t have the kind of experience working with marginalized communities, working with the accused, working with folks on cases that aren’t economically viable,” said Donnelly, a former public interest lawyer. “It’s important to have folks on the bench that understand that.” 

Winning a judicial seat is practically a lifetime appointment in Pennsylvania. After each judge’s 10-year term, voters answer a simple “yes” or “no” to choose whether that person should be retained for another term. It is exceedingly rare for a judge to not be retained. So the stakes are high in terms of longevity of the winner’s tenure and because of the power they wield. 

Sentencing is one of the clearest displays of judicial power. Though prosecutors most often set the stage for what sentence a convicted person receives, it’s ultimately up to the judge. A 2018 report by the Abolitionist Law Center found that Pennsylvania had the fifth-highest proportion of people serving life without parole sentences in the U.S., and that Philadelphia courts were driving that trend. Pérez says that several of the candidates Reclaim endorsed made clear “they did not agree with how often the sentencing of life without parole is given” and promised to prioritize alternatives. But none renounced life without parole sentences altogether.

The vast majority of criminal cases are decided without a jury, and for civil cases, judges are the sole arbiter. “In the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia and municipal court,” Donnelly said, “who is on the bench and what procedures they decide to put in place gets to decide who gets evicted and who stays in their homes, who gets to get compensated for the wrongs that happened to them in their workplace I say to folks all the time, there is no government official that affects your life more than the judge overseeing your case.”

In housing disputes, including eviction cases, landlords are far more likely to be able to afford a lawyer than tenants. During one of the Judge Accountability Table’s candidate forums, Michael Lambert vowed that he would refuse to arbitrate tenant-landlord disputes until the tenant has legal representation. He added that there are programs available to help tenants, but they need to be far more robust. “We have to have more attorneys that are available for the tenants,” he said.

Judges are also important players in the movement for progressive prosecution according to Dharia. She points to Arlington, Virginia, where Commonwealth’s Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti made it a policy to not prosecute marijuana possession when she took office in 2020. Judges balked and required that her prosecutors write a case-specific explanation for every instance—a blanket rule that was never required of prior administrations. 

Dehghani-Tafti brought the dispute before the state’s Supreme Court. Justices rejected her attempt to rein in local judges, saying they could not rule so broadly without a specific case.

“The public defenders and prosecutors in many parts of Virginia have aligned goals, at least to a degree, and it’s really just that there is resistance from the bench,” Dharia said. In Philadelphia, District Attorney Larry Krasner has met with similar resistance from judges, who initially chastised his prosecutors for being too lenient.

But judges are also in the position to hold prosecutors accountable for doing what they promised on the campaign trail. 

“A huge issue with these progressive prosecutors is that they have big plans and policies, but that’s not actually how it’s playing out in court,” Dharia said. 

To this end, many candidates in Philadelphia’s judicial races have their eyes on cash bail. Krasner’s office stopped asking for bail for a number of low-level crimes early in his tenure, but Turner says there are still too many people incarcerated pretrial in Philadelphia. In particular, she disagrees with Krasner’s COVID-era policy of asking bail commissioners to set an impossibly high $999,999 bail—a dollar less than $1 million, which triggers certain holding conditions—as an attempt to implement a binary system akin to Washington D.C. A person is either a threat to the public, or they are not, she says. Turner doesn’t think that Krasner’s office is making well-informed decisions about who needs to be jailed, and she supports eliminating cash bail entirely. 

Bail commissioners don’t have to be lawyers, hearings often last just a few minutes, and defendants often have little to no support from a defense attorney. Turner says that if she is elected, she will advocate for more robust bail hearings to follow this initial procedure.  

“If a defense attorney knew that I was in the Court of Common Pleas, they could file a motion to reconsider bail,” she said. “We have to keep everyone to a high standard.”

—

Despite the position’s importance, running for judge can be a hard sell to progressives. For one, judges don’t have the same autonomy that an elected prosecutor does. “They can’t lobby for legislation, can’t lobby for social change movements, can’t be overtly political in that way,” said Donnelly. But he believes that judges can still have a political impact: “Judges have agendas and ideologies, whether it’s a municipal court judgeship in Philadelphia or the Supreme Court of the United States, you can craft decisions and make decisions that push a certain ideology and push a certain agenda.”

