Marilyn Mosby takes a selfie with an admirer Wednesday after she took part in a panel on police misconduct and reform during the Congressional Black Caucus conference in Washington. (Photo by Nicole Pilsbury/Maryland Matters)
Former Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, in what may have been one of her first public appearances since getting off home detention, talked about the need for police reform and made her own case to an appreciative audience Wednesday in Washington.
Mosby was part of a panel of lawmakers, lawyers and advocates at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation conference who talked about flaws with public safety in America and envisioned a better future.
The audience was generally receptive to the panel’s arguments that despite some improvements, the criminal justice system and policing in America still has room for improvement. But they were especially enthusiastic about Mosby, who was convicted on federal charges that she says were brought because she pursued convictions of Baltimore police officers.
Audience members chimed in with a “That’s right!” or “Yeah!” as Mosby answered panel questions, and the end of each of her answers was met with an eruption of applause and cheers. Peoplel swarmed around her as the panel concluded, eager to snap a picture with or have a chat with the former attorney.
Mosby said she was not surprised to be invited to speak on the panel, saying in a brief interview afterwards that, “There was a lot of change enacted as a direct result of what happened in Baltimore City.”
“Baltimore was at the forefront of this progressive movement,” she said.
The panel discussed the nationwide protests and reform efforts that followed the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore — a crisis Mosby came face-to-face with as the city’s top prosecutor.
The two high-profile deaths in police custody sparked national conversations about police accountability.
“Both cities remind us that public safety is not just about officers on patrol or prosecutions in the courtroom, but about trust, community and a shared belief that every person deserves equal justice under the law,” said Rep. Wesley Bell (D-Mo.), the panel moderator.
Gray’s death was four months into Mosby’s term in office. She and her team worked to charge the officers involved in Gray’s death and the U.S. Justice Department exposed the police department’s discriminatory practices — leading to nationwide reform, Mosby said at the panel. Those reforms included things like body cameras, de-escalation policies and dashboard cameras, she said.
Mosby said that prosecutors were not prosecuting police, and there was a lack of accountability in America at the time. She got death threats and became a “target of the same system I represented” following the prosecution of the officers, she said on the panel.
Bell also described Mosby as a target while asking a question about how prosecuting cases can change public safety and justice perspectives.
Mosby is on three years of supervised release — with one of those being the year of home confinement that concluded in June 2025 — for perjury convictions related to the purchase of two Florida homes.
She said the federal government was not able to find anything after interrogating her neighbors, family, friends, hairdresser and her children’s dance instructor.
“I had no idea that they could come back and say that I am now going to be the target of a criminal investigation for a statute that has never been legally used against anyone else in this country up to this day, and for a vague statute that has never been legally defined by neither Congress nor the IRS,” Mosby said during the panel discussion.
Former Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby. (Photo by William J. Ford/Maryland Matters)
Jason Armstrong, a retired Ferguson police chief who was appointed five years after Brown’s death, spoke on the panel about seeing the payoff and community impact from working to create a “culture of accountability.”
“Like Mrs. Mosby said, the sacrifices that I’m having to put forth in this are worth something,” he said.
Panelist Justin Hansford, a Howard University law professor and the director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center, also referenced Mosby in one of his answers, emphasizing her point that “the justice system isn’t just.”
Mosby said that the federal government opened an investigation on her two months after publishing this Washington Post op-ed that criticized President Donald Trump’s decision and threats to send federal law enforcement officers to cities around the country in July 2020.
“They did it because they wanted to get me out of office, and they were successful,” she said. “Justice is always worth the price paid for its pursuit. I would not do anything different.”
Voters leave the Bricolage Academy gym after casting their ballots in New Orleans, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (Photo by Matthew Perschall/Louisiana Illuminator)
NEW ORLEANS –Nziki Wiltz, buzzed around a crowded job fair Sept. 4 at the headquarters for the criminal justice reform nonprofit Voice of the Experienced (VOTE), helping people apply for jobs.
“We’re making copies for those that need copies … whatever you need,” Wiltz said, “we’re going to make sure that if we don’t have it, we help you get it.”
Wiltz, a regional policy coordinator for VOTE, said that having a racketeering charge brought against her by the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office over six years ago taught her how vulnerable people are to the criminal justice system. The charge was later dropped.
“I lost everything, and then I started learning, studying the law and getting [involved with] more organizations that do work like VOTE,” Wiltz said.
Now, after setting up VOTE’s job fair designed to connect people with criminal convictions with employers willing to hire people with that history, Wiltz and her colleagues have their eyes set on the city’s upcoming election.
Wiltz and her colleagues are advocating for voters to vote to approve an amendment to the city charter to protect people with a conviction history from laws that “arbitrarily and unreasonably” discriminate against them. They hope that the Fair Chance Amendment, as proponents of the measure call it, will serve as a declaration of the city’s residents in support of giving people with past convictions a second chance.
The amendment, if passed, will amend the municipal Bill of Rights, a largely aspirational section of the charter, that “reflects the beliefs, convictions and goals of the citizens of New Orleans,” according to the document.
