George Gascón was considered a national leader on criminal justice reform when he was elected Los Angeles district attorney in 2020 on a pledge to overhaul the largest local prosecutor’s office in the US.
Over the last four years, he has worked to fulfill his promises to reduce mass incarceration, right the wrongs of the racist legal system and hold police accountable for misconduct. But by the 2024 election, the political climate in California and across the country had dramatically shifted. In November, Gascón suffered a stunning defeat to Nathan Hochman, a former federal prosecutor and Republican-turned-independent, who positioned himself in the race as a “hard middle” candidate who would undo Gascón’s “pro-criminal extreme policies”.
The outcome was seen as a significant loss for the movement to elect progressive prosecutors in the US. Gascón’s supporters argued that his policies had been unfairly blamed for broader social problems, including homelessness and the fentanyl crisis, and noted decreases in crime during his term. Hochman has said he won’t abandon reform, but will seek longer prison terms and go after low-level offenses.
Hochman’s divergent approach could come into sharp focus in the case of Erik and Lyle Menendez, the brothers convicted of the high-profile 1989 killing of their parents; Gascón recommended their re-sentencing and release in October, citing their rehabilitation over decades incarcerated and the abuse they endured as youth, but Hochman has said he would re-examine the case, leaving the brothers’ fate uncertain.
The Guardian spoke with Gascón last week about the Menendez case, voters’ rejection of him and the state of reform efforts in the US. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How are you making sense of your loss?
On a personal level, my family is relieved. Professionally, it’s disappointing. My loss was impacted by a variety of factors that really had nothing to do with criminal justice reform. There was an uptick in crime in the pandemic across the board. In conservative communities run by traditional prosecutors and sheriffs, the per capita crime increased at higher levels than it did in communities like mine. There’s very little agreement on what makes crime go up or down. There are many external drivers. Prosecutors don’t necessarily impact the daily swings or macro crime numbers. It’s about holding people accountable for individual wrongdoing. Los Angeles just did a big announcement about double-digit decreases in homicides and shootings. Nobody mentioned this occurred during a period where we had a very progressive prosecutor. Prosecuting cases in a more thoughtful manner didn’t cause crime to go up.
My bigger disappointment has to do with how many families and communities are going to suffer by a reversal of policy where you start over-incarcerating communities, causing more social displacement and increasing the economic costs of the carceral machine without necessarily increasing safety. Even very affluent communities, which generally don’t have to worry about their kids going to jail, will be impacted because of the draining of resources from being invested in education and other public services to go into the carceral system.
What do you see as your legacy in terms of reducing incarceration? You resentenced hundreds of people, giving them a chance to come home after many years in prison.
It’s remarkable when you consider that of the roughly 330 people we’ve re-sentenced, less than 1% have re-offended, and none with violent crimes. These are people who committed serious crimes and could have been in prison for additional decades. They’ve integrated themselves into the community and in many cases become productive members of society. The people we re-sentenced for murder, not one has committed a crime since they’ve been out. It proves a point that there are probably thousands of other people in prison today who could be safely released. From a more macro perspective, there are thousands and thousands of other cases of people who we did not send to prison for long periods of time. And crime continued to go down. Also, consider the number of young people we’re not transferring to adult prisons who are doing well. With the reductions in California prison populations, the governor has been able to start closing some prisons.
How did the Menendez brothers fit into this reform agenda?
With the Menendez case, I needed to be consistent with my belief that there is redemption, and rehabilitation needs to be encouraged. California has a tool for prosecutor-initiated resentencing for people who committed serious crimes who were under 26, who’ve been in prison for a substantial number of years and have shown tremendous effort to rehabilitate. The Menendez brothers were the poster child for that. Not only have they done things for self-improvement within the prison system, but more praiseworthy was how much they have done to improve the lives of others around them. The re-sentencing process involves intense review of prison files and other information. I’m very familiar with their records. I felt it was a perfect re-sentencing case. I was disappointed that the judge kicked the can further down the road. If Mr Hochman reviews the files, I believe he’ll reach the same conclusion – if he wants to follow the path the law allows. But it gets into the philosophical question of whether you believe there is redemption and rehabilitation and that no matter how bad of a crime you committed, at some point there may be a path for you to come back to society.
What does the Menendez brothers’ story reveal about the broader system?
It is highly unlikely that if they were released tomorrow, that they would harm anybody or commit crimes. They’re not being held in prison because we’re afraid they’re going to be dangerous. On the contrary, evidence says they’ll be very productive. So the question becomes, do we just hold people indefinitely, because there’s never enough punishment? Do we say 35 years in custody is not enough time to hold them accountable for horrendous crimes? If that’s your argument, they might as well die in prison. It doesn’t matter what they do in prison. What I believe is a more healthy path as a society is that people get a second chance.
Just in LA county, there’s potentially thousands of people who can be safely re-sentenced and re-integrated. The Menendez case could illustrate to the community that you can actually bring people back home safely. That would highlight the importance of looking back at so many people who are currently incarcerated and do not need to be, if you believe that incarceration is primarily about the safety of the community and believe there’s a point where accountability has been satisfied after many years in prison.
What would it mean if we prioritized getting people home from prison?
That’d be a huge savings to California taxpayers, but also a huge social impact on the communities where men and women could go back to their families – fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers. If you did the economic analysis of people in the state who could be re-sentenced safely, you could probably easily close 20% of our prison space. When you consider the billions of dollars saved that could be re-invested in community development, including in those communities that are economically dependent on those prisons today, it would be tremendous. It would provide a different level of productivity and wealth instead of funding what is really a bottomless pit – an investment with very little return. Some prisons could’ve been closed and they were not, because there was extreme political pressure not to impact the communities and small towns that became almost totally dependent on their prison. Why not repurpose all of that economic wealth in the same town toward the production of goods and services?
Criminal justice reformers and progressives struggled this election. Are there lessons to be learned?
If you look at the broader political message of certain Democrats, I think it was a confused message. One thing I appreciated about the Republicans, especially those who are extreme right, is they’re very consistent. In 2020, Donald Trump lost significantly, the Republican brand was damaged, but Republicans did not go back and say, let’s rethink our messaging. They doubled down. In 2022, they again lost and continued to double down. Part of the problem is the ambivalence of the Democratic party. Some Democrats wanted to use a Republican narrative, and we confused people. The Democratic party should be the party of the working class, but instead we bought into the narratives of the opposition and walked away from our values and consequently lost the working class.
Criminal justice reform is swept in that – a lot of Democrats walked away from what we know is the right thing to do for the safety and wellbeing of our community. Some Democrats in California were vilifying reform and embraced Proposition 36 [a tough-on-crime initiative to enact harsher penalties for retail theft, property crimes and drug offenses, which is expected to expand incarceration in the state]. They know Prop 36 is flawed, not going to create any more safety, and going to be extremely detrimental, and yet they embrace the message, because they thought it was the politically expedient thing to do, instead of spending time fighting for what’s right and what they believe in. I believe our message, whether reform or economic justice, is the right formula for the wellbeing of most Americans and our nation as a whole. But that lost the day, because we had a very equivocal messaging and infighting. We suffer in the process. It drives me bonkers when I hear this post-mortem of Democrats blaming “the left” or “the activists”. No – it was the lack of clear conviction in what we know to be right.