While there are roughly 2,200 prosecutors and sheriffs on the ballot this year, there’s not much at stake in this election for most of these offices because they drew just one single candidate. But Bolts has kept track of other important races for sheriff and DA all year to identify and cover the elections that are poised to make the biggest difference for local policy. During the primaries, we covered critical DA races from Ohio to Texas and sheriff races from Florida to Michigan.

And now the general elections are upon us. Below is Bolts’ guide to 33 prosecutor and sheriff elections next month—and some honorary mentions, too.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

This used to be the office of Joe Arpaio, the far-right strongman who housed detainees at an outdoor camp called Tent City and was convicted of contempt of court for refusing a court order to stop detaining people suspected of being undocumented, only to be pardoned by Donald Trump. Paul Penzone, the Democrat who defeated Arpaio in 2016, resigned from the office earlier this year, and Jerry Sheridan, a former Arpaio deputy, is now trying to win back the office for the GOP.

Sheridan is on the Brady List, a database of law enforcement officers with a history of lying, because a judge found that he lied under oath during a civil rights lawsuit. Sheridan has said he’d bring back some of the most controversial practices from his former boss, Arpaio, including building a new facility like Tent City, which the county tore down in 2017. Tyler Kamp, a former Phoenix police officer who switched parties late last year to run for sheriff as a Democrat, is connecting Sheridan to Arpaio’s record of racial discrimination. 

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor 

Just two years ago, Republican County Attorney Rachel Mitchell narrowly defeated a progressive challenger who ran on curbing the punitive legacy of this office. That was a special election, so Mitchell is already back on the ballot, and this time her challenger has a different message. Tamika Wooten, who ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination, has accused Mitchell of “leniency” toward defendants and faulted her use of diversion programs, The Arizona Republic reports. Wooten’s criticism echoes the attacks made by Mitchell’s primary opponent, who lost by a large margin in August.

On abortion, though, the fault lines in this race align more closely with partisan expectations. When the state supreme court revived an 19 century ban on nearly all abortions this spring, Wooten told Bolts that she would not bring charges under the law, saying, “That is a very serious and personal decision that a person must have with themselves and with their health care provider.” While lawmakers later overturned the 1864 law outlawing virtually all abortion, a ban after 15 weeks remains in place, and Mitchell has refused to rule out prosecuting doctors. She has also fought an effort by the Democratic governor to prevent local prosecutors from charging abortions. 

Arizona | Pima County (Tucson) sheriff

This race erupted in controversy this week after Democratic Sheriff Chris Nanos put challenger Heather Lappin, a Republican who works in the local jail, on forced leave. Nanos alleged that Lappin helped the newsroom Arizona Luminaria, which has long reported on excessive force and inhumane conditions in the Tucson jail, connect with an incarcerated source for pay. Arizona Luminaria has denied that it pays sources, saying it only reimbursed an incarcerated source for costly phone calls from the jail.

Nanos’ leadership over the jail, which has seen a string of deaths during his tenure, has been subject to scrutiny. Moreover, the county board, which is run by Democrats, has for months pressed Nanos for information about sexual assault allegations against a sheriff’s deputy. Nanos and Lappin have largely blamed problems at the office on understaffing, Arizona Luminaria reports. 

The race is unfolding against the backdrop of a GOP ballot measure, on the ballot this fall, that would ramp up the role of sheriffs in patrolling the border. Nanos has steadfastly opposed the measure, and he has said he would not enforce it. He defeated a challenger in the July Democratic primary who argued for tighter relationships with federal immigration authorities. Lappin said during the GOP primary that she supported the measure but has since backtracked.

California | Alameda County (Oakland), and Los Angeles County

Two first-term DAs in California faced near immediate efforts to remove them from office, plus mutinies by staff within their office angered by their reforms. Now each faces a political threat. In Oakland, former civil rights attorney Pam Price won the DA’s office in 2022 on a decarceral platform, and rolled out policies meant to focus on rehabilitation over punishment. But local forces who opposed her election, many of which had just succeeded in ousting San Francisco’s DA next door, quickly organized a recall campaign against her, Bolts reported in August. 

