Here’s a NY Times article from last October:

“In the first 90 days, I’m going to give you a plan to end mass incarceration,” said John Creuzot, a former judge who hopes to unseat Ms. Johnson in November [as Dallas DA].

In the past, candidates running to be district attorney — if they were challenged at all — touted their toughness on crime. But now district attorneys’ races have become more competitive, attracting large donations and challengers running on pledges to transform the criminal justice system.

Usually their pledges have to do with drug offenses, and this attracts some conservatives as well, who aren’t interested in prosecuting what is considered “minor” drug offenses (what should be classified that way is another issue, one I won’t deal with in this post). But the new DAs—and Creuzot won the election, so he’s one of them—often go far beyond that.

Which is part of the original plan—going far beyond that, although the more popular drug sentencing reform is often what’s emphasized. Here’s an article about more recent doings by Ceuzot in his new job:

“When I ran to become your district attorney, I promised you that I would bring changes to our criminal justice system,” Creuzot wrote in an open letter about the new policy. “The changes that I promised will be a step forward in ending mass incarceration in Dallas County, and will make our community safer by ensuring that our limited resources are spent where they can do the most good.”

In response, Creuzot is taking heat from police organizations, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott.

“Reform is one thing,” Abbott and Paxton said in a joint letter to Creuzot. “Actions that abandon the rule of law and that could promote lawlessness are altogether different.”

How was Creuzot elected? The effort was very organized and well-funded:

The Texas Organizing Project estimates that organizers had 75,,000 “conversations” with voters to advance the cause of criminal justice reform. The group knocked on 6,000 doors a day, paying workers $15 an hour and giving them paid sick time. The effort produced 115,000 new midterm voters, Brown said.

“Brown” is Brianna Brown, deputy director of the Texas Organizing Project, “a progressive group pushing to end mass incarceration in America.”

What is this phrase, “mass incarceration”? It conjures up the idea of a group of people—a la Jews during World War II, for example—being put in camps, which is a favored leftist image these days to use against the right.

And here’s an even more recent editorial about Dallas (June, 2019) in the Dallas Morning News:

The district attorney, John Creuzot, is passionate about criminal justice reform and about reducing the numbers of incarcerated people in the county jail.

He has drawn headlines for his assurance that he won’t prosecute minor marijuana crimes or thefts of less than $750 for what he called items of necessity.

We appreciate Creuzot’s passion for seeing fewer people incarcerated. But we are concerned with reforms that place less burden for a crime on the person responsible than they do on society at large.

That is what was so disturbing about Police Chief U. Renee Hall’s misstatement during a news conference Monday about the increase in murders in the city.

Hall said, people in Dallas “who have returned from prison who can’t find a job, who are not educated so in those instances” have been “forced to commit violent crimes.”

The chief quickly clarified her comment and promised justice for the killers. And she shouldn’t be condemned for a single extemporaneous statement under the camera lights.

But she also emphasized that the city “can’t arrest its way out of crime.”

This is a common phrase in criminal justice reform that has some validity insofar as a society has to build up opportunity for all people.

But the phrase also risks becoming a warped cliche that excuses law enforcement from its most important role. People who do bad things need to be held accountable, both as justice for society and victims and as a deterrence to potential criminals.

Another article on the subject can be found here.

But I don’t want to focus on Creuzot or Dallas, because he is by no means the most extreme case. To go back to that Times article, which sheds some light on how the Texas Organizing Project (note the neutral-sounding name) and other “progressive” groups pushing that “end mass incarceration!” theme get their financial backing. Three guesses, and the first two don’t count:

The push to overhaul prosecutors’ offices was pioneered by the billionaire George Soros, who in recent years has backed more than 20 candidates, including Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, vowing to upend the way prosecutors have traditionally approached their jobs.

In Dallas, Mr. Soros has given more than $46,000 worth of polling to Mr. Creuzot’s campaign through the Texas Justice & Public Safety PAC. And the Texas Organizing Project, a grass-roots economic and racial justice organization that Mr. Soros also funds, has donated more than $190,000 worth of canvassing.
The effort aims to achieve a single overarching goal, said Whitney Tymas, who heads Mr. Soros’s prosecutor initiative, which is separate from his philanthropic work.

“We want to end mass incarceration. That’s our North Star,” she said. “We’ve won twice as many races as we’ve lost. We’re not going to win them all. But we’re really trying to, because that’s the difference between people unjustly sitting in jail or not.”

This is one of those things that’s happening under the radar of most people.

[NOTE: Ace describes how it’s been operating in Boston recently.]

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It seems to come down to the ability to focus imagination on positives, what is called intentional imagination rather than uncontrolled imagination:

Mental imagery can supplement perceptual input—but it can be equally useful when perceptual input is painful, tedious, or lacking. A prisoner in supermax can use mental imagery to create the space and time that confinement strips away…

He also used his imagination to time travel, imagining “alternate endings to past interactions with people—what if I said this? Or what if I would’ve invited her for coffee or something like that?” He wrote about painful relationships and episodes, reframing them and extracting a lesson. Memory is both constructive and reproductive, says Alex Schlegel, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In fact, imagination and memory run on parallel tracks in the brain. By engaging the imagination, [the prisoner in solitary] was able to “rewrite” his past in a more positive light, and reframe his future.

This is similar to a technique some therapists use called reframing, but in intentional imagination the scene is played out in great detail and the entire thing acts as a powerful reframe.

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