“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.

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.

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.”

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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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