Further south, in Los Angeles, George Gascón made a splash within a day of entering office four years ago, as he rolled out a suite of policies to reduce cash bail and sentencing enhancements. Much like Price, Gascón faced a deluge of controversy and negative press over specific cases that critics said he did not prosecute aggressively enough, and he backtracked on some of his measures, Bolts reported earlier this year. 

Now Gascón faces Nathan Hochman, who is running on bringing back more punitive policies to the office and accuses the incumbent of having “extreme pro-criminal policies,” even as violent crime in Los Angeles is decreasing. Hochman was the GOP nominee for attorney general two years ago, though he is helped in this blue county by the fact that this race is nonpartisan.

California | San Francisco prosecutor

Brooke Jenkins replaced the reform-minded Chesa Boudin as prosecutor in 2022, after Boudin was recalled by voters. As Bolts reported at the time, Jenkins quickly disbanded one of Boudin’s major initiatives, a police accountability unit that had prosecuted killer cops. Jenkins won when she faced voters for the first time two years ago, and is now running for a full term. 

She faces Ryan Khojasteh, a former prosecutor in the office who was hired by Boudin and then promptly fired by Jenkins when she took office. Khojasteh is making the case that Jenkins has gone too far in ramping up punishment for teenagers accused of crimes, proposing a return to more rehabilitative policies. He has criticized her for rolling back diversion programs But he has also tried to distance himself from Boudin and eschew some of his policies. This election is overshadowed by the higher-profile races for mayor and city council, which feature similar debates, and even candidates who are proposing to ramp up policing and arrests on matters like homelessness.

Colorado | Arapahoe County prosecutor, and Douglas County prosecutor

Arapahoe and Douglas, two populous counties south of Denver, have long shared a DA. But as Alex Burness writes in Bolts, come 2025, “similar criminal cases may be met with starkly different responses—depending on which side of [a] new administrative boundary they occur.”

That’s because Colorado recently split its 18th Judicial District in two, separating the liberal Arapahoe County (home to Aurora) from its more conservative neighbor. 

As a result, a reform-minded prosecutor may be coming to suburban Colorado. Democrat Amy Padden is favored over former Republican DA Carol Chambers in Arapahoe County. Padden lost her first DA bid in 2020, when she said she’d work to curb jail terms for low-level offenses and reduce the prosecution of minors as adults. She has kept up these themes this year. “We’re not going to prosecute our way to a safer community,” she told Bolts in July. “The way we reduce crime is to see if there are ways to rehabilitate folks and get them back on their feet.”

Douglas County is likely to head in the opposite direction. The GOP tends to do very well here, so Republican George Brauchler, a former DA with a punitive record, is favored over Democrat Karen Breslin. Brauchler is running on the unusually harsh promise of seeking jail time for anyone who commits any theft, Bolts reported in July. 

Florida | Hillsborough County prosecutor, and prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties 

Twice since 2022, GOP Governor Ron DeSantis has removed a reform-minded prosecutor from office. The legal battles over whether he had the authority to do this are still ongoing. But the two suspended prosecutors are not waiting for the courts: They’re running to get their jobs back, challenging the people DeSantis appointed to replace them.

In Hillsborough County, home to Tampa, Democrat Andrew Warren faces Republican Suzy Lopez, the DeSantis appointee. Lopez quickly rolled back Warren’s policies, Boltshas reported, canceling a reform he had put in place to curb aggressive policing of Black cyclists in Tampa. In the Orlando metro region, in a circuit that combines Orange and Osceola counties, Democrat Monique Worrell faces DeSantis appointee Andrew Bain, who is running as an independent. This race is marred by a legal complaint that the GOP fielded a sham candidate to help Bain.

