Op-Ed: I'm keeping San Francisco safer by emptying the jail. My father should be freed too (via latimesopinion)
have been COVID-19-confirmed; given limited testing, the true number is surely much higher.
In San Francisco, I make decisions with my colleagues about who to incarcerate for how long and who to release on what conditions. These decisions are often agonizing, nearly impossible balancing acts of competing risks. For decades, criminal justice policy has been driven by the sometimes realistic fear that any person released could commit a heinous crime. But data show that allowing such fears to override all other concerns is shortsighted.
My office is determined to allow public health officials to guide public policy through the coronavirus crisis. Using the discretion granted to prosecutors by law, we’ve reduced San Francisco’s jail population by 40% since March 16, the date of the city’s shelter-in-place order. Our year-to-yearWhen public safety allows, we delay filing new charges. We have released, pending trial, those in jail facing low-level offenses, along with the elderly and medically vulnerable.
Although many prosecutors and local law enforcement officials across the country are also using their discretion to decrease their jail populations, more need to embrace reforms in the face of this pandemic. Data show the way. State prisons, for example, where there are far more people incarcerated than at the local level, could release most inmates over the age of 65 who have already served 10 or more years, a significant sentence.
I will continue to protect the safety of all San Franciscans — residents, crime victims, public servants and those who live and work in our jails. Though I know my efforts can’t protect my own father, I hope they will save someone else’s.
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