Although it’s not clear that the amendment will result in any immediate, concrete change for formerly incarcerated people, supporters say it will serve as a foundation to combat discrimination against people with convictions on their record.
“If we vote yes on that, it enshrines a protected class of people with conviction history,” said Ronald Marshall, chief policy analyst at VOTE.
Marshall, who found work with VOTE after getting out of prison, said that he constantly meets people who are getting turned down for jobs and can’t find housing because they were discriminated against due to their status as a formerly incarcerated person.
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans has some sort of criminal record, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Roughly 45 million have had misdemeanor convictions and an estimated 19 million have had a felony conviction. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), the statistical arm of the Department of Justice, Louisiana was ranked 2nd in the nation for imprisonment rates in 2022, behind Mississippi.
Research done by the Historic New Orleans Collection has shown how Louisiana has long been a leader in incarceration in the United States. And a study released by the BJS in 2021, revealed that no more than 40% of formerly incarcerated people they tracked were employed at any given time over a four year period between 2010-2014.
“When people are leaving incarceration and coming back to their communities, a job and housing are the two major things that they’ve got to get sorted out in order to restabilize, and oftentimes, you can’t get a job without a house and you can’t get a house without a job,” Monique Blossom, director of policy and communications at the Louisiana Fair Housing Action Center told Verite News in an interview before the job fair.
A streetcar rolls past a voting precinct in New Orleans. (Photo by Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)
During a public hearing at City Hall in April for the ballot measure, several supporters of the issue shared how a criminal conviction can stay with a person, making finding a job and housing difficult.
“This amendment is just not about a fairness, it’s about giving our people, our neighbors, a real second chance,” said Ciara Green, a business owner and volunteer with VOTE who spoke at the hearing. “It’s about ending the sentence at the prison gate, not extending it to every job interview, every housing application and every ‘no’ that gets thrown at someone who’s already paid the price.”
Marshall helped advocate in City Hall for the ballot measure. He said that the progress the city made this year, sharpening the city’s existing “Ban the Box” ordinance, has already laid the foundation to support people with a history of conviction when they’re applying for jobs with the city and city contractors. The “Ban the Box” ordinance was originally passed in 2018, and it required the city and its contractors to interview candidates before checking for a criminal record.
This summer, the City Council passed an ordinance that amended the city’s Ban the Box ordinance, adding five criteria that the city’s hiring managers would have to consider before denying a formerly incarcerated person a position. The ordinance also created a means for job applicants to sue in District Court if they feel they were denied a position in violation of the code.
Marshall said that voting to enshrine formerly incarcerated people as a protected class in city law — which the amendment would do, supporters say — ups the ante by creating further legal foundations to protect people with histories of conviction, especially where it does not clash with state law.
“We are preempted from creating local laws on housing. We are preempted from creating local laws on licensures. … We are preempted in a lot of areas by state law,” Marshall said, arguing that in areas where state or federal law does not prevent it, the measure’s passage could create space for formerly incarcerated people to challenge potentially discriminatory practices.
“We’ve got to end the permanent punishment,” Marshall said.
Councilmember Oliver Thomas introduced the changes to the Ban the Box law and the ordinance to amend the Bill of Rights. Dominique Lang Jackson, his legislative director, said the two pieces of legislation work together to protect formerly incarcerated people from discrimination. The latter, if passed by the voters, “will reflect the beliefs of our citizens,” Lang Jackson wrote, and the former “protect(s) formerly incarcerated individuals from discrimination based on conviction history in employment/contracting with the City of New Orleans.”
City Council President JP Morrell, who told Verite News that he “fully supports the amendment on the ballot,” also clarified the limitations of the amendment, in a previous hearing.
“When we amend the charter, that affects the city, not private industries,” he said during a City Council Criminal Justice Meeting in April.
At the Sept. 4 job fair, which offered a wide range of assistance from resume writing to offering free business clothes, others lauded the amendment and what it might be able to achieve for formerly incarcerated individuals.
Local entrepreneur, Sess 4-5, was at the event to promote it on social media and encourage some of his followers to come out and look for a job. When asked about the ballot initiative he said that he was in favor of it.
“It’ll help take the barriers off of folks who were incarcerated, who changed their lives and [are] in the process of becoming productive citizens, so that you won’t have those obstacles or barriers placed on you,” he said. “If you qualify for the job, you should be able to get the job.”
Jordan Bridges, organizing director at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, was there to tell attendees what services his organization offers.
“As a workers’ center focused on economic justice and labor justice we wanted to make sure that those workers specifically have access to resources in case things go wrong at work,” Bridges said.
The NOWCRJ is preparing for their own event to help people impacted by the justice system — a warrant clinic scheduled for Sept. 20. At the clinic, attendees will be able to address outstanding misdemeanor warrants and associated fines and fees and reinstate their Louisiana drivers licenses with the Office of Motor Vehicles.
With respect to the ballot question, Bridges said they are urging everyone to vote yes.
“Our goal, for even our own warrant clinic, is to make sure that we address systemic issues, we dissolve barriers to employment, and this Fair Chance Amendment gives formerly incarcerated people a chance to participate more fully in society,” Bridges said.
A new program that aims to provide an exit ramp from the revolving-door justice system will boost access to services for New Yorkers in need with $3 million from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office.