And the race itself is less glamorous and it’s harder for a candidate to distinguish themselves by their values: It is a down-ballot election that voters don’t often pay attention to. In Philadelphia, the outcomes of judicial elections have historically been influenced by two factors: where a candidate’s name appears on the ballot and whether they have an endorsement from the Democratic Party. The first is completely arbitrary—decided by a lottery which, for municipal court elections, entails picking names out of a coffee can. And the latter requires politicking in circles where public defenders and public interest lawyers are not often insiders. 

“The people that are in the trenches aren’t going to bar association meetings or these political networking events, you’re at the jail. You’re in the courtroom,” said Jessica Brand, the founder of a social justice consulting firm, the Wren Collective, and a former public defender who was an adviser to the Flip The Bench campaign in New Orleans, which supported a slate of progressive judges. (Brand was legal director of The Justice Collaborative, the predecessor of The Appeal Media.)

Money is a barrier, too. When Donnelly has tried to recruit progressive candidates, he has repeatedly found that the finances required to run a campaign were an obstacle—not just in terms of getting enough donations, which Donnelly says a grassroots infrastructure in the city could help with, but rather affording the time it takes. “They would have to take a leave from work, and do a full-time campaign for five months,” he said. For a private attorney this may not be a challenge, but the situation is different for public defenders and public interest lawyers. “Some of these folks had families, some didn’t know if their job would let them do that, or couldn’t go five months without a paycheck.”  

Pérez is aware of these obstacles; she and her colleagues are working to figure out how to help candidates overcome them. “We are very determined to make sure that we work on identifying and building a pipeline for more candidates who are of the community—the immigrant community, the Black and brown community,” she said. This includes financial infrastructure for a campaign, as well as connecting potential candidates with political power holders. 

“We’re figuring out how much of an impact we can have, the movement can have,” she said. “What we’re always keeping in mind is the long-term effects that the judicial system—the carceral system—is having on Philadelphians.”

Also read our preview of the May 18 elections for judge in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh).

This article was updated to clarify that in Philadelphia’s judicial elections only the municipal court ballot lottery involves a coffee can.

The post Philly’s Judge Elections This Month Have the Power To Change the City appeared first on Bolts.

The support of friends, family, and social service providers catalyzed Sterling Johnson’s recovery from substance use disorder. “When they looked at me and they saw hope in me instead of treating me like shit,” he said. “I would say that dignity, respect, having people believe in you. Those are the things that make you want to change.”

Johnson is a lawyer and housing advocate in Philadelphia, where District Attorney Larry Krasner has made strides toward decriminalizing simple drug possession by dismissing an increasingly large portion of these cases. Johnson sees this as key to decriminalizing substance use.

“Let’s humanize every single person,” he said. “You don’t put them in a box and they get better from the box.” 

Philadelphia could step back into the mainstream of the war on drugs should Krasner lose the May 18 Democratic primary—a de facto general election in this deeply blue city. His opponent is Carlos Vega, a career prosecutor who Krasner fired upon taking office. Vega has more of a law-and-order stance; he favors sending drug possession cases to drug court, rather than dropping charges outright. Drug courts can bring alternatives to incarceration, but their eligibility is restricted, and people remain under the threat of prosecution or incarceration if they relapse during treatment.

“Correctional facilities are detrimental to a person’s health … Being incarcerated has a huge impact on a person’s life, even more than the use disorder,” said Danielle Ompad, professor of epidemiology at New York University’s School of Global Public Health. She said that prosecuting drug offenses isn’t working and that “we could be putting that money into poverty alleviation, building an economic safety net.” 

Upon taking office, Krasner stopped prosecuting marijuana possession. Then, in late 2019, he established a policy of dropping every drug possession charge if the person shows proof of participating in treatment. The office defines treatment broadly, and does not require the recovery program to be court-monitored. Attending a Narcotics Anonymous meeting would suffice for someone caught with cocaine, for example, and such meetings are free and widely offered in the city. The office also does not wait to see if the person successfully completes the program before dismissing the case, a marked contrast with drug courts.

“We weren’t going to keep a hammer over their head to be sure that they completed X number of days,” Krasner told The Appeal: Political Report. “We know that often people are not ready for treatment, or treatment fails them the first time. But at least go so that you know where to get [it].”  