Complicating both elections, DeSantis may choose to overturn the elections again if Warren and Worrell win, maintaining Lopez and Bain in office no matter the results. He kept that door open in remarks in September, and some Republicans have said they expect it should voters reject his appointees. 

Georgia | Chatham County sheriff

The Savannah jail, long plagued by allegations of neglect and abuse, has become a flashpoint in the race between Republican Sheriff John Wilcher and Democrat Richard Coleman, a local police chief. 

Wilcher’s campaign has received thousands of dollars from jail contractors, including people associated with CorrectHealth, the jail medical provider targeted by a scathing 2019 investigation into treatment at the jail and at the center of a wrongful death lawsuit alleging poor treatment. Wilcher has also stopped in-person visitations, which Coleman says he will restart if elected; such visits can be an important lifeline for people who are detained.

Many other Georgia sheriffs oversee jails with abusive conditions, though they may not be holding competitive races this fall. Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen, a Democrat who oversees a jail where deaths keep mounting, is unopposed, for instance. 

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff, and Gwinnett County sheriff

When Democrats in 2020 flipped the sheriff’s offices in Cobb and Gwinnett, two large counties in the Atlanta suburbs, it prompted rapid change in immigration policy: The new sheriffs immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to cancel their counties’ participation in ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local sheriff’s officers to act as federal immigration agents. 

But Georgia Republicans this year retaliated with a new law that requires sheriffs to apply to join 287(g), and hold people suspected of being undocumented when ICE requests it.

The law shrinks sheriffs’ discretion. But Priyanka Bhatt, an attorney with Project South, an organization that advocates for immigrants’ rights in Georgia, says sheriffs still have room to minimize ICE’s footprint, if they so choose. Even if a sheriff’s office is forced to enter into a 287(g) contract, she told Bolts, it can still refrain from proactively interrogating or arresting immigrants. “The way in which the sheriffs implement 287(g) is under their control,” she said.

The first-term Democratic sheriffs are now running for re-election. Cobb County Sheriff Craig Owens, who has spoken out against the new law and said he wouldn’t devote resources to 287(g), faces Republican David Cavender, who says he’d partner with ICE more closely and has echoed Trump’s rhetoric about the “open southern border.” Gwinnett County Sheriff Keybo Taylor faces Republican Mike Baker, who has made fewer public statements and who did not respond to Bolts’ request for comment on his views on immigration. 

Georgia | Chatham County prosecutor, and Clarke and Oconee counties prosecutor

The Georgia GOP adopted a law last year that threatens to remove DAs from office if they adopt a policy to not charge certain types of cases, such as abortion or marijuana. Critics denounced the law as an effort to target a swath of new Democratic officials, mainly women of color. To sign the law, Governor Brian Kemp traveled to Savannah, home of DA Shalena Cook Jones, who ran on expanding diversion programs locally and has defended reforms from Kemp’s attacks.

Republicans also signaled that they hoped to use the law to target Deborah Gonzalez, the DA of Clarke County (Athens) and Oconee County, who’d quickly rolled out some reforms such as ending marijuana prosecutions after winning office. 

The new law hasn’t yet been used to remove a DA. But Cook Jones and Gonzalez are now running for second terms, fighting off complaints that they’ve neglected the duties of their office, and saying they would continue their approach. Cook Jones faces Republican Andre Pretorius, with whom she is trading accusations of misconduct. And Gonzalez is facing Kalki Yalamanchili, a former prosecutor who is running as an independent.

Illinois | DeKalb County prosecutor, and Lake County prosecutor

In eliminating the use of cash bail last year, the Illinois Pretrial Fairness Act also made prosecutors the gatekeepers of bail reform, Bolts explained this spring. Proponents say they now hope that prosecutors will implement the law in good faith, though some prosecutors have been clear that they’ll do what they can to maximize pretrial detention. 