The investment in the Fortune Society-run program aims to fill holes in the city’s social safety net where they’re perhaps most clearly displayed — in arraignments. It will see courtroom-based outreach workers engage people arrested on low-level offenses when they would otherwise leave the courthouse with only a subway ticket, a return date and nowhere to go.
Bragg told the Daily News the “courtroom navigators” program seeks to recognize and remedy the life challenges that cause so many to remain tangled up in the criminal justice system, released time and again back into the circumstances that led them to offend.
“This is a cycle that many of us have seen for years and years,” he said. “They can literally put that person in a Fortune Society vehicle and ride with that person to a bed, provide that person with a bed and find out what else that person needs. … Recidivism being addressed by stabilizing people.”
Navigators, as they’re known, will staff Manhattan arraignments seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m., offering to help people dealing with issues like poverty, homelessness and mental illness navigate complex paths to housing, substance use disorder and behavioral health treatment and other immediate and long-term services at the start of their cases.
The voluntary program adds a layer to a tattered patchwork of mental health services available to criminal defendants. It will operate parallel to court-mandated treatment interventions like supervised release, an alternative to jail focused on ensuring someone’s return to court that’s had limited success.
The city’s ad-hoc mental health courts — operated at will by a handful of judges — have shown strong results diverting participants away from the justice system permanently by bringing together a team to tailor the resolution of their case to their ongoing needs. However, admission is highly limited due to a lack of funding and has drawn criticism for the requirement that a participant admit guilt.
New York County Criminal Court at 100 Centre St. in Manhattan in 2020. (AP)
There are fewer options for those with mental health needs who fight their cases from jail.
According to city data, more than half of the roughly 6,000 people incarcerated on Rikers Island have a diagnosed mental illness — with one in five classified as severe.
While some efforts to remedy the situation have been made, according to the most recent report by federal monitor Steve Martin, the increased need for mental health services at the dysfunctional jail complex vastly outweighs the availability of help. More than a dozen detainees have died by suicide since the start of 2021.
Many of the 28 to die waiting for trial on Rikers since the start of 2022 struggled with mental illness, like Manish Kunwar, a 27-year-old Nepali man found unresponsive in his cell earlier this month.
An officer familiar with Kunwar’s cell block at the Taylor Center in the wake of his death told The News, “The basic needs of a human being are far beyond gone in that place.”
The courtroom navigators program, which will primarily serve those walking out of court with nowhere to go, is the second element of a mental health grant initiative launched by Bragg’s office and the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance in December. The funding comes from $9 million seized from international banks in criminal investigations by the DA.
Bragg in June awarded $6 million to the nonprofit organization The Bridge to oversee the initiative’s first prong, connecting high-needs people spending significant time sleeping rough in Manhattan with wraparound services.
The trained navigators who will work to forge lasting connections with participants have experienced and overcome struggles with the criminal justice system, health needs and housing themselves, according to Stanley Richards of the Fortune Society.
“This investment reflects a visionary approach to address the underlying drivers of crime and violence at their root, aiming to reduce recidivism and create a safer, more supportive community,” he said.
Bragg hopes to hold up data a year from now that will compel state leaders to scale up navigator programs and install support in courthouses and communities where there is none in other jurisdictions.
“Stabilizing people, addressing the root causes of crime, obviously benefits that individual, but it benefits all of us,” he said.
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Three years ago, while the nation’s attention was on the 2020 presidential election, voters in Oregon took a dramatic step back from America’s long-running War on Drugs. By a 17-point margin, Oregonians approved Ballot Measure 110, which eliminated criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of any drug, including cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. When the policy went into effect early the next year, it lifted the fear of prosecution for the state’s drug users and launched Oregon on an experiment to determine whether a long-sought goal of the drug-policy reform movement—decriminalization—could help solve America’s drug problems.
Early results of this reform effort, the first of its kind in any state, are now coming into view, and so far, they are not encouraging. State leaders have acknowledged faults with the policy’s implementation and enforcement measures. And Oregon’s drug problems have not improved. Last year, the state experienced one of the sharpest rises in overdose deaths in the nation and had one of the highest percentages of adults with a substance-use disorder. During one two-week period last month, three children under the age of 4 overdosed in Portland after ingesting fentanyl.
For decades, drug policy in America centered on using law enforcement to target people who sold, possessed, or used drugs—an approach long supported by both Democratic and Republican politicians. Only in recent years, amid an epidemic of opioid overdoses and a national reconsideration of racial inequities in the criminal-justice system, has the drug-policy status quo begun to break down, as a coalition of health workers, criminal-justice-reform advocates, and drug-user activists have lobbied for a more compassionate and nuanced response. The new approach emphasizes reducing overdoses, stopping the spread of infectious disease, and providing drug users with the resources they need—counseling, housing, transportation—to stabilize their lives and gain control over their drug use.