The share of drug possession charges that were outright dismissed by the DA’s office climbed as soon as Krasner took charge in January 2018. It then rose again after he made it a policy in late 2019 to drop charges for people who seek treatment regardless of whether they enter drug court or complete a program. 

Comparing January through March 2020 (before local courts shut down due to COVID-19) to the equivalent time period in 2017 (the last year before Krasner entered office), the share of drug possession charges that were dismissed increased from 19 percent in 2017 to 54 percent in 2020. This jump corresponds to hundreds of dismissed cases.

The share of dismissed charges surged further when the pandemic began, but pandemic data is tricky because courts were non-functioning and many prosecutors dismissed low-level cases more broadly. Between January and March of 2021, as Krasner called for police to make fewer arrests for low-level crimes, the office dismissed 87 percent of drug possession charges. 

Krasner has made other changes to enhance harm reduction, like declining to prosecute anyone for possessing buprenorphine, a drug that is prescribed to quell cravings for someone weaning off opioid use but is also sold on the black market. Also he sanctioned fentanyl test strips, which are used to detect the lethal chemical and were previously considered drug paraphernalia. And alongside other city officials, he has advocated for the construction of a safe injection site to reduce overdose deaths.

Vega says he will continue to not prosecute cases involving marijuana possession. When it comes to other forms of substance use, though, he wants to take the Philadelphia DA’s office in the opposite direction. He has spoken against bringing a safe injection site to the city, and he is campaigning to return to the long-established drug diversion programs administered by a drug court, where a person’s chance to circumvent incarceration depends on whether they can abide the program’s conditions and achieve sobriety. 

“If you’re caught with a drug that I believe is going to destroy your life, lead you to a dark place and also affect the community, I’m going to put you into a program,” Vega told the Political Report. “And once you complete that program, get the help you need, the counseling you need, I drop the charges, and I seal that record.”

However, this type of court-monitored diversion program is increasingly selective, only admitting people with no prior convictions, and it comes with onerous requirements such as reporting for urine tests that can impede a person’s ability to make a living. Critics say that these programs often lead to incarceration when people trip up and fail to meet those conditions—often with steeper sentences than if they had just been sentenced in the first place.

“For people who have substance use disorders, relapsing can be part of their recovery,” said Ompad.

Some local activists and public health advocates are also pressing Krasner to go further and dismiss drug possession arrests without conditions. “Most people who use drugs don’t need treatment,” said Ompad. “If someone is picked up for marijuana or cocaine possession and they use maybe once a month or once a week, they don’t really have a substance use problem.”

Brooke Feldman, a board member with the Philadelphia-based harm reduction nonprofit Angels in Motion, says she supports what Krasner is doing, but thinks that he should drop the treatment requirement, however small it may be. “Mandating something isn’t the way to go,” she said.

She explained that one negative experience with a treatment facility can become a barrier to recovery—so a person should only enter when they’re ready, and through a program that is right for them. “If someone goes to a meeting because they had to, it just gives them a picture of something that they don’t want to do in the future. That can set them back,” she said.  “Or if someone goes and gets an assessment for treatment and has a negative experience, they sat and waited for eight hours, in withdrawal, got treated like shit, in the end was told, ‘Sorry we don’t have any beds available for you.’ That kind of stuff sets people back.” 

Krasner has also faced criticism from the Philadelphia Bail Fund, which slammed him in a July 2020 report for asking judges to set impossibly high bail for people charged with, among other things, drug possession with intent to distribute. This is a charge that Krasner doesn’t plan to stop prosecuting, but he had implied it would no longer trigger pretrial detention when he made promises to only seek bail for violent offenses.

Other prosecutors nationwide have moved toward policies of not prosecuting drug possession, including DAs in Boston, Seattle, and Baltimore, where State Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s office halted prosecuting drug possession during the pandemic as a measure to reduce jail population size. In response to a subsequent drop in crime rates, Mosby’s office recently announced that these changes are permanent.

Taking it a step further, in a January 29th letter to his constituents, newly elected Travis County, Texas, District Attorney Jose Garza said that he would not prosecute people for possessing small amounts of drugs, but also for selling those amounts, unless the case includes violent conduct. 

