 Larry Krasner wants to fix America's criminal justice system, which imprisons more people per capita than any other country on the planet. Since 2018, he served as the district attorney of Philadelphia, one of America's most highly incarcerated and, as of late, increasingly crime-ridden cities. Krasner spent three decades as a criminal and civil rights defense attorney before deciding to run for office. Our movement did the uncomfortable thing. We took back power, he wrote in a memoir about his successful 2017 run for Philadelphia's district attorney. We outsiders went inside and took over the institution we had fought against all our lives. In his first week as DA, Krasner fired 31 staffers and replaced them with a new team that he described as ideologically attached to the mission. It's a pretty basic mission for people who are in favor of freedom. One of those missions is to be less incarcerated than Vladimir Putin's Russia. I don't think that should be very controversial, apparently it is, but it seems to me that that's basic. Another aspect of the mission is not to have what I would call the ultimate form of big government, which is to be the most incarcerated country in the world without a perceptible increase in safety. Krasner easily won re-election last year, but today he's under intense pressure because Philly posted a record 562 murders in 2021, and it's on pace for a similar outcome in 2022. The Republican-led state legislature has become impeachment proceedings against him. Reason sat down with Krasner in his office to talk about his reforms, the violent crime spike, the heat that progressive prosecutors are feeling in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, and what that means for the future of the American criminal justice reform movement. You spent decades as a basically civil rights defense attorney, and now you are the city's top prosecutor. What made you decide to pursue that in 2017? When I came out of law school, I think I was a little bit naive, and I believed that if you just did really good work either as a prosecutor or defense attorney, I actually started out as a state public defender in that under-resourced rodeo that Justice Sotomayor talked so much about. I believe that if you were on either side, you could do really good work, and that the system wasn't broken. What I found out over 30 years is that in many ways it really is, and those were the same 30 years when much of the rise of mass incarceration occurred. I got to the point when I was 56 where I felt like in order to have a much more sweeping impact on a system that I thought was profoundly broken, I had to do something else, and that's when I decided to run to be a chief prosecutor in Philly. And can you talk a little bit about Philadelphia specifically because I know that, for instance, the youth incarceration rate was high compared to even other big American cities. I mean, what was the situation that you were coming into in this city that you felt was needing to be urgently addressed? So the crazy irony of Philly is that this is a tourist destination for freedom. Liberty Bell, you know, place where they wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, all of that is here. And yet when we came into office, it was the most incarcerated of the big cities. It was the poorest of the big cities. It had the highest level of supervision and parole, 25 times higher rate than New York City when we came in here. And yet it is a majority minority city. And it's also a city that's about 85% democratic. And arguably the poorest and the most violent of the 10 biggest cities, most chronically violent anyway at that time. So how the hell do you end up with this witch's brew? How is everything so bad all at the same time? That's when we came in and that was the mission we faced. And part of the mission was trying to figure out how you unravel that, that unique combination of economic failure that seems connected to criminal justice policies that don't make you safer and that tear the city down. That was the mission, it's a big mission. We've made, I think, some significant progress while simultaneously slamming into the pandemic, which has been a challenge all across the country. Some reforms that you implemented coming in that will probably sound pretty good to a libertarian audience such as basically not declining to prosecute marijuana crimes, opioid possession, sex, work type crimes. You know, what what libertarians would call victimless crimes. What were you hoping to achieve with that policy? And how has it panned out so far from your perspective? Was we wanted to increase the focus on the most serious crimes that tear apart society, situations where I believe that we do need to have jails and we need to have incarceration and we need to have consequences. But part of doing that is to stop taking offenses where they are that are either victimless or nonviolent or not serious and try to deal with them through public health approaches. So look for example at sex work or as they call it in the Pennsylvania Code prostitution. You have a situation in which you are to a large extent dealing with women or men because it can be both and sometimes non-binary people who are victims in various different ways. They're struggling with trauma. They're struggling with mental health issues. They're struggling with addiction in many circumstances. And what you're doing by locking them up and putting them in custody and what you're doing by making it so they cannot go to police to protect themselves against people who want to harm them. And what you're doing by giving them convictions is making it harder for them to reintegrate themselves into society when they're able to address these issues and you're not providing them with support for these issues. The reality is you're not getting good drug treatment or mental health treatment or trauma treatment when you're in