Oregon’s Measure 110 was viewed as an opportunity to prove that activists’ most groundbreaking idea—sharply reducing the role of law enforcement in the government’s response to drugs—could work. The measure also earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars in cannabis tax revenue for building a statewide treatment network that advocates promised would do what police and prosecutors couldn’t: help drug users stop or reduce their drug use and become healthy, engaged members of their communities. The day after the measure passed, Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, one of the nation’s most prominent drug-policy reform organizations, issued a statement calling the vote a “historic, paradigm-shifting win” and predicting that Oregon would become “a model and starting point for states across the country to decriminalize drug use.”
But three years later, with rising overdoses and delays in treatment funding, even some of the measure’s supporters now believe that the policy needs to be changed. In a nonpartisan statewide poll earlier this year, more than 60 percent of respondents blamed Measure 110 for making drug addiction, homelessness, and crime worse. A majority, including a majority of Democrats, said they supported bringing back criminal penalties for drug possession. This year’s legislative session, which ended in late June, saw at least a dozen Measure 110–related proposals from Democrats and Republicans alike, ranging from technical fixes to full restoration of criminal penalties for drug possession. Two significant changes—tighter restrictions on fentanyl and more state oversight of how Measure 110 funding is distributed—passed with bipartisan support.
Few people consider Measure 110 “a success out of the gate,” Tony Morse, the policy and advocacy director for Oregon Recovers, told me. The organization, which promotes policy solutions to the state’s addiction crisis, initially opposed Measure 110; now it supports funding the policy, though it also wants more state money for in-patient treatment and detox services. As Morse put it, “If you take away the criminal-justice system as a pathway that gets people into treatment, you need to think about what is going to replace it.”
Many advocates say the new policy simply needs more time to prove itself, even if they also acknowledge that parts of the ballot measure had flaws; advocates worked closely with lawmakers on the oversight bill that passed last month. “We’re building the plane as we fly it,” Haven Wheelock, a program supervisor at a homeless-services provider in Portland who helped put Measure 110 on the ballot, told me. “We tried the War on Drugs for 50 years, and it didn’t work … It hurts my heart every time someone says we need to repeal this before we even give it a chance.”
Workers from the organization Central City Concern hand out Narcan in Portland, Oregon, on April 5. (Jordan Gale)
Measure 110 went into effect at a time of dramatic change in U.S. drug policy. Departing from precedent, the Biden administration has endorsed and increased federal funding for a public-health strategy called harm reduction; rather than pushing for abstinence, harm reduction emphasizes keeping drug users safe—for instance, through the distribution of clean syringes and overdose-reversal medications. The term harm reduction appeared five times in the ballot text of Measure 110, which forbids funding recipients from “mandating abstinence.”
Matt Sutton, the director of external relations for the Drug Policy Alliance, which helped write Measure 110 and spent more than $5 million to pass it, told me that reform advocates viewed the measure as the start of a nationwide decriminalization push. The effort started in Oregon because the state had been an early adopter of marijuana legalization and is considered a drug-policy-reform leader. Success would mean showing the rest of the country that “people did think we should invest in a public-health approach instead of criminalization,” Sutton said.
To achieve this goal, Measure 110 enacted two major changes to Oregon’s drug laws. First, minor drug possession was downgraded from a misdemeanor to a violation, similar to a traffic ticket. Under the new law, users caught with up to 1 gram of heroin or methamphetamine, or up to 40 oxycodone pills, are charged a $100 fine, which can be waived if they call a treatment-referral hotline. (Selling, trafficking, and possessing large amounts of drugs remain criminal offenses in Oregon.) Second, the law set aside a portion of state cannabis tax revenue every two years to fund a statewide network of harm-reduction and other services. A grant-making panel was created to oversee the funding process. At least six members of the panel were required to be directly involved in providing services to drug users; at least two had to be active or former drug users themselves; and three were to be “members of communities that have been disproportionately impacted” by drug criminalization, according to the ballot measure.
Backers of Measure 110 said the law was modeled on drug policies in Portugal, where personal drug possession was decriminalized two decades ago. But Oregon’s enforcement-and-treatment-referral system differs from Portugal’s. Users caught with drugs in Portugal are referred to a civil commission that evaluates their drug use and recommends treatment if needed, with civil sanctions for noncompliance. Portugal’s state-run health system also funds a nationwide network of treatment services, many of which focus on sobriety. Sutton said drafters of Measure 110 wanted to avoid anything that might resemble a criminal tribunal or coercing drug users into treatment. “People respond best when they’re ready to access those services in a voluntary way,” he said.
Almost immediately after taking effect, Measure 110 encountered problems. A state audit published this year found that the new law was “vague” about how state officials should oversee the awarding of money to new treatment programs, and set “unrealistic timelines” for evaluating and funding treatment proposals. As a result, the funding process was left largely to the grant-making panel, most of whose members “lacked experience in designing, evaluating and administrating a governmental-grant-application process,” according to the audit. Last year, supporters of Measure 110 accused state health officials, preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic, of giving the panel insufficient direction and resources to handle a flood of grant applications. The state health authority acknowledged missteps in the grant-making process.
