Chesa Boudin Quotes

Chesa Boudin

Profession : Lawyer

Birth : August 21, 1980

My family taught me radical politics from the beginning, but I also learned to prove myself in elite institutions.

Chesa Boudin

My earliest memories are going into prisons. Going through metal detectors, getting searched by guards.

Chesa Boudin

When my parents were arrested, I was a year old. And like so many children with incarcerated parents, I experienced a range of traumas connected to the separation. I was angry. I was ashamed. I had developmental delays, behavioral problems.

Chesa Boudin

Because like so many people who were victimized directly or indirectly by crime, I blamed myself. If I hadn't been able to find closure, I never would have overcome those early developmental challenges.

Chesa Boudin

One of my priorities is giving victims the right to choose different paths to restoration and to healing. It's prioritizing having restitution available for economic harm, having victim services for the trauma and also recognizing that victims are far more than simply pieces of evidence to be used in order to secure a lengthy prison sentence.

Chesa Boudin

Different victims, different survivors of different crimes will choose to pursue different paths. And hopefully, over time, we can collectively transform our culture into one that prioritizes healing and prevention instead of simply focusing on punishment.

Chesa Boudin

By incarcerating someone who is homeless or addicted or who suffers from mental health challenges, we only further destabilize that person and create situations where they are more likely to commit crimes in the future.

Chesa Boudin

All it takes is a single person coming into or going out of the jail or prison with COVID-19, and the entire jail will likely be infected. Most jails have people living in very close quarters.

Chesa Boudin

We've been addicted to incarceration as a primary response for decades, whether or not it's a good use of resources, whether or not it's humane, whether or not it is effective at keeping us safe, rehabilitating or healing victims.

Chesa Boudin

As a law-enforcement official, as a politician, you are always going to have in the back of your mind the fear that someone you release will end up committing another crime, potentially a serious crime, during a period when they otherwise would have been incarcerated.

Chesa Boudin

Stop and frisk - whether done while walking down the street or while driving a car - is a civil rights violation.

Chesa Boudin

My parents are all people who have taken a stand for what they believe in over and over again. That to me is a fine example - even if I disagreed with some of their choices.

Chesa Boudin

People are shaped in myriad ways by their upbringing and family. We also have agency in our lives, the people we become, and the lives we lead.

Chesa Boudin

I don't expect to ever put my family background to rest but I do expect to be taken seriously as a scholar, a writer and a Latin Americanist on my own terms, not defined through my parents and their history or politics.

Chesa Boudin

Being a foreigner - especially a white and relatively wealthy one - in poor, underdeveloped countries is inherently fraught.

Chesa Boudin

Unlike many travel books I didn't set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.

Chesa Boudin

The failure of both Congress and state legislatures to respond to the murder of George Floyd with any meaningful action reminds us that our nation's attempts at reform can often amount to nothing.

Chesa Boudin

We should start with the basics: Police officers are unlikely to be held accountable if the prosecutors investigating and potentially prosecuting them feel indebted to them.

Chesa Boudin