For the People
For the People is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.
Copyright © 2021 by Larry Krasner
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Krasner, Larry, 1961– author.
Title: For the people : a story of justice and power / Larry Krasner.
Description: First edition. | New York : One World, 2021
Identifiers: LCCN 2020056778 (print) | LCCN 2020056779 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593132920 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593132937 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Krasner, Larry, 1961– | Criminal defense lawyers—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Biography. | Public prosecutors—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Biography. | Criminal justice, Administration of—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia. | Philadelphia (Pa.)—Politics and government
Classification: LCC KF373.K69 A3 2021 (print) | LCC KF373.K69 (ebook) | DDC 340.092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056778
Ebook ISBN 9780593132937
oneworldlit.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Greg Mollica
Cover photograph: Rich Garella
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1: Chasing Power: Campaign Announcement
Chapter 2: Early Outsider
Chapter 3: Death Penalty: First Interview at the DAO
Chapter 4: Frank’s Long Shadow
Chapter 5: Decarceration
Chapter 6: Do Less Harm
Chapter 7: Police Integrity
Chapter 8: Prosecutor Integrity
Chapter 9: Lisa Taught Me Politics
Chapter 10: Victims and Survivors
Chapter 11: Progressive Prosecutor
Chapter 12: Difference = Power: The Campaign
Chapter 13: Protest Clampdown
Chapter 14: And Then We Won
Chapter 15: Changes
Chapter 16: Ryden
Chapter 17: Eleventh Hour: Second Interview at the DAO
Chapter 18: Taking Power: Swearing In a Movement
Epilogue: Swearing In the Future
Dedication
Acknowledgments
The For the People Playlist
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
Shine a light
Through the eyes of the ones left behind
—Elton John, “Philadelphia Freedom”
I am now the elected district attorney of the city and county of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania—one of the largest cities in the United States. Philadelphia is a diverse and wonderfully quirky city, known for Brotherly Love (and Sisterly Affection more recently), Ben Franklin, police corruption and brutality, the U.S. Constitution, cheesesteaks and soft pretzels, Questlove and the Roots, rabid sports fans, patronage, its successive waves of immigration, big-city ward politics, the Declaration of Independence, high poverty, high home ownership, a working-class attitude, affordability, a great restaurant scene, and its magnetic attraction for millennials. It’s also known for bombing itself.
But this book is not about my time as DA. It’s about the little story of how I got there—and the bigger story of how an outsider movement for criminal justice reform took power and then took office. Before I was sworn in, my long life’s work as a lawyer was in criminal defense and civil rights—as far from the work of a traditional prosecutor as a lawyer could be. Back in that life, I joined with other Philly outsiders to push for justice against the insiders in the all-powerful Office of the District Attorney, the institution I now run. But our work as outsiders didn’t accomplish a whole lot—at least not enough—before our movement did the uncomfortable thing: We took back power. We outsiders went inside and took over the institution we had fought against all our lives.
Philadelphia is rightly famous for its national parks, historical sites, statuary, and artifacts dedicated to the ideals of freedom and governmental restraint. Independence Mall, in the center of the city, includes the antique Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution were drafted in all their deeply flawed glory. The little brick house where Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag from hemp is nearby. Independence Hall looks out at the National Constitution Center, a modern museum across a blocks-long grassy expanse. The tourist-friendly Liberty Bell Center sits on that grassy mall, adjacent to the museum’s most recent and smallest addition: its guilty conscience, the slave memorial that roofs over the archaeological remains of General Washington’s slaves’ quarters. In Mount Vernon, Washington owned 316 slaves. As president in Philadelphia, he owned nine. They were: Oney Judge, Christopher Sheels, Hercules, Austin, Richmond, Paris, Giles, Moll, and Joe. The stone corners of the slaves’ tight lodgings are underground, nearly hidden, visible only from ground level through glass. You have to look down to see them.
There are other good reasons to look down in Philly. The many legacies of slavery are also nearly hidden here. Unrestrained government still tramples freedom in the city, this time through its criminal justice system, but it can be hard to see. Consider, for example, that 27 percent of Pennsylvania’s state prisoners in 2017 had been sentenced in only one of the state’s sixty-seven counties: Philadelphia. Those incarcerated Philadelphians are hidden in prisons that dot the state’s rural and suburban counties, stretching west until they run out at the Ohio border.
Sometimes the system hides in plain sight: In Philly you can’t walk down a city block without passing someone currently on county probation or parole. You just don’t know who it is. When I was running, Philadelphia’s county supervision rate (the rate of people currently on probation and parole) was one in twenty-three, higher than in any other big city in America. Among African Americans, the rate was one in fourteen. For African American men in Philly, that rate was even higher. Philly’s rate of county supervision was twelve times higher than the supervision rate in New York City, a two-hour drive north. In comparison, the rate of adults on probation or parole was one in fifty-five in the United States, the most carceral country in the world. Philly’s rate was more than twice the national rate.