The debate is playing out in two prosecutor races this fall. In Lake County, a populous suburb just north of Chicago, State’s Attorney Eric Rineheart was one of very few prosecutors who backed ending cash bail. Four years after ousting a GOP incumbent, he faces Republican Mary Cole, who has centered her campaign around her opposition to the Pretrial Fairness Act, saying it endangers public safety. (Data shows that crime has not increased since its implementation.)

West of Chicago, in DeKalb County, GOP State’s Attorney Rick Amato is retiring this year after spending the last few years fighting bail reform. Republican Riley Oncken is continuing Amato’s strategy of blaming Democrats for crime, while Democrat Chuck Rose says the law is working. 

Kansas | Johnson County prosecutor, and Johnson County sheriff

Kansas’ most populous county voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 for the first time since 1916. Sheriff Calvin Hayden, a Republican, did not take it well, and spent the following years amplifying lies about the 2020 results and investigating unfounded allegations of fraud. GOP voters responded by kicking him out in their August primary, which he lost to Doug Bedford, a former undersheriff. 

Bedford is now running against Democrat Byron Roberson, the Prairie Village police chief. In 2010, Roberson shot and killed a woman with a history of mental illness, Susan Stuckey, in her apartment. The local DA’s office declined to prosecute, but the family demanded answers and had to sue to obtain records that raised questions about the police response. As he runs for sheriff, Roberson has said the events made him more aware of a need for mental health professionals to respond to 911 calls. 

The DA who decided to not prosecute Roberson at the time, Republican Steve Howe, is still in office and he has faced more recent accusations of glossing over police shootings; one investigation showed that he provided a false account of a 2018 shooting. This fall, Howe is seeking a new term against Democrat Vanessa Riebli, a former prosecutor in his office.

Riebli narrowly won the Democratic primary over a defense attorney who campaigned on a more progressive platform, while she focused on administrative restructuring like changing how cases are assigned in the office. She is also running on a promise to guard reproductive rights. One question is whether Hayden’s actions stain Howe: The DA has faced criticism within his own party for not speaking up against the sheriff’s endless and baseless investigation into local elections.

Michigan | Macomb County prosecutor

Peter Lucido faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment while he served in the Michigan legislature. After he became Macomb County’s prosecuting attorney in 2021, an investigation found that he had behaved inappropriately toward women working in his new office. 

Lucido, a Republican, now faces Democrat Christina Hines, who has worked as a prosecutor in neighboring counties. In 2021, shortly after Eli Savit became the reform-minded prosecutor of Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor), Hines joined Savit’s office and helped develop a restorative justice program. Last year, she published an article that defended restorative justice as a rehabilitative tool that also brings more closure for victims. But as she runs in Macomb County, which Trump narrowly carried twice, Hines has distanced herself from some of Savit’s major policies, such as his decision to stop seeking cash bail, Michigan Advance reports.

Even so, CPAC, a prominent conservative conference that Lucido has attended, attacked Hines this summer with a social media ad associating Hines with George Soros, the billionaire whose super PAC has helped liberal prosecutors win office, calling her part of a “radical plan to fundamentally change Michigan, and ultimately our country.” Hines has denied any direct association with Soros, focusing her campaign on Lucido’s ethical issues, from the many allegations against him to his decision to celebrate Confederate General Robert E. Lee. 

Michigan | Oakland County prosecutor, and Ingham County prosecutor

Two counties east of Detroit feature Democratic prosecutors running for second terms. 

The race in Oakland County will be this year’s clearest test for criminal justice reform in Michigan. Karen McDonald, a self-described “progressive prosecutor,” has expanded diversion programs, and she has helped some people who were sentenced to life without parole as children apply for resentencing. Her Republican challenger, Scott Farida, is a former prosecutor who says the office should be harsher toward defendants.

In Ingham County (Lansing), Democrat John Dewane was appointed prosecutor in late 2022 after his predecessor Carol Siemon resigned. Siemon had implemented reforms to reduce incarceration, including limiting firearm possession charges and refusing to seek life without parole for people accused of murder. Dewane rolled back her reforms when he took office.