The audit described a chaotic process, with more than a dozen canceled meetings, potential conflicts of interest in the selection of funding recipients, and lines of applicant evaluations left blank. Full distribution of the first biennial payout of cannabis tax revenue—$302 million for harm reduction, housing, and other services—did not occur until late 2022, almost two years after Measure 110 passed. Figures released by the state last month show that, in the second half of 2022, recipients of Measure 110 funding provided some form of service to roughly 50,000 “clients,” though the Oregon Health Authority has said that a single individual could be counted multiple times in that total. (A study released last year by public-health researchers in Oregon found that, as of 2020, more than 650,000 Oregonians required, but were not receiving, treatment for a substance-use disorder.)
Meanwhile, the new law’s enforcement provisions have proved ineffectual. Of 5,299 drug-possession cases filed in Oregon circuit courts since Measure 110 went into effect, 3,381 resulted in a recipient failing to pay the fine or appear in court and facing no further penalties, according to the Oregon Judicial Department; about 1,300 tickets were dismissed or are pending. The state audit found that, during its first 15 months in operation, the treatment-referral hotline received just 119 calls, at a cost to the state of $7,000 per call. A survey of law-enforcement officers conducted by researchers at Portland State University found that, as of July 2022, officers were issuing an average of just 300 drug-possession tickets a month statewide, compared with 600 drug-possession arrests a month before Measure 110 took effect and close to 1,200 monthly arrests prior to the outbreak of COVID-19.
“Focusing on these tickets even though they’ll be ineffective—it’s not a great use of your resources,” Sheriff Nate Sickler of Jackson County, in the rural southern part of the state, told me of his department’s approach.
Advocates have celebrated a plunge in arrests. “For reducing arrests of people of color, it’s been an overwhelming success,” says Mike Marshall, the director of Oregon Recovers. But critics say that sidelining law enforcement has made it harder to persuade some drug users to stop using. Sickler cited the example of drug-court programs, which multiple studies have shown to be highly effective, including in Jackson County. Use of such programs in the county has declined in the absence of criminal prosecution, Sickler said: “Without accountability or the ability to drive a better choice, these individuals are left to their own demise.”
The consequences of Measure 110’s shortcomings have fallen most heavily on Oregon’s drug users. In the two years after the law took effect, the number of annual overdoses in the state rose by 61 percent, compared with a 13 percent increase nationwide, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In neighboring Idaho and California, where drug possession remains subject to prosecution, the rate of increase was significantly lower than Oregon’s. (The spike in Washington State was similar to Oregon’s, but that comparison is more complicated because Washington’s drug policy has fluctuated since 2021.) Other states once notorious for drug deaths, including West Virginia, Indiana, and Arkansas, are now experiencing declines in overdose rates.
In downtown Portland this spring, police cleared out what The Oregonian called an “open-air drug market” in a former retail center. Prominent businesses in the area, including the outdoor-gear retailer REI, have closed in recent months, in part citing a rise in shoplifting and violence. Earlier this year, Portland business owners appeared before the Multnomah County Commission to ask for help with crime, drug-dealing, and other problems stemming from a behavioral-health resource center operated by a harm-reduction nonprofit that was awarded more than $4 million in Measure 110 funding. In April, the center abruptly closed following employee complaints that clients were covering walls with graffiti and overdosing on-site. A subsequent investigation by the nonprofit found that a security contractor had been using cocaine on the job. The center reopened two weeks later with beefed-up security measures.
Portland’s Democratic mayor, Ted Wheeler, went so far as to attempt an end run around Measure 110 in his city. Last month, Wheeler unveiled a proposal to criminalize public drug consumption in Portland, similar to existing bans on open-air drinking, saying in a statement that Measure 110 “is not working as it was intended to.” He added, “Portland’s substance-abuse problems have exploded to deadly and disastrous proportions.” Wheeler withdrew the proposal days later after learning that an older state law prohibits local jurisdictions from banning public drug use.
Despite shifting public opinion on Measure 110, many Oregon leaders are not ready to give up on the policy. Earlier this month, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek signed legislation that strengthens state oversight of Measure 110 and requires an audit, due no later than December 2025, of about two dozen aspects of the measure’s performance, including whether it is reducing overdoses. Other bills passed by the legislature’s Democratic majority strengthened criminal penalties for possession of large quantities of fentanyl and mandated that school drug-prevention programs instruct students about the risks of synthetic opioids. Republican proposals to repeal Measure 110 outright or claw back tens of millions of dollars in harm-reduction funding were not enacted.
The fallout from Measure 110 has received some critical coverage from media outlets on the right. “It is predictable,” a scholar from the Hudson Institute told Fox News. “It is a tragedy and a self-inflicted wound.” (Meanwhile, in Portugal, the model for Oregon, some residents are raising questions about their own nation’s decriminalization policy.) But so far Oregon’s experience doesn’t appear to have stopped efforts to bring decriminalization to other parts of the United States. “We’ll see more ballot initiatives,” Sutton, of the Drug Policy Alliance, said, adding that advocates are currently working with city leaders to decriminalize drugs in Washington, D.C.
Supporters of Measure 110 are now seeking to draw attention to what they say are the policy’s overlooked positive effects. This summer, the Health Justice Recovery Alliance, a Measure 110 advocacy organization, is leading an effort to spotlight expanded treatment services and boost community awareness of the treatment-referral hotline. Advocates are also coordinating with law-enforcement agencies to ensure that officers know about local resources for drug users. “People are hiring for their programs; outreach programs are expanding, offering more services,” Devon Downeysmith, the communications director for the group, told me.
