The False Hope of the Progressive-Prosecutor Movement

The public’s growing familiarity and frustration with America’s criminal legal system has brought a new type of prosecutor to power. These so-called progressive prosecutors promise to end mass incarceration and bring fairness to the criminal legal system—by doing things such as declining to prosecute certain low-level offenses, expanding diversion programs, and replacing hard-line assistants with reform-minded outsiders. Liberal activists and politicians, and even a Supreme Court justice, have endorsed this movement as the key to criminal legal reform.

But progressive prosecutors’ approach . The progressive-prosecutor movement acknowledges (as research has ) that prosecutors’ power is a major source of America’s criminal-justice problems. It asks its adherents to use that power for good, and trusts them to do so.