jail, right? When you're coming out and you're trying to become a cashier and they see three prostitution convictions that ain't gonna work. So no, we're not gonna do that. We're not gonna make it worse for people who we view fundamentally as victims. We need the rest of government, the rest of society to work with us to provide them with some resources. Freedom works better than incarceration in that situation. Similar feelings, of course, about possession of all drugs. While simultaneously wanting to be a catalyst for support. We have seen tremendous success in other countries and Portugal is one in very, very drastically decreasing addiction. Actually in Lisbon, an 80% reduction in the on street persistent use of opioids over 20 plus years by getting away from cops and judges and courthouses by trying to address the underlying needs that led to the drug use in a system invented by a doctor. But Portugal has a far more robust drug treatment system than does Philly. And cops, judges and courthouses are directly involved. Since 2001, the government can force drug users to appear before a panel of doctors, psychologists and social workers who can opt to refer them to treatment and impose a fine for non-compliance. Portugal's reforms in 2001 were more far reaching than the abolition of penalties for using and possessing small quantities of drugs, noted a Swedish researcher who studied the system in 2021. When Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001, overdose deaths plummeted. But they've climbed back up in the past decade. Without that being present in a place like Philadelphia, does it still work to decriminalize something like opioids where people or even heroin or now fentanyl is what's dominant in the supply? Or does it cause more problems? So let me not overstate where we are. We still accept prosecution of people for possession of these drugs. But we make every effort in the prosecution for possession, which is different than selling. We make every effort to enable them to voluntarily get treatment. And Portugal is very much on the voluntary approach, because the reality is that when you're dealing with addiction, people who are successful in dealing with the addiction often have to try to embrace treatment seven, eight, nine, ten times. So rather than forced treatment, which doesn't work, if you make it available to people who when they are ready to get it, will obtain it, what you find is that all the resources go to the people who are ready. The success rate is much higher and you get benefit from it. Simply by taking all of the resources and money out of trying to criminalize what is, in my view, essentially a disease, what you're doing is you're creating the resources that allow you to provide that treatment. No, it doesn't happen overnight because I ain't the governor, I ain't the mayor, I ain't the legislature. I can't do all of that overnight. But if you never start the process, you will never get to the end. Another major aspect of your reform has been bail, which you came in announcing that you wouldn't seek bail in cases, except in cases where a particularly violent crime had occurred. And the rationale is you're filling up jails with people who haven't even been convicted of a crime. There's one 2016 study that found that up to 30% of jail inmates are there just awaiting trial and it's costly to the taxpayer. It's potentially violating innocent people's rights. The police have said that this has resulted just in like a revolving door where they keep arresting people over and over again and they just keep ending up out there on the streets. So what is your view of how bail reform has gone? Well, let's understand something. I don't set bail. Bail is set by judges. And it's set by judges after they hear from the defense and they hear from the prosecution, which is being skipped when people start saying somehow we're creating a revolving door. We're absolutely not. In fact, we are very dissatisfied in serious cases involving violent crime that the bails that are being imposed are way too low. So it is complicated in that sense. The first thing we did 45 days in in 2018 was we set for nonviolent, low-level misdemeanor offenses where people don't present a danger, we're not going to ask for money. Because when you ask for money and judges put little bits of bail on people, the homeless ones, the broke ones sit in jail, but the ones who have a job get out. And the jail is not for poverty. If you present a true danger to the public, then in my view, you should be in jail pending trial because you present a true danger to the public. No matter how rich you are, money should have nothing to do with it. But on the other hand, I don't want to be holding people in jail for 135 bucks a night because they can't pay $100 when the person who got arrested for the same damn thing but has a job can get out the same day. That doesn't make any sense. What we found after a year of taking 25 different nonviolent, non-serious offenses and not seeking money bail for those offenses was success. We found out there was no increase in crime related to it. There was no increase in people failing to come to court, which is what it's supposed to be for. Freedom really was free in that situation. A separate phase happened during the pandemic when we had the additional exigency of trying to make sure that our jails didn't become super spreaders. Five out of 10 of the super spreaders early in the pandemic were in custody, right? So we now had the way public safety in traditional forms, but also public safety that could flow from the spread of a deadly virus within custody. That got complicated. But what we did there was took an even more adamant step towards, look, we're either going to hold you on a very, very high amount of bail because that's the only way under Pennsylvania law we can hold you because you're that much of a danger or we don't want any money at all. We