An array of services around the state have been expanded through the policy: housing for pregnant women awaiting drug treatment; culturally specific programs for Black, Latino, and Indigenous drug users; and even distribution of bicycle helmets to people unable to drive to treatment meetings. “People often forget how much time it takes to spend a bunch of money and build services,” said Wheelock, the homeless-services worker, whose organization received more than $2 million in funding from Measure 110.
Still, even some recipients of Measure 110 funding wonder whether one of the law’s pillars—the citation system that was supposed to help route drug users into treatment—needs to be rethought. “Perhaps some consequences might be a helpful thing,” says Julia Pinsky, a co-founder of Max’s Mission, a harm-reduction nonprofit in southern Oregon. Max’s Mission has received $1.5 million from Measure 110, enabling the organization to hire new staff, open new offices, and serve more people. Pinsky told me she is proud of her organization’s work and remains committed to the idea that “you shouldn’t have to go to prison to be treated for substance use.” She said that she doesn’t want drug use to “become a felony,” but that some people aren’t capable of stopping drug use on their own. “They need additional help.”
Brandi Fogle, a regional manager for Max’s Mission, says her own story illustrates the complex trade-offs involved in reforming drug policy. Three and a half years ago, she was a homeless drug user, addicted to heroin and drifting around Jackson and Josephine Counties. Although she tried to stop numerous times, including one six-month period during which she was prescribed the drug-replacement medication methadone, she told me that a 2020 arrest for drug possession was what finally turned her life around. She asked to be enrolled in a 19-month drug-court program that included residential treatment, mandatory 12-step meetings, and a community-service project, and ultimately was hired by Pinsky.
Since Measure 110 went into effect, Fogle said, she has gotten pushback from members of the community for the work Max’s Mission does. She said that both the old system of criminal justice and the new system of harm reduction can benefit drug users, but that her hope now is to make the latter approach more successful. “Everyone is different,” Fogle said. “Drug court worked for me because I chose it, and I wouldn’t have needed drug court in the first place if I had received the kind of services Max’s Mission provides. I want to offer people that chance.”
Larry Krasner has been at the forefront of the progressive-prosecutor movement since becoming Philadelphia’s district attorney in 2017. Which means that he has also been at the center of an unending storm.
Krasner has faced relentless battles with the police union, other local elected officials, and Republicans who control the Pennsylvania state legislature and are now making an unprecedented effort to impeach him. He’s also won support from many community leaders and criminal-justice-reform advocates. On Wednesday he reached a milestone: His office won a manslaughter conviction against a Philadelphia police officer for shooting a Black man in 2017—the first such conviction for on-duty action in Philadelphia in at least half a century.
Yet, like other progressive prosecutors in major cities from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles to San Francisco, his political position remains precarious. These prosecutors received a huge burst of momentum from the nationwide protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. And they have an aggressive agenda aimed at reducing jail and prison populations, elevating alternatives to incarceration (particularly for juvenile offenders), emphasizing community services over tough enforcement to reduce gun violence, and imposing greater accountability for police-officer misconduct. (Beyond Wednesday’s conviction, Krasner is pursuing murder cases against two other police officers; previously no murder case involving a Philadelphia police officer had gone to trial in almost 40 years, ThePhiladelphia Inquirer found.)
But rising crime rates have weakened these prosecutors’ standing. Though violent crime, particularly homicides, remains far below its peak, in the 1990s, the rates in many major cities spiked at the height of the pandemic to levels far above the totals earlier in this century—and have remained stubbornly high since. As of Monday, Philadelphia, for instance, has experienced 388 homicides this year, slightly more than in 2021 and double the number through that date as recently as 2015.
Criminologists say the causes of these increases are complex. And crime rates often rise faster in places committed to traditional hard-line policing and prosecutorial policies, as the centrist Democratic group Third Way showed in an eye-opening report earlier this year. (The murder rate in red counties outside Pittsburgh grew much faster than Philadelphia’s did from 2019 through 2021, Krasner’s office pointed out to me.) Krasner and his allies in Philadelphia cite the Republican-controlled legislature’s repeated rejection of stronger gun laws, such as red-flag statutes and universal background checks, as a key cause of the city’s endemic gun violence.
Yet none of this has insulated progressive prosecutors from an intensifying backlash. San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled earlier this year; like-minded Los Angeles D.A. George Gascón narrowly avoided a recall election because opponents bungled their petition-gathering effort.
The decision by the Pennsylvania General Assembly to explore impeaching Krasner marks the latest challenge to the movement. Last week the chamber voted to hold Krasner in contempt when he refused to provide documents it demanded as part of the probe. Krasner, for his part, has filed suit in state court arguing that the legislature lacks the authority to remove him, primarily because its impeachment power, under the state constitution, is limited to state officials, not local ones.