The county is blue enough that Dewane is the clear favorite to win a full term next month. But the race is still worth watching because of who the GOP nominee is: Norm Shinkle played a starring role in one of the moments where Trump came closest to overturning the 2020 election results. As one of the four members of the State Board of Canvassers that fall, Shinkle refused to certify the results, amplifying Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud. Michigan is intimately familiar with what a law enforcement official willing to entertain election conspiracies can bring: Just an hour west of Lansing, a sheriff has kept investigating the 2020 election. 

New York | Albany County prosecutor

David Soares, a vocal foe of criminal justice reform and the DA of New York’s capital county for two decades, lost in the June Democratic primary to local attorney Lee Kindlon. But he did not concede and he is now mounting a write-in campaign to secure a sixth term.

Bolts reported this summer that Soares has used his bully pulpit to attack a suite of reforms passed by Democrats, most notably the landmark changes to New York’s bail system and a law that raised the age for charging people as adults from 16 to 18. Kindlon is more supportive of the reforms, and he has accused Soares of fearmongering. Albany progressives who back Kindlon say they hope that the election fosters more attention to rehabilitation and diversion efforts, especially for young people. 

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) prosecutor 

Four years ago, Republican Joe Deters held on to this prosecutor’s office after beating Fanon Rucker, a Black Democrat who told Bolts this year that racist messaging against him contributed to his loss. But Deters joined the state supreme court last year, and was replaced as prosecutor by Republican Melissa Powers, who has emulated his rhetoric. She has said that, if she loses, Cincinnati will transform into “a Baltimore, a Saint Louis,” she has called for maximizing prison terms, and she has joined the police union in attacking local judges as “woke”, particularly juvenile court judges that she claims are too lenient. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that a decrease in youth crime belies the fearmongering against judges.

Powers faces Democratic challenger Connie Pillich, a former lawmaker and an unsuccessful candidate for governor. Pillich’s campaign has not focused on proposing criminal justice reforms; as a lawmaker last decade, she sponsored legislation to roll back a reform meant to rule out prison for some nonviolent charges. She has also blamed Powers and prior GOP prosecutors for crime in the county; Democrats have not held this office since the 1930s even as they have taken firm control of the rest of the county government.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

Voters in Cincinnati are also choosing their sheriff. Democrat Charmaine McGuffey is running for re-election in a rematch against her predecessor, Jim Neil. McGuffey ousted Neil in the 2020 Democratic primary in a tense race. McGuffey, who had worked under Neil, alleged that Neil fired her because she’s gay and because she warned about abuse in the jail. She also faulted Neil’s cooperation with ICE and said she’d reduce the overcrowded jail. While the jail population decreased slightly during the pandemic, it still remains well above capacity.

This year, Neil is running as a Republican. He says he wants to resist the “agenda of the Democratic Party” to “not support law enforcement,” and has complained that the county is flying the Pride flag on public buildings. He also says the office could detain still more people, and that it has room to hold immigrants, including by shipping detainees out of the county.

Ohio | Portage County sheriff

Some conservative sheriffs have involved themselves in elections, engaging in yearslong investigations of the 2020 results and setting up task forces to police voting. Enter Portage County Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski, who in September drew widespread condemnation when he called on county residents to “write down all the addresses” of people with yard signs for Kamala Harris. 

He made those remarks in a xenophobic social media post that used the term “locust” to describe undocumented immigrants. 

Jon Barber, Zuchowski’s Democratic opponent this fall, denounced the sheriff’s remarks, telling Bolts, “I don’t know how it could be interpreted as anything else but voter intimidation.” Barber also took issue with Zuchowski’s “derogatory” attitude toward immigrants, saying, “I don’t know anyone who’s in the United States who does not have some immigration lineage.” Zuchowski is also facing allegations that he forced people held at his jail to work for his reelection campaign. 