are going to divorce this process from money. So if you present a real danger to the public, you can sit in jail until you trial. And if you don't, you should get out. And this should not be about money. We made these arguments, but judges set bail. We don't. And what we have found is that things have improved. We have a lower number of these low bails that hold in broke people but let out middle class or rich people. We have a lower number, so that's progress. But we have, and we also have a higher number of high bails for people who, for example, are charged with a shooting which a 16-year-old has hit at a recreation center while people are playing basketball. We have a higher number of those high bails, but are we happy? No. We are frequently seeing a lot of bail commissioners who are used to an old system. It's a system that benefits bail bonds people and it benefits counties. It becomes a trough of money for government. They're much more comfortable with these bails that are kind of in the middle. And that's a problem that we're still working on. The real solution here is legislative, but you've got a legislature now that is so lobbied up and donated up by people who make money off of the bail industry that it's going to take a while. We're going to have to get the people to get us there. You've been criticized by the other side for doing this thing where you request a very high bail of $999,900, $1 under a million bail. And I guess what you're saying is the rationale here is bail should either not be there at all or it should be so high that we just are holding the person. What do you say to the critics coming from the other side that, well, this ultimately has resulted in some people who didn't commit a very serious crime having this insane bail over their heads? I respect their opinion, but I disagree. I mean, the reality is what we are trying to emulate here in a state that's all about the cash bail is what they've been doing in DC for over 30 years, which is we're either going to hold you and it's not about money or we're going to let you out and it's not about money. DC has the advantage of also providing services. So when you have broke people or people who are suffering with addiction issues, mental health issues, homelessness issues, things like that, what they'll do is they won't make you pay any money, but they'll give you resources that you go to from the time of arrest. That's a more positive system than we fund here yet. But I can tell you there's nothing new about this. This approach of divorcing money from whether you're held or not is something that we now see not only in DC for a long time with what I view as successful results, about 88% of people down there get out without paying money. About 12% of people are held for trial because they pose a real danger. We're not seeing it just there. We're seeing it in New Jersey, Kentucky, Illinois. It is spreading throughout the United States. Not immediately, but it is spreading throughout the United States and it's absolutely the direction we should go. We should stop profiteering off of holding people in jail. We should be holding them, if at all, because on the facts that we have, they present a real danger. Philadelphia has seen an alarming violent crime spike over these past couple of years. Both gun homicides and armed robberies have gone way up. And this is different than many other large American cities which did see crime spikes during the pandemic, but have somewhat subsided more so than Philadelphia. And your critics blame you. They say it's these bail policies, first of all, with the so-called revolving door. Also, your unwillingness to prosecute gun crimes, which gun arrests have gone up, but gun prosecutions have gone down. So given these stats, how much blame do you deserve for what's happening in Philadelphia? Well, almost all the stats are just untrue. The reality is we actually charge gun possession cases at a higher rate than the people who came before us. Our conviction rate for homicides, for shootings, for homicides with guns, for rapes, for carjackings, for robberies with guns is extremely high. All of those conviction rates at the trial level are in the 80s and 90% levels. What you're referring to is really a political narrative that serves certain people, but it is not accurate. But I've seen the graph where the gun arrests have gone up, but the prosecutions have not stayed up. So what's going on with that? So that is not what the graph shows. The graph shows that the gun arrests have gone up, but the success with the prosecutions has not gone up. It has gone down in certain instances. What's going on is a combination of factors. One of them is that there are a lot of illegal searches that are done in these cases. And I don't say that to blame anybody, but the reality is there are a lot of illegal searches. So a lot of those searches are thrown out by judges because they're violations of the Fourth Amendment. And we cannot convict people when all the evidence is thrown out. A lot of those are cases where you have a civilian witness who absolutely will not show up no matter what we do. And many of them we have police witnesses who are not showing up repeatedly and those cases are thrown out. There is a fictional line that people like to put out there, which is essentially that if a prosecutor starts a case, then it must be perfect. And if they don't win the case, then obviously it's their fault. But you have made, correct me if I'm wrong, but you have made the decision not to prosecute certain gun possession cases where it doesn't involve an actual violent crime. No, that's not correct. We actually prosecute every single kind of gun possession case. What they may be referring to is for a small number of cases, a few percent, where we have basically law-abiding people who are having, for example, a first offense with a lawfully purchased firearm, but are in violation