In Oregon, Multnomah County (Portland) District Attorney Mike Schmidt was a strong advocate for the new state law that decriminalizes drug possession, making it the first state in the country to do so. The 2020 reform was inspired in part by Portugal, which decriminalized personal amounts of drugs in 2001.

Krasner says he would eventually like to have a similar model. In Portugal, if a police officer finds a person in possession of drugs, rather than send that person to jail, they typically direct them to a local commission that includes a lawyer, social worker, and a doctor. This team will educate the person about available treatment, including medical and social services. 

The primary rationale for Portugal’s law change was to destigmatize drug use, encourage treatment for those who needed it, and cut down on needless incarcerations. Since it was implemented, drug use has decreased, and the number of overdose deaths has declined. Meanwhile, the number of people entering drug rehabilitation programs has increased. 
Portugal’s government implemented this system in the midst of a heroin epidemic that Philadelphia is mirroring today. The city is one of the hardest hit by the opioid overdose epidemic. A staggering 1,150 people were reported to die from overdose in Philadelphia in 2019, with 80 percent of them attributed to opioids.

This article has been corrected to reflect that Krasner’s predecessor did not have a policy of declining to prosecute marijuana charges; Krasner established this policy upon taking office. This article has also been updated to include that Vega says he would retain this policy and not prosecute marijuana cases.

The post Philadelphia D.A. Race Could Ramp Up the War on Drugs appeared first on Bolts.

When rapper Meek Mill was reincarcerated for a minor probation violation in 2017—after spending more than a third of his life under court supervision—no one familiar with the Philadelphia probation system was surprised. To the lawyers, advocates, and people under supervision who wrestle with this system, this case was an outlier only because it made national headlines. Mass supervision is a seldom discussed product of the tough-on-crime era in the United States, but today it is a leading driver of incarceration.

Philadelphia is at the center of this machine. This city’s rate of people under court supervision (including probation and parole) is by far the largest of any large city in the United States, according to a 2019 analysis by the Philadelphia Inquirer. The paper’s yearlong investigation concluded that this dubious standing was due to a confluence of regressive laws, judicial culture, and lack of oversight.

That dynamic has begun to change, though. Reining in the size of the probation and parole population was among the goals of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner when he came into office in 2017, and during his first term the population has decreased by more than a third.

“Supervision for probation and parole, in general, is not just ineffective, it causes failure,” Krasner told The Appeal: Political Report. “It causes crime, it causes people to lose their jobs and not be able to support their families and not rehabilitate, and go back to jail.”

An upcoming election could roll back the gains he has made. In a May 18 Democratic primary, largely seen as a referendum on criminal justice reform, Krasner will face off against Carlos Vega, a career prosecutor who was one of the 31 attorneys that Krasner fired early in his tenure in an effort to change the office’s culture. A Republican candidate, defense attorney Charles “Chuck” Peruto Jr., is aiming to challenge Krasner in the November general election if Vega loses the primary.

Vega, who is backed by police unions and running with tough-on-crime rhetoric, is opposed to one of Krasner’s key reforms: capping probation lengths.

Even with probation caps and other changes in place, the number of people in Philadelphia on probation is still significant: Based on BJS figures, Philadelphia’s rate of community supervision is nearly one third higher than the national average.

Krasner came into a situation where probation reform was already underway—the public defender had been working on it for years, and was beginning to make some traction thanks to a multimillion-dollar grant from the MacArthur Foundation. But Krasner’s approach to probation represented an about face from his predecessor’s.

“Philadelphia might be ground zero for mass supervision in America,” said Vincent Schiraldi co-director of the Columbia Justice Lab and the former commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation. But, he added, “Larry is helping it dig out from under that.”

—

Meek Mill’s story has almost become a folk legend for criminal justice reformers. The rapper, whose real name is Robert Rihmeek Williams, initially served five months in jail for gun and drug charges when he was 19. He was incarcerated over a decade later for violations of the probation conditions that were added to the sentence. The violations that kept him churning through a Philadelphia courtroom included not asking for permission to leave the state to go on tour and failing a drug test. 

The national uproar that followed Meek Mill’s 2017 incarceration paved the way for his release and his charges being dropped—and it shifted focus toward millions of people, disproportionately Black, who are in his shoes as probationers. At the end of 2018, the most recent year that data is available, 3.5 million people in the United States were on probation, or one in 72 adults, representing more people than in jail and prison combined. 