South Carolina | Charleston County prosecutor and sheriff

During her 17-year tenure as Charleston’s prosecutor, Solicitor Scarlett Wilson has faced complaints of widespread racial inequalities. Four years ago, she narrowly beat a Democrat who promised to conduct a “racial audit” of the office to address disparities. But the dynamic in this year’s campaign is very different.

Wilson’s Democratic challenger, David Osborne, is a former prosecutor Wilson demoted in 2021 because he sent an email to a defense attorney mocking the office’s mandatory training on racial equity and unconscious bias, The Post and Courier reports. The defense attorney was representing someone charged during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020; Osborne has since accused Wilson of letting down police and not prosecuting protesters aggressively enough. Still, Thomas Dixon, a pastor and prominent local Black activist who has long denounced Wilson for not holding law enforcement accountable for shootings or in-custody deaths of Black people who die in custody, has said he’d welcome change in the office.

Charleston voters did force some turnover in 2020—just not in the prosecutor’s race. Sheriff Al Cannon, a Republican who’d held the office since 1988, lost to Kristin Graziano, a Democrat. Upon taking office, Graziano immediately fulfilled a campaign promise to reduce collaboration with ICE, terminating the county’s participation in the agency’s 287(g) program and refusing to hold people for ICE without a judicial warrant. Prominent Republicans have since attacked her for not detaining immigrants, using the Trumpian strategy of equating immigration and crime. 

Graziano in November faces Republican Carl Ritchie, who has indicated he’d toughen office policies toward people suspected of being undocumented.

Texas | Harris County (Houston) prosecutor and sheriff

A Democratic primary in March already shook up Houston’s DA office: Sean Teare, a former prosecutor in the office, defeated eight-year incumbent Kim Ogg. When a 2017 court ruling held that local bail policies were unconstitutional because defendants were routinely jailed simply for being poor, local officials reformed how the county handles pretrial detention for misdemeanors, but Ogg strongly opposed those changes. Teare defended bail reform while challenging Ogg, and he told Bolts that Ogg had created a “culture of fear” in her office that made her staff overcharge some cases and remain too reliant on pretrial detention.

Now Teare faces Republican Dan Simons, another former prosecutor in the DA’s office who, like Ogg, is accusing misdemeanor bail reform of endangering public safety and misrepresenting the changes in bail policy that followed the court ruling. During his time at the office, some coworkers questioned Simons’ ethics, Houston Landing reported, with one junior prosecutor claiming he told her to lie to a defense attorney to force a plea deal. Democrats have grown stronger in Harris County in recent years, and are now generally favored to win, but some countywide races have remained tight.

If he wins the DA’s office, Teare could have an ally in Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, a Democrat who embraced the bail changes and some other reforms, but who is also overseeing jails that are rife with abuse and deaths. Gonzalez is also up for reelection this year, facing Mike Knox, a former Houston police officer who wants to ramp up policing and join ICE’s 287(g) program, which Gonzalez left in 2017. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) prosecutor

Another reform-minded prosecutor won in Texas’ March primaries. Travis County DA José Garza beat an expensive challenge funded by tech interests and Elon Musk backing attorney Jeremy Sylestine, who made the case that Garza’s policies were endangering Austin. “We scored a major victory for our progressive movement and for criminal justice reform,” Garza said on election night. Garza now faces Republican Daniel Betts, who is campaigning on a similar message as Sylvestine. Travis County is a lot bluer than Harris County, making any race there an uphill climb for the GOP. 

Garza, who has been a foil of Texas GOP officials, also faced a separate effort to toss him from office this year when a county resident filed a legal complaint against him, taking advantage of a new state law providing for the removal of prosecutors who refuse to prosecute certain charges. A GOP prosecutor assigned to investigate the complaint recommended that it not move forward this summer, though a local judge has still kept the case alive.  

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

Fort Worth’s local jail has seen a surge of deaths during the tenure of Sheriff Bill Waybourn. Local organizers have long been demanding an investigation into Waybourn’s practices and accountability over the deaths, and Bolts reported this week that he appears to be flouting a state law dictating oversight, sparking the attention of the state agency that regulates jails.