of not having a piece of paper that says you can carry it on the street. In those situations, we hold them accountable with consequences, including community service, long-term supervision, various other things they need to do, fines and costs, things of that sort, but we give them a pathway to avoid a conviction. And we do that because we believe society will be safer if you take law-abiding people who made a mistake and did something wrong and you don't make them unemployable. Now I can tell you, we've studied the recidivism from that, in other words, the rate at which they then get arrested later. And if we look at the ones we divert and granted we're cherry-picking, we're picking people who we believe are safe, their rate of reoffending is one sixth of the rate of the ones we prosecute. Nobody talks about this, but there needs to be a velvet glove and there needs to be a hammer. When you can tell the difference between the wheat and the chaff and you're taking people who have done something wrong, like buy the gun legally and with good intent, but they haven't gotten the permit to carry, when you can tell the difference between those people and the ones who are out to do harm, then you can make it safer by prosecuting in a different way, which is to hold them accountable with diversion rather than conviction. So do you have an alternative explanation as to why violent crime is setting records in Philadelphia because you can understand how someone would look at the situation and say, okay, this reform DA came in and changed the whole way that the office is run and now these are the predictable results. So what is the alternative explanation for what's going on? Well, first of all, once again, just to get dig in on the data, we looked at where we were a couple of years ago and we'll give you all the data, so you can check it later, make sure I'm not making it up. But my recollection is of the 50 largest cities in the United States, there had been an increase in homicides or homicides by gun that was on average 42%. We were up 40. So the notion that we're somehow leading this mission when we're actually ever so slightly below average is just not true. We're actually somewhere in the middle. When you look more broadly, you look at the history of the city of Philadelphia, the two highest periods of increase in homicides were actually under Republican district attorney quite some time ago and they didn't have to deal with a pandemic. We're dealing with a pandemic. When you look countywide, and I ain't making this up. I know it's hard to believe, but it's real and we got it for you. If you look at the very individuals who are trying to bring about impeachment, what you will find is that during a two year period when we saw homicides go up 59% in Philly, one of these dudes, it went up 800% where he lives. Another one, it went up 400% where he lives. And the other one, it went up, let me make sure I got this right. It was 800, it was 300, and it was 250%. Those are the people saying we need to look at Philly where it's gone up 59% because we're Republicans and we wanna get elected and we're all about the fear. That is what's actually going on here. What we have here is a terrible situation, but it is by no means a leading terrible situation in the United States. Take a bigger look at this and I would encourage you to look at an article which is called the red state murder problem. And what you will see is they did a study in 2020 of what states were the most murderous and what cities were the most murderous. What they found was eight out of 10 of the most murderous cities were Republican cities, essentially Trump cities. And when they then looked at the difference between all the states that voted for Trump, the places where you would expect to have more conservative policies around prosecution and also more availability of guns. So look at all the Trump states, they used Trump, Biden as a proxy for these two different approaches. What you found was that the murder rate in the Trump states was actually 40% higher. And this is all the Trump states compared to all the Biden states, the murder rates were 40% higher. So help me now here, please. But I mean, you're talking about at the state level whereas these, I mean, I can't think of many large cities that are governed by what you would call a Trump Republican. No, I can and I'll give it to you. I have the list and I'll be happy to pull it out. So you're saying eight out of 10. I'm telling you the top city in the United States for the increase in violence is a Trump city, so Trumpy, that they got that prosecutor and had that prosecutor represent the Republican Party in impeachment of Donald Trump. That's what we're talking about. This is a sweepingly false narrative. Krasner is right that eight out of 10 states with the highest murder rate in 2020 voted for Trump and seven of the 10 were governed by Republicans. But violent crime tends to be a more localized problem. Of the 10 big cities with the highest murder rate in 2020, all were governed by Democratic mayors. Krasner has also pointed to three of Pennsylvania's rural counties with a higher percentage uptick in murders than Philly between 2019 and 2021, all of which are represented by his Republican adversaries in the state legislature. But because those counties all had at normally low murder rates in 2019 and their baseline murder rates are so low, their 15 excess murders were more likely to be random statistical noise than the excess 250 murders in Philly over the same time period. That's not to say the murder spike was just a Democratic city problem. Fort Worth, Texas, America's second largest Republican-controlled city also saw a steep jump in homicide between 2019 and 2020 and the largest Republican-led city in America, Jacksonville, Florida, hit its highest murder rate since 2007. But unlike in Philly, murders in Jacksonville and many other American cities have fallen sharply since. 