Technical probation violations are common because supervision typically comes with monthly fees, mandatory meetings, drug tests, and other requirements like completing certain programs. These conditions can make compliance difficult, particularly for low-income people, and lead to mistakes that land people in jail or prison.

Probation began as a humane alternative to incarceration. “It took a sharp turn to the more control, surveillance, punitive model in the ’70s,” said Schiraldi. “They started to borrow some of the more punitive elements” of the legal system. 

Studies have shown that short periods of supervision can have benefits. However, if someone is going to reoffend, they are most likely to do so early on, and the positive effects for lower-risk supervisees diminish in the second and third year—the requirements of probation hinder a person’s ability to lead a productive life, and they become more likely to be reincarcerated for minor violations. More than one in 10 state prison admissions are the result of a technical violation of probation such as missing appointments with their probation officer or testing positive for marijuana.

A recent analysis of data from Oregon and South Carolina by Pew Charitable Trusts found that 90 percent of people who make it through the first year of probation supervision without rearrest could have had their sentences shortened without diminishing a community’s safety, as measured by rearrests. 

As legal scholar Cecelia M. Klingele has written, “community supervision is not an alternative to imprisonment, but only a delayed form of it.”

This type of research informed Krasner’s mindset regarding probation when he came into office. His approach to decreasing the load involves first working with the public defender’s office and the courts to streamline early termination of supervision for people who they determine no longer need it. 

Byron Cotter, director of alternative sentencing at the Defender Association of Philadelphia, says this is not a new concept. 

“For years we’ve been filing termination petitions, termination of probation early when a client is doing well,” he said. But, he added, Krasner has been a much better partner than past administrations. Cotter said that this year his office filed over 800 petitions, as of Feb. 9 when he talked with the Political Report. Of those, 95 percent have been granted early termination. 

“He has assigned a specific DA to respond to those petitions, so the responses are quicker,” he says. Previously the petitions would ping-pong between the court and the DA’s office making for a slow and unproductive system. 

Cotter believes the new system has enough support that it could be a permanent feature of the office, even if Krasner doesn’t win a second term. 

“I’m hopeful that even if there is a change, that the person that comes into that new position will understand this now,” he said. 

Vega agrees with Krasner that if a person is doing well under supervision, that person should be rewarded with a shorter sentence. “I’ll start from the beginning. You get clean and sober, I’m reducing your probation. When you get your GED or associate’s, I’m reducing your probation,” he told the Political Report. “And finally when you get that paycheck job where you say, ‘Look, I’m paying taxes to pave our roads and put into our schools,’ I terminate that probation.”

He advocates for a more individualized program for each supervisee, tailoring their requirements to what they need to get back on their feet—an approach that New York City has largely been able to implement because the caseload is so much smaller, so there are more resources for each person. 

Where the two candidates differ is on the front end. “A short probation isn’t helping you,” said Vega. “You need a roadmap to success.” This stance is in line with the policies of Krasner’s predecessors and counters Krasner’s guidelines that call for shorter supervision sentences. 

Krasner directed his line attorneys to stop adding probation after incarceration, referred to as a probation “tail.” The attorneys have discretion to make decisions outside his guidelines with the approval of a supervisor if an individual case merits it. 

When it comes to probation as an alternative to incarceration, the guidelines put a cap at three years of supervision for felony charges. And for misdemeanor cases the ceiling is one year of supervision unless state law requires more. For a technical violation of supervision conditions, Krasner’s prosecutors are directed to not ask for more than 60 days of incarceration. Also, his office has simply charged fewer low-level nonviolent crimes than the prior administration. Between 2018 and the present, the average number of drug convictions decreased by more than 50 percent compared to the 2015 to 2017 average, while the average number of dismissals increased by more than half.

Krasner’s office has tracked future years of court supervision—that is, years imposed assuming a person does not get a violation. The drop in the number of years of supervision sentenced from 2015 to 2017 compared to 2018 to date dropped by more than half. The effect of shorter sentences will most likely be more significant  in coming years, as shorter terms of supervision are completed. 

“I’ve seen this pattern over and over again in criminal justice reform,” Krasner said, “it’s much easier to change things and do them well in the future than it is to go back in time and fix things.”

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