Waybourn has also ramped up immigration enforcement and helped set up a county task force to police elections.  

Waybourn, who is a Republican, is facing Democratic challenger Patrick Moses, who accused the sheriff during a public forum earlier this year of “neglecting the people that are dying in the jail,” Bolts reported. Tarrant County, one of the nation’s largest jurisdictions, has historically voted Republican but grown more competitive in recent years—a political shift that itself has fueled far-right conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Washington | Pierce County (Tacoma) sheriff 

The 2021 death of Matthew Ellis, a Black man who was hog-tied by the Tacoma police and a Pierce county sheriff’s deputy, sparked a state investigation into local law enforcement and led to the passage of a ban on hog-tying this year. Even as he faced scrutiny, Pierce County Sheriff Ed Troyer stood by the practice and was the only sheriff to defend it to the attorney general. Troyer also faced a scandal within months of taking office in 2020 for calling the police on a Black newspaper carrier, sparking reform calls from state Democrats. 

Troyer is retiring this year, and two candidates hope to replace him. Keith Swank, a former Seattle police officer, is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2022 on a platform of cracking down on immigration and blaming crime on “anti-police activists.” Patti Jackson, who currently works in the sheriff’s office, is endorsed by local Democrats and says she’d pursue “progressive initiatives” to address the “root causes” of crime. She’s also touting Troyer’s endorsement.

Leslie Cushman, an advocate with the Washington Coalition for Police Accountability, a group that helped champion the ban on police hog-tying, told Bolts she’ll demand reforms from whoever wins, including pushing for deescalation policies, changing how mental health calls are handled, and barring police traffic stops for minor infractions—a reform other jurisdictions are considering this election.

And the list goes on | Some honorary mentions

Chicago is poised to elect Eileen O’Neill Burke as its new prosecutor after she squeaked out a close Democratic primary win and is now heavily favored in the overwhelmingly blue Cook County. It’s the same dynamic in Ohio’s blue Franklin County, home to Columbus, where Democrat Shayla Favor, who won a tight Democratic primary for prosecutor campaigning on what she called a “progressive vision for public safety,” now faces Republican John Rutan, who shares conspiracy theories about elections and 9/11 and has been disowned by the local GOP. 

In another blue county, Atlanta DA Fani Willis is poised to win re-election; she’s still prosecuting Trump while running against one of his former lawyers, Courtney Kramer. 

Savit, the prosecutor in Ann Arbor, is running for re-election unopposed and he is bound to gain a new ally: Alyshia Dyer, a social worker, who won a tight primary to become the next sheriff of Washtenaw County. Bolts reported that Dyer has put forth a progressive platform, including ending low-level traffic stops, and she is now unopposed in the general election. Other unopposed candidates include Dar Leaf, a far-right Michigan sheriff in Barry County, Michigan, who has kept investigating the 2020 election, and Greg Tony, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, who rolled back a reform shortly after being appointed to the office by DeSantis.

Elsewhere still, Miami is electing a sheriff for the first time in decades. In Clay County, Florida, a sheriff who was ousted in 2020 after allegations that he wrongfully detained a mistress—he was later acquitted— is attempting a comeback. In Wisconsin’s swing Kenosha County, the site of the Black Lives Matter protests during which Kyle Rittenhouse shot three men in 2020, the deputy DA (Democrat Carli McNeill) who authored the criminal complaint against Rittenhouse faces Republican Xavier Solis, an attorney who represented a foundation that raised money for his legal defense. 

Bolts is also watching prosecutor races that could be competitive in Florida’s Palm Beach County, New York’s Westchester County, New Hampshire’s Hillsborough County, and Texas’ El Paso County, as well as sheriffs races in Genesee County (Flint), Michigan and San Francisco.

The post The 33 Prosecutor and Sheriff Elections that Matter to Criminal Justice in November appeared first on Bolts.

