Several reform-driven district attorneys won seats on Tuesday on pledges to revamp a criminal justice system that disproportionately targets people of color.
By Alfonso Serrano
November 7, 2018
The “tough-on-crime” platform that has shaped district attorneys for generations — and steered them to easy electoral victories across the country — wobbled under pressure on Tuesday (November 6), as several reform-minded prosecutors won office on pledges to transform a criminal justice system that has bloated U.S. prisons and disproportionately targeted people of color.
The electoral gains would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. But the stark campaign reversals, driven by changing voter sentiment over mass incarceration — and financed by deep-pocketed donors — saw progressive district attorneys win seats from Dallas to Boston to Birmingham.
Perhaps no race was more emblematic of that change than the contest in Dallas, a city with a history of wrongful convictions and death penalty cases. Democrat John Creuzot, who is White, beat Black Republican incumbent Faith Johnson. Johnson, who was appointed by Governor Greg Abbott in December, had touted her record of prosecuting police officers for shooting unarmed civilians.
But that record proved insufficient for voters who have questioned her commitment to stemming mass incarceration. Creuzot, a former state district judge, campaigned on promises to increase diversion programs and curtail charges for certain low-level crimes. He has also pledged to craft a plan within three months to end mass incarceration. By the end of his first term, Creuzot says he’ll cut incarceration in Dallas — the city houses 1.3 million incarcerated people — by 15 to 20 percent.
On Tuesday, Creuzot cruised to victory with 60 percent of the vote.
“Over the course of his campaign, district attorney-elect John Creuzot has expressed a growing commitment to the ACLU’s Smart Justice reform principles,” Sharon Watkins Jones, director of political strategies for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said in a statement. “The ACLU of Texas looks forward to working with him to accomplish the ambitious reform commitments he made during the campaign, in particular his pledge to reduce state jail and prison admissions by 15 to 20 percent within four years.”
District attorneys wield vast powers to prosecute crimes. They alone determine when to pursue criminal charges and which charges to file. As pivotal decision makers, prosecutors have come under mounting criticism for saturating the criminal justice system with felony convictions and fueling disproportionate incarceration rates among Blacks and Latinx people.
With Obama-era efforts to reform the prison system long gone, and with Attorney General Jeff Sessions ordering federal prosecutors to target crime suspects with toughest possible charges, reform backers have increasingly focused on local prosecutors. Those efforts have paid off quickly, boosted by billionaire donor George Soros and advocacy groups like the ACLU and Color of Change. Dozens of progressive prosecutors have won office in recent years, including Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, a longtime civil rights attorney who last year rode to victory on promises to dismantle mass incarceration.
The profound remaking of the prosecutor role continued on Tuesday.
Read more on the progressive prosecutors who won seats during the 2018 midterm elections: http://bit.ly/2JMkOrs.
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