2022 police data shows Philly is close to matching the all-time murder record it set last year. Philly has seen overall violent crime rise by 7%, property crime by more than 30%, and commercial burglary more than 50%, according to police stats. So what we can agree on is that Philadelphia, it set a murder record last year. My question is, if it's not a problem with coming from the DA's office, what do you think needs to change to get that murder rate down in Philadelphia? Or is it not a policy issue? No, I think there's a lot of things that have to change in Philly. First of all, in Philly, you're dealing with the poorest of the 10 largest cities. There's no question that there is a heavy correlation between poverty and economic failure, particularly on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis and chronic violence. Philadelphia has been a chronically violent city for decades. What has been done through traditional, lock them up and hang them high approaches has never worked to reduce violence in Philadelphia. That's where it has been. So what works? Two things work. One is modern enforcement, and that includes things like some pretty amazing forensics that are now available that have been available but have not been funded. It ain't good politics to fund forensics. It's good politics to fund compensation for large police unions that wield political power like some other unions. It's good politics for police not to be accountable because then their leadership endorses the right politician. But it's never been good politics to put the $50 million that Philadelphia needs into a forensics lab that would allow them to go from the statistic they had a few years ago, solving 17% of shootings to solving 30% or 40%. That would make a huge difference in deterrence. So that is part of modern enforcement. It's other things like more wiretaps. Mobile wiretaps obviously supported by probable cause. It's other things like camera technology and things of that nature. And a society where you have almost no witnesses in many of these cases because the bonds between law enforcement meaning prosecutors and police and communities are so broken. So there's a modern enforcement side to this that is super important. But the other side of it is a frankly never before serious investment in prevention. And that takes many, many different forms. If you view the most sacred obligation of a prosecutor's office or law enforcement to try to prevent the next victimization, that is really a much better goal than to give somebody a life sentence after that person has taken a life. It really doesn't do that much. But that prevention money gotta come from somewhere. And so when you look and you see the decline of mental health services available in our society during the period of mass incarceration, we got at 85% of mental health services. We put that money into prisons. We put it into jails. When you look at the decline of money available for education for poor people especially public education, it coincides very neatly with the growth of everything that was about locking you up and throwing away the key. We have to get these resources from somewhere. And when you look at economic decline in areas where they've been all too eager to give you a permanent conviction for turnstile jumping or a first retail theft or something like that. What you see is employers don't wanna go there because they don't wanna hire people who have prior convictions. So they locate their businesses elsewhere. I think you see my point. What you see is that much of this is very, very counterproductive. And the answers have to be the lessons we got from the pandemic. One of the biggest lessons is that when you had schools open, you had organized sports in and out of school and I could go on camps, arts programs, et cetera. When you had those things going on, you had much lower levels of gun violence. And when they went away, we saw this incredible spike. When you give young people a sense of hope, when you give them constructive people to do cause it is young people killing young people for the most part. When you do that, you start to see these things go in a better direction. You mentioned lowering sentences for like retail theft and things like that as being part of the solution. And that was something I wanted to talk to you about because this is an issue that's become something, this was an issue in San Francisco where people complained a lot about quality of life type crimes where the shoplifting went way up, they say, because of decreased penalties for shoplifting. And you've made it a policy, to have kind of a summary judgment or not summary judgment, what do you call it? Summary offense. Yeah, a summary offense for people, $500 or less, you know, you've lowered probationary periods. A summary offense, by the way, usually is like a fine or at most no jail time. So, and then some of that same police data I referenced earlier showed that infiliate property crimes up 30%, commercial burglaries 50%, do you think that that has worked out in a way that has made quality of life worse here in Philadelphia? No, the reality here is a lot more interesting and a lot more complex. We are seeing a big increase in property crimes right now, but if you look at the last two years, there was a big decrease in property crimes. When you lock people up in their homes and you shut down businesses and you have them sitting near their car all day, what you're going to see and what we did see was in many, many, many categories very significant declines in property crimes when society came back online as we saw the diminishment or the diminution of the pandemic, people started to go back to work. We saw these spikes going back up. This is also, of course, happening in a time of tremendous economic displacement. We have a voracious, arguably out of control situation going on with opioids