When I ran for DA, what was visible for decades in Philadelphia was an outsized police department the city could ill afford. Philadelphia—currently the country’s sixth largest city—had the fourth largest police department, with more than six thousand uniformed personnel. Despite a thirty-year downward trend in crime nationally and locally, and despite being the poorest of the ten largest cities in the United States, the city continued to fund cops at the expense of desperately needed resources for public education; treatment for mental illness, addiction, and trauma; and economic development—all the things that we know actually prevent crime. Yet this generously funded police department had not reduced Philadelphia’s rates of violent crime compared to other jurisdictions. The national and local downward trend in crime was real, but so was the fact that even during decades of declining crime, Philly chronically had higher violent crime rates than jurisdictions with smaller police departments.
The city’s war on the freedom of its own citizens was also evident
in the fact that, until recently, Philadelphia had sentenced more juveniles to life without any possibility of parole than any other city in the world. Sometimes Philly had sentenced those juveniles to death. Philadelphia remained the only northeastern U.S. city where the death penalty was even available—and it had a history of being one of the most prolific producers of death-row residents in the country.
Pennsylvania lawmakers hadn’t helped their biggest city to reclaim its history as a cradle of freedom. Its legislators had increased the number of criminal offenses to nearly 1,500—a 500 percent increase from the 1970s, when there were 282 Pennsylvania crimes that worked just fine. Add to that Pennsylvania lawmakers’ mad love for mandatory sentencing laws and high sentencing guidelines, and here was what you got: While the rest of the country had increased the number of people in prisons and jails an alarming 500 percent during the period of mass incarceration starting in the 1980s, Pennsylvania had increased its numbers more than 700 percent by 2017, with Philadelphia being its primary driver. Pennsylvania has outpaced the rest of the most incarcerating country in the world.
Many upstate Pennsylvania legislators’ unrelenting urge for incarceration was pragmatic: Mass incarceration benefited their rural, exurban, and suburban county economies by feeding their primary industry, public state prisons, once coal and steel were gone. Mass incarceration increased highway funds (never mind that incarcerated people didn’t drive) and other federal funding where state prisons were situated because inmate populations were counted in the local census. Mass incarceration also built political power through gerrymandering by counting people in jails as residents even though they couldn’t vote. It advanced the careers of politicians who posed as good economic stewards for their counties, talking tough on crime, which affected their counties far less than Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Meanwhile, these counties, where the coal and steel industries had disappeared, switched to mining the bodies of urban Pennsylvanians—people from somewhere else, whose racial, cultural, and economic differences made locking them up that much easier—and hid them in their state prisons. But my thirty years as a lawyer told me that even lawmakers’ powers were slow and limited compared to the power a local chief prosecutor wielded. Legislators had little control over chief prosecutors’ decision making—their discretion to decide how to handle their cases.
By the time I ran for Philly’s chief prosecutor in 2017, I already knew that chief prosecutors hold the power to make life-changing decisions within their jurisdictions. They unilaterally decide whether or not to use the law to try to kill people, take their freedom, take their clean records and good reputations, take their future employability and their livelihoods, take their ability to form and provide for families, take them away from their families, and take their peace of mind and their money. Chief prosecutors have the latitude to offer favorable or unfavorable deals for guilty pleas on heavy or light charges, to offer diversion programs that avoid convictions, to drop cases, to try cases the right way or the wrong way, and to present honest or untruthful witnesses. They can decide to be impartial or use victims as political pawns, to hide evidence or provide it, to recklessly or purposefully convict the innocent, to leave wrongfully convicted people stuck in jail or help exonerate them, to over-incarcerate or decarcerate, to try to be even-handed or discriminate, to wisely steward society’s resources toward prevention and rehabilitation or burn up so much money on punishment that there’s nothing left for anything else. It’s a lot of power. And thirty years in courthouses had taught me the sad truth that most chief prosecutors have abused it.
When I ran my long-shot campaign to be Philly’s chief elected prosecutor, I promised to try to reverse the damage done by traditional prosecution. I wasn’t supported by the usual centrist powerbrokers, but I wasn’t alone. I and other progressive prosecutors who were elected before and after me ran to be technicians for a growing national people’s movement for criminal justice reform, arguably the most important civil rights issue of our time.
That movement rejects that the United States should be the most incarcerated country in the world. It intends to decarcerate. That movement embraces prevention, rehabilitation, and public health over punishment. For people who are suffering from addiction and mental illness, it prefers to treat rather than jail. That movement would reduce what we spend on jails and excessive policing to reinvest in public education, economic development, antiviolence efforts, treatment, and everything else that actually prevents crime. That movement embraces racial justice. That movement recognizes that traditional prosecution’s grievous missteps don’t just fail to prevent crime—they actually cause it by stealing resources from crime prevention programs that restore communities. Traditional prosecution breaks the people it should protect, which breaks their communities, their cities, and their towns. Ultimately, mass incarceration destroys so much of what we care about that it will eventually destroy itself.
