Do Harsher Punishments Deter Crime? With Chesa Boudin

During Chesa Boudin's 2,5 years in office as San Francisco's elected district attorney, incarceration plummeted - the number of people in the county jail fell by approximately 40 percent. Meanwhile both violent and non violent crime rates fell by double digits. Some of these changes may have been accelerated by COVID and police behavior. Did San Francisco create a virtuous cycle where decreasing incarceration feeds into decreasing crime? More broadly, California has safely cut its prison population nearly in half as crime rates near modern lows. What lessons can we learn from San Francisco and California's successful decarceration?Welcome to a seminar with Chesa Boudin, the founding executive director of Berkeley’s Criminal Law & Justice Center, a policy and advocacy hub. He served as San Francisco’s elected district attorney from 2020 until 2022. During that time, Boudin implemented reforms to ensure that the criminal legal system delivered safety and justice for all. He significantly expanded the office’s victim services’ division; eliminated prosecutors’ use of moneybail; prosecuted police for excessive force; sued the manufacturers of ghostguns; expanded diversion to address root causes of crime, and reduced incarceration significantly. During his time in office both violent and non-violent crime fell by double digits. Prior to his election Boudin clerked for two federal judges and worked for years as a deputy public defender. He is a graduate of Yale college and Yale law school and attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. His biological parents spent a combined 62 years in prison starting when he was a baby.Discussants Camila Salazar Atías, Senior specialist, destructive environments, FryshusetAmina Azhar, Federal Public Defender - Eastern District of CaliforniaCraig Haney, social psychologist, professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a researcher on The Stanford Prison Experiment.Moderator: Jerzy Sarnecki, professor emeritus of general criminology at Stockholm University. His research area is mainly life cycle criminology and criminal networks.