Craig Green, a law professor at Temple University, told me he thinks Krasner is likely to win that argument. The General Assembly, Green says, has “never tried anything” like this possible impeachment before, even in cases where local officials were guilty of gross misconduct and corruption, which no one has alleged against Krasner. Craig is dubious that the state supreme court will conclude that the legislature’s disapproval of Krasner’s policy choices meets the standard of “improper or corrupt motive” the court has set as justifiable grounds for a potential impeachment.
Even if Krasner doesn’t win in court, Republicans don’t have enough votes in the State Senate to reach the two-thirds majority they would need to remove him should the House impeach him. But the controversy over his approach isn’t going anywhere, either, particularly as Philadelphia struggles with the wave of gun violence that has spilled out from long impoverished neighborhoods on the north and west sides into its rejuvenated Center City. More than 1,700 people have been shot in the city this year, police statistics show.
Yesterday at The Atlantic Festival, I sat down with Krasner to discuss his battles with the state legislature, his diagnosis for the rising crime rate, and his continued commitment to rethinking how the criminal-justice system operates. Below are highlights from that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Ronald Brownstein: Mr. District Attorney, you have been in the center of the storm since your election in 2017. And you’ve certainly got one brewing now with the Republican-controlled General Assembly in Pennsylvania trying to impeach you. Why is this happening, and where is it going?
Larry Krasner: It’s happening because progressive prosecutors keep winning elections. There is a misperception that we’re losing; that’s actually incorrect. They can’t beat us in elections, so they try to remove us from office in other ways: by recalls, by impeachment. In my situation, what occurred is, for the first time in the history of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the legislature is trying to remove an elected official for their policies. I repeat: policies. You can get removed for crimes or deeply corrupt activity. That’s what impeachment is for. But you’re not supposed to be removed because your policy won by a landslide.
Brownstein: Can they remove, in your view, a local official as opposed to a statewide official?
Krasner: No, in my view, they can only remove statewide officials, because there is a separate impeachment procedure for cities. And I happen to be in a city.
Brownstein: Well, the policy dispute is obviously about your approach and what is happening with crime in Philadelphia. And [according to] the police department, there have been 388 homicides in Philadelphia. That was the figure through Monday. We are still not back up to the levels of crime that we saw in the 1990s, but we are at an elevated rate from earlier in the century, not only in Philadelphia but in many other cities. What’s driving this?
Krasner: Well, there’s been an uptick really since 2014 in Philadelphia. That’s more or less the low point nationally. I think a lot of things are driving this. But the main thing I bring up is guns. There are more and more and more guns every year. And if you look at the number of guns that are actually removed from the street by law enforcement, they are at least doubled or tripled by the new legal gun sales that are occurring. We have seen an accumulation of guns in this country at this point where we have one and a half guns per human being, more or less. And we have an NRA that would like to see a loaded gun tucked into a diaper. This is an NRA that would like silencers, which hasn’t happened since the 1930s. They would like us to be able to print our guns at home on 3-D printers. [It’s] the most damaging organization to public safety in the history of the United States.
Brownstein: Let me ask you about guns, because that is certainly one of the flash points in the debate about your approach in Philadelphia. It’s also been a flash point in L.A., where I live: what to do with people who are caught with guns but haven’t used them yet in a crime. Your view, as quoted recently in The New York Times, is that it’s counterproductive to focus on arresting and incarcerating people caught carrying firearms without legal permit. Why do you think that?
Krasner: So that view is not correct. It’s counterproductive to prioritize that more than solving gun violence. The reality is that if you want to stop gun violence, you should pursue gun violence. That means you should solve homicides. You should solve shootings. The current solve rate, or at least the most recent measured solve rate for gun homicides in Philly, is 28 percent. The most recent solve rate for shootings in Philly is 17 percent. Our conviction rate for homicides is approaching 90 percent; better than our predecessors, but we only get the cases [police officers] solve.
So a lot of what has happened all across the country is coming from [fraternal-order-of-police] sources, right-wing sources: that the real problem is guns; it’s not the homicides. And the reason they’re saying that is they’re having terrible difficulty solving the homicides. I do not say that, by the way, to besmirch the police. There are certain tools that they need. There are modern ways to actually solve these cases, including some absolutely unbelievable forensics that would blow your mind. But you’ve got to invest in them.
Brownstein: You had a landmark conviction of a police officer this week, which we’ll talk about in a moment. But I want to just be clear: What is your view about what should happen to people who are found with guns who have not yet committed a crime? Are you saying that they should in fact be prosecuted on a routine basis?
Krasner: Yes, they should. And the fact is that the House itself, before they decided to impeach me, did a study and found that the sentences for gun possession were longest in Philadelphia. Just so we understand what’s really happening here. This is not coming from some real concern about crime. Our city is giving out longer sentences, including under my administration. So that’s a total red herring.
Brownstein: Many of the other progressive prosecutors have talked about treating gun violence as a public-health problem. Again, the statistics as of Monday: 1,700 shooting victims. In Philadelphia, what have you learned about the opportunities and limits of a public-health strategy to combat gun violence? Do you feel like it’s stemming the tide with those kinds of numbers?