that feeds much of this. So no, I mean, a lot of that simplistic, it's not even true that we're punishing people less for retail theft. The reality is that I was in the system for 30 years as a defense attorney in one way or another. They used to charge higher levels of the offense. They charge a misdemeanor every now and then a felony, but very few of those people ever went to jail and with the summer, you can go to jail for 90 days. What it does is it takes people out of this ridiculous process of tying up police, handcuffing people, taking them to a police station, keeping them in jail until they pay bail, which a lot of times they cannot pay bail, then they go to court, then the witnesses don't show up anyway in very, very high levels because their employers don't want security guards to be in court. They want security guards to be at the store, all right? So a lot of this is really just, it's just, that's what it is. You're facing impeachment now from a Republican-led state legislature, although some Democrats have joined them in holding you in contempt for not turning over some materials related to a case that you say, you can't turn over because it's grand jury material. Because it's a crime, yeah. I don't like me to commit a crime. You've called this whole... I'm declining to do that. You've called this whole thing illegitimate. Why is the impeachment proceeding illegitimate in your mind? So the reason it's illegitimate is you impeach people for committing crimes. You impeach them for deep, deep corruption. This is a legislature that has almost never done it. It has never happened in the history of the Commonwealth, which is hundreds of years that they have said we're gonna impeach somebody not because that person committed any crime, but because we disagree with their ideas. Understand where this impeachment is coming from. I was elected the first time, handily, the second time with an overwhelming landslide. We got 72% of the vote in Philly. We got more than two-thirds of every Democrat in the primary. And in the areas most affected by gun violence, the ones where if you bought any of this nonsense, you would think they'd be against me, I had the highest rates of support. We had rates of support that were 80 to 85% in the areas most affected by gun violence. That's what Philadelphia thinks about the person they freely and fairly elected. People leading this are from hundreds of miles away. They do not live in Philadelphia. They're not permitted to vote in Philadelphia. They're from Beaver County. I did not make that name up. They're from Washington County and Adams County. They're from these far away counties that are rural, that are to put it mildly gun-loving in ways that we are not. We have some ideas about reasonable regulation of guns. They don't want to appreciate it and neither does their financial sponsor, the NRA appreciate. But their point is we may not live there. We can't even vote there. But our few votes out here as legislature should allow us to remove you because we don't like your ideas. That is the end of democracy. That is the gutting of democracy. It means that anytime you have a dominant party, they can remove the opposing party by saying we don't like your ideas even if your constituents love them. That's where we are. And no, it's not a surprise that we are less than one month away from a hotly contested midterm election where one party has a very large contingent, shall I put it, of people who are either insurrectionists themselves or their election deniers or they are essentially patronizing and supporting insurrectionists. You were elected here before the killing of George Floyd which really brought this issue of criminal justice reform and police reform to the forefront of a lot of people's minds. But you, that did sweep in a lot of other like-minded prosecutors around the country, Gascon in LA, Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. There's this public appetite for criminal justice reform. You, as you mentioned, won your reelection quite handily. You, there was significant backing from progressive activists like George Soros which conservatives like to point out. I mean, not really the second time, but. He backed out the second time. First of all, he never supported me directly, but there's your pack. No, he never gave me a dime in my pack. He was, well, anyway. Or two-a-pack. I don't want to be weighing into the weeds with this, but the fact is there was significant outside support over a million bucks. Put into TV ads and radio ads by people I never met, never conferred with, with whom we never did anything, right? That happened the first time. There's no question that amplified our message the first time. The second time, there was almost none of that money. It was, I think less than $200,000 or something like that. Represented only a few percent of the entire amount. It was once again, all on the outside. And that was very simply because we were running off of our deeds instead of our ideas. People in Philly knew what we did and they wanted us. Our donors actually, on average, donated far less than my opponent. Because the point I was trying to make is that there was this large, there's this enthusiasm and money and support for this cause. And now it seems that there has been some backlash. I mean, Boudin was recalled in San Francisco. Gascon has survived, I think, a couple recall attempts. And of course, you're now facing impeachment here. What do you predict for the immediate future of the reform prosecutor movement and let's just say criminal justice reform more broadly? Success. And let me tell you why. So if you look about two and a half, three years ago, we had gone from zero progressive or reform prosecutors in the United States to the point where 10% of the US population lived in those jurisdictions, 10%. Around George Floyd in a two-year period, that amount increased to about 20% of the US