Chesa Boudin Quotes

Chesa Boudin

Profession : Lawyer

Birth : August 21, 1980

Our criminal justice system is failing all of us. It is not keeping us safe. It is contributing to a vicious cycle of crime and punishment.

Chesa Boudin

Local prosecutors must use the power and discretion afforded them to carry out sweeping reforms that will protect the public - especially Black communities - from police violence. Our system's integrity depends on it.

Chesa Boudin

My father, David Gilbert, is in prison in New York. He is lucky that he has a single cell, not shared with another person. His cell is about eight feet by eight feet.

Chesa Boudin

If police departments won't remove officers who lack integrity, prosecutors should ensure that no one is prosecuted based on those officers' unreliable accounts.

Chesa Boudin

There's an awful lot about our criminal justice system that is dysfunctional. Everyone who sets foot in a criminal courtroom will see myriad ways the system is dysfunctional.

Chesa Boudin

Politics has always been personal for me. You know, growing up, I was in a very politically conscious household. We engaged with intellectuals and artists and academics from around the world who were thinking critically about politics and the intersection of politics and public life.

Chesa Boudin

I want to give every victim of every crime in San Francisco the right to participate in restorative justice if they choose to.

Chesa Boudin

We should not have people in prisons and jails who aren't a violent threat.

Chesa Boudin

The status quo tough-on-crime policies of the '90s and 2000s are not working and are not popular. And it provides me with hope about the possibilities for San Francisco and this whole country in terms of moving away from our dependence on prisons and jails to solve social problems.

Chesa Boudin

The problem with money bail, for those who aren't familiar with it, is that it puts a price tag on freedom. It says to someone who is wealthy that no matter how dangerous you are, you can buy your way out.

Chesa Boudin

In San Francisco, I am proud to say that one of my first mandates as district attorney was that my staff would never ask the court to impose money bail. If we believe someone is too dangerous to be released, then it doesn't matter how wealthy they are - we should ask the court to detain them.

Chesa Boudin

What we're doing in San Francisco and what we're doing with other criminal justice partners across the state and across the country is anything but indiscriminate. We are being careful. We are being focused and surgical in our efforts to decrease the jail population.

Chesa Boudin

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

Chesa Boudin

We need to do a better job identifying what's contributing to the crime and making sure we hold people accountable in a way that addresses that root cause.

Chesa Boudin

In any campaign you make a lot of promises and you talk about a wide range of issues. When you're elected, the work of accomplishing those goals has to be sequenced. You can't do everything at once.

Chesa Boudin

Homelessness, open air drug use and mental illness - which we all see in this city - are things we've been relying on the DA's office and the jails to deal with. That's really expensive, inhumane and ineffective.

Chesa Boudin

My mother negotiated a plea deal, and my father went to trial. I think one thing we notice in their case that kind of stands out is how, in some ways, arbitrary the outcomes in the criminal justice system can be. And they did basically the same thing, identical thing.

Chesa Boudin

I've been really consistent throughout the campaign and since I won that I want to prioritize victims rights and I want to prioritize healing.

Chesa Boudin

I was in diapers when my parents left me with the babysitter to participate in an armored car robbery. They never came home.

Chesa Boudin

The fact that more than 50 percent of Americans have an immediate family member either currently or formerly incarcerated tells you a lot about just how defining a feature of American culture incarceration has become.

Chesa Boudin