Krasner: I’ve learned we haven’t tried it. This is a country that has not used public health to try to deal with addiction. We have not used public health to deal with mental illness and homelessness. We haven’t used public health to deal with criminal justice. Even though we do have reform going on in ways that are constructive, all of the money that’s being saved, which is an enormous amount of money, is not going back into rebuilding the mental-health system that was torn down about 85 percent during the period of mass incarceration. All that money is not going into public schools. And in Philadelphia, public-school kids are funded at half the level of the surrounding counties. But that’s another enormous problem. If we don’t take the money that we’re saving from doing stupid and put it into smart, then all we’re doing is building another tax break for wealthy people, and there is going to be some level of failing to succeed as much as we could.
Brownstein: So give me your wish list to reduce those 1,700 shootings.
Krasner: On the enforcement side, the biggest thing that we should be doing is investing very, very heavily in modern forensics. You can do absolutely amazing things with cellphones that we could not do before. You can do amazing things right now with tiny bits of DNA. You can do amazing things that would solve an enormous number of cases. And until we do that, the notion of deterrence is really not there.
I don’t know why we are allowing anybody to have an AR-15. I don’t know why we’re allowing [young] people … to get them. I don’t know why we have gun shows at all. I don’t know why we have unregistered gun parts. I mean, the whole notion of a polymer gun or a ghost gun is that it’s a loophole. You can get an unmarked piece of plastic and a bunch of unmarked pieces of metal that you can buy on the internet. You can put them together in your basement and you can sell an arsenal round out the back door. And we see more and more ghost guns that are showing up at crime scenes, and it’s doubling and tripling and quadrupling every year.
Brownstein: Some of the prosecutors elected as part of this movement have opposed cash bail, sometimes in all cases. But you have taken a different approach, a more nuanced approach. You support high cash bail in cases of gun violence.
Krasner: There’s a general misunderstanding of what “no cash bail” is. No cash bail has happened in D.C. for over 30 years. There’s only two stops on this train. One stop is you get out without having to pay money. You may have to go to a place that provides homeless services or mental-health services or addiction services, because whatever they’re sending you to is associated with your interaction with police. And those are nonviolent offenses, for the most part. But then there’s the other group who sit in jail, no matter how rich they are.
But the problem in Pennsylvania is you’ve got a legislature that likes its bail-bonds people, makes a lot of money in donations off of their lobbyists, and they are in love with cash bail. What we did in Philly is we tried to simulate a no-cash-bail system by asking for very high bail, which is a million or more in some cases. And then no bail; we don’t ask for these $10,000 bail, $50,000 bail amounts, because they just make things worse.
Brownstein: You won a landmark conviction of a police officer for an on-duty shooting, a manslaughter conviction—the first one, I believe, in at least 50 years. You have several more in the pipeline. What is the message you are sending with these cases?
Krasner: The message is what it always should have been, which is that justice applies to everybody. We probably cleared 150 or 200 shootings toward or of civilians by police in uniform. But we have charged three officers with homicide so far. And I mean, to me, this is not complicated. If you commit a murder, if you shoot an unarmed person in the back and you don’t have a lawful justification, the fact that you’re in uniform doesn’t excuse that.
[There are] a lot of really great cops in Philly. They just have a rotten leadership of their union. But there are a lot of really good cops in Philadelphia who are trying to do it the right way. And every time we knock down a corrupt police officer or a vicious, brutal police officer, we’re just lifting up the good ones, which also hasn’t been done in forever.
Brownstein: There’s a sense that this [progressive-prosecutor] movement is on the defensive now, as you noted, with the recall of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, the attempted recall of Gascón, the fight that you are facing in Pennsylvania. Is it possible to maintain support for alternative approaches that focus less on incarceration while crime is going up?
Krasner: The way to get it under control is criminal-justice reform, because doing things in a just way actually does make us safer. And I know that sounds like a platitude. But let me just give you an example of why I think they’re really at our throats.
So, 10 years ago, there were essentially zero progressive prosecutors and no portion of the U.S. population lived in a jurisdiction with a progressive prosecutor. Two and a half years ago, 10 percent of the U.S. population [did]. Right now it’s about 20 percent; 70, 75 million Americans have elected or reelected a progressive prosecutor. They all want to talk all day about Chesa Boudin and his recall, all that. They want to talk about that. Who here knows that we have a new district attorney in Memphis who is a progressive and replaced a very conservative incumbent? Who here knows that in Alameda County, right across from San Francisco, Pamela Price is about to win and win big? And she lost four years ago. It is not the case that progressive prosecution is dead in action. The real case here is that even in this incredibly difficult time, it’s maintaining. I wouldn’t say it’s growing, you know, doubling in leaps and bounds like it did around the events surrounding George Floyd. But it is maintaining. So the reality is we’re doing really well, and they can’t beat us in elections, and they’re worried about that.
The truth is, conservatives don’t actually care very much about crime. They really don’t. What they’re really worried about is that criminal-justice reform is something that connects to voters who are unlikely voters who are alienated from the system, who finally are seeing some reason to go to the polls, which is why we had insane turnouts in our off-year, low-turnout elections both times I ran. And we’ve seen this in many other jurisdictions. If I am a MAGA Republican, the last thing I want to see is any progressive prosecutor still standing. Because what it could be is the salvation of democracy. And they are out to destroy democracy.