population. You're talking 70 to 75 million people. There is no political group, political party in the US can say we doubled in two years like that. And their influence was even bigger because many but not all were big jurisdictions. So 20% of the population really was involved with 30% of all criminal cases. This is a problem for people who are opposed to what we are doing. And so they got out all their money, they threw it down hard and they made a money fire to try to beat us. First, Kim Foxx didn't work, then they tried to stop George Gascon who by the way was a career cop and a career police chief before he became the DA in San Francisco for six years, which is what he was. He is one of the earliest of the progressive prosecutors and he is the copyist of the progressive prosecutors. So he knows what the hell he's talking about when it comes to policing. He then does the unthinkable and gets elected beating an incumbent in the largest criminal justice jurisdiction in the United States. Yes, they came at him twice with recall efforts in a state that needs to change his stupid recall laws. They failed twice, he's not failing. You look at Chesa and I say this as someone whose son lives in San Francisco where last year the average sale price for a home was $1.8 million, okay? It's a special place. It ain't Baltimore, it ain't St. Louis and it ain't Philly where the average home price here is probably on the order of about, I would say a quarter of a million bucks, which is a price, but it's not 1.8. What actually happened there is Chesa lost and what's happening in Oakland, which is a bigger jurisdiction right across the water, you're about to see Pamela Price win as the progressive prosecutor there when she couldn't win four years ago. What happened South of San Francisco in other big jurisdictions. You saw the reelection of Diana Bekton who's a progressive prosecutor in one of those counties. What we are seeing now and I'm giving it to you as straight and objective as we can is that in a time of tremendous fear, when people who are conservative and are carceral and believe in a carceral state, they want this country to be more incarcerated than Vladimir Putin's Russia feel like to have a moment because there is real concern about crime and there should be. There is a surge in violent crime and it's real. Those same people are trying to run a fear-based kind of politics that is not scientific, is not based on data, it doesn't look at causation, it doesn't look at solutions. They're trying to run that crap again just like they did in 1968, but even in that hostile climate, and I ran for reelection in that hostile climate, I ran last year, even in that hostile climate, what we're seeing is that the progressive prosecutors are getting elected and they are getting reelected, they are at least holding their own at this time, but the tactics have changed. What we're seeing is that the opponents have almost given up on elections because they know that they're failing when they try to get us out with elections. What they are doing is they are resorting to anti-democratic tactics that occur in between elections. They're either taking away people's authority to make certain kinds of decisions unlike all of their prosecutor colleagues, unlike decades of tradition, or they're trying to do recalls, or they're trying to do impeachment under brand new theories. The brand new theory being here, being I can impeach you for your ideas, I can impeach you for your policies, really? Can we? You better hope you don't have Democrats in charge of the state who are as cynical as you are because a whole lot of you are gonna be out of work and we might as well give up on elections at that point. So what you're actually seeing is that these tactics, like all these recalls and impeachments, reflect that they can't beat us at elections and they can't even beat us at elections in any significant way in one of the most frightening times with some of the worst crime that we have seen. So given that you're optimistic that the Reform DA is going to survive all this, are you also optimistic that the project of working towards a society that is not the most carceral country in the world will succeed over in the coming years? I'm optimistic, but we have, I mean, we gotta be honest about our history. Our history, unfortunately, you know, if you would look to like the writings of somebody like Brian Stevenson, he would argue that we didn't actually eliminate slavery, we it morphed. It went from a strictly slave system to a system of mass incarceration. You know, we see tremendous successes in the history of the United States, in my opinion, things like the election of Barack Obama and then you have the insanity of the election of somebody like Donald Trump who I wouldn't actually let sell me a pair of shoes. You know, we have that kind of stuff going on. So the part of me that knows how many people in this country are people of goodwill and resort to reason they believe in history and science and truth, that part of me is very optimistic, but we cannot deny the reality that there is a contingent in the United States who are fundamentally racist, who are either unscientific or anti-scientific, who do not care for democracy and probably never did and who do not care for truth. What exacerbates it? We could talk about that all day. How we got here, we could talk about that all day. But certainly what we have here are two profoundly divided and competing forces. And I intend to spend whatever energy and time I have supporting science, truth, history, data, things that work, solutions that are new, where we have failed and trying to fix things that have been wrong for a very, very long time with solutions that don't look like some evolution of slavery. Larry Kressner, thank you very much for talking to reason. It's always good to talk about slavery is bad and it's libertarian, so it's been a pleasure.