But how does an extremely punitive criminal justice jurisdiction built on traditional prosecution destroy itself? Philadelphia has built two pricey, brand-new courthouses in recent years to handle its boom in criminal cases while simultaneously closing and selling public schools. What is the impact of defunding Philly students’ public education and failing to graduate young people—robbing them of resources in exactly the years when young men are most prone to commit crime? Philly suburbs’ public school funding remains much higher; its crime is much lower.
And what does a rapacious criminal justice system do to a city’s economy? Is it a surprise that a city that has convicted and incarcerated and oversupervised so many of its youth, especially its men, also made them unemployable? Is it surprising that such a criminalized workforce is unattractive to businesses considering whether to locate in the city? Pernicious criminal justice turns those young people into poor taxpayers and poor providers for the rest of their lives. And all this incarceration and supervision is expensive. Not only does it lead to the economic disenfranchisement of the youth caught in its net, but it also helps explain how Philadelphia’s economic decline and its chronically burdensome taxation incentivize even more flight from the city and a downward spiral in the tax base.
What alchemist drew water from the well of ignorance to come up with this poison brew of expensive criminal justice, lost businesses, lost tax revenues, lost employment, underfunded education, and despair? The legacy of Philadelphia’s traditional prosecutors and institutional partners includes their impoverishment of the city. And poverty and despair catalyze more crime. Philadelphia is a glaring example of the need for criminal justice reform—but it is no outlier: Its problems are the problems of cities around the country. When I chose to run for office, I knew the bad news: Our decades-long radical adventure in an authoritarian, punitive, and broken criminal justice system had not merely failed to prevent crime: It had caused crime in ways a working system would prevent.
The good news is that profound change is possible in cities, their institutions, and their politics, just as it is in people. At its core, the movement for criminal justice reform recognizes that people change; it rejects a comic-book version of people as unchanging saints or monsters. That binary, fictional narrative is the cracked foundation of a system that tilts toward retribution and punishment rather than rehabilitation and prevention. The criminal justice reform movement recognizes that, just as people can profoundly change, so can institutions and so can the politics and the media that prop up those institutions, even after decades of failure. The real question is how?
This book is about facing the reality that traditional prosecutors and their institutional friends need to go, which will never happen until the rest of us take over their power. For most of my life before becoming Philadelphia’s chief prosecutor, and even during that campaign, I have wrestled with the same questions: How and why is our criminal justice system so broken? How do we fix it and move forward? Where are the nuts and bolts to turn, and what tools will work to tur
n them in order to repair criminal justice? How do we fix the injustice of the past? How do we prevent injustice in the future? In our democracy, can we take power back when leadership has failed? If so, then how? Why are we afraid to seek power?
The miracle is that, after a long life of watching and wondering from the outside, I have a job now as a mechanic on the inside of a broken system, in support of this unrelenting grassroots movement to address the key civil rights issue of our time: criminal justice reform. But the story of our time in office in Philadelphia is not this book. Our wins and losses in office to date are a matter of public record, an open source and imperfect repair manual that incorporates the wisdom and battle scars of my fellow American criminal justice mechanics—the progressive prosecutors who, like me, are nothing more and nothing less than technicians for a national movement for criminal justice reform.
CHAPTER 1
Chasing Power
Campaign Announcement
Don’t you know
They’re talkin’ ’bout a revolution
It sounds like a whisper
—Tracy Chapman, “Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution”
For thirty years of my career, I did the kind of work that makes you unelectable, or so the political insiders say. Voters said something else.
I was in the dark, holed up in the control booth of a television studio in Philly’s public access television station, getting ready to announce my candidacy for district attorney. At fifty-six, I’d spent my career in court as a criminal defense and civil rights trial lawyer. I had tried and won a lot of cases. I got some justice for a lot of individuals, but that justice was never quite ideal. It was unbalanced, incomplete, and unsatisfactory. Even the wins showed me that the system needed to change. But as I tried case after case and the decades passed, the system didn’t change. It was only getting worse. Our city was one of the most jail-happy cities in the most incarcerated country in the world. Too many serious crimes went unsolved, especially when the victims were powerless. In one area of concentrated poverty in Philly, the solve rate for shootings was only 15 percent. And, rather than being cared for and supported, too many victims were used for political purposes. Day after day, driving around Philadelphia, I saw for-sale signs on too many of our public school buildings. For years, while visiting clients in custody and their families in their homes I kept wondering why jails and prisons and new courthouses just kept growing like an unchecked tumor, while the things we all needed fell apart. The problem behind it all was the criminal justice system. We were coming together that day, to change it.