After appearing before the South Carolina Board of Paroles and Pardons more than 500 times in the past 35 years, lawyer Douglas Jennings announced last year that he had participated in his final hearing. It had become routine for the board to reject his clients, regardless of how much he showed that they’d changed since their crime. “I just couldn’t justify taking somebody’s money as a fee to appear before the parole board when I didn’t feel good about being able to produce the right results for them,” he told Bolts.

The panel, which Jennings has nicknamed “the rejection board”, has made it increasingly difficult for prisoners to win parole in South Carolina. In 2018, it released roughly four out every 10 people who applied. The odds of release have declined since then: By 2022, the board only approved one out of every 10 petitions. Last year, the board’s grant rate was seven percent.

This downward trend has continued into 2024. In the first four months of this year, the board approved only 5 percent of more than 900 parole applications, according to data provided by the board.

Declining parole rates in South Carolina are part of a national trend. Parole, which permits early release for eligible prisoners who exhibit good behavior and have a low risk of committing another crime, has fallen across the country in recent years as parole boards have succumbed to political pressure and media narratives that stoke fears about crime. Between 2019 and 2022, grant rates plummeted in 18 out of 27 states surveyed by the the Prison Policy Initiative, a criminal justice reform research organization. Often, this decline has directly stemmed from state officials’ desire to crack down on release, and to the professional and ideological backgrounds of the people they appoint to parole boards, as Bolts has reported recently about the parole boards in Alabama and Virginia.

The same political dynamic is at play in South Carolina. Governor Henry McMaster, a Republican who in 2016 proposed abolishing parole when he was attorney general, is in charge of appointing the board’s seven members, pending Senate approval, and can remove them at his discretion. Under his tenure, the members he’s put in place have operated a system that places an emphasis on past crimes rather than rehabilitative efforts. 

They’ve also kept crucial details about their operations secret, Bolts learned from interviews with people who’ve experienced the process and from analyses of past cases. In some cases they’ve denied parole based on incorrect information, ignoring applicants’ efforts to correct their files.

As chances for parole shrank in South Carolina, Jennings grew tired of trying to convince board members that his clients had worked on bettering themselves in prison and would be productive members of society, only for the board to routinely reject their applications because of their past crimes. “The board seems to have adopted some sort of super conservative approach of not really giving a fair opportunity of parole to many inmates who would pose no risk to the community,” he said.

In South Carolina, parole has long already been an unfair process. The University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change published a study this month finding that Black people in the state were denied parole at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts from 2006 to 2016. More than 60 percent of the state’s prison population is Black compared to 27 percent of the statewide population. 

People hoping to get paroled in South Carolina must navigate a complicated and adversarial system. Those who committed nonviolent offenses have to win unanimous approval from a panel of three board members or a majority of the full seven-member board. Prisoners convicted of a violent crime go before the full board and must win a two-thirds majority, or at least five members. Historically, the board has granted parole to people convicted of nonviolent offenses much more frequently than those convicted of a violent crime. 

This year, though, board members have rarely voted in favor of parole regardless of the nature of the crime. 

The board declined to answer Bolts’ questions about the falling grant rates; board spokesperson Anita Dantzler wrote in an email that it “does not participate in public interviews.” 

Critics of the parole board say many of its members are skeptical of parole across the board, with little regard for individual circumstances; they also worry that, for some members, this has to do with careers far removed from the criminal legal system. Kim Frederick, the board’s chair since 2019 who has a background in victims services, granted just 41 of the 849 parole applications she reviewed this year, an approval rate of 4.8 percent, according to data obtained by Bolts showing members’ voting record from January through April of this year. 

Frank Wideman, a philanthropist who has served on the board since 2021, granted parole to just 3.8 percent of prisoners, the lowest grant rate among the board members so far this year. Reno Boyd, a high school math teacher, paroled 6.3 percent of applicants. Molly DuPriest Taylor, a family lawyer, approved 6.5 percent of applications, while Henry Eldridge, who formerly worked in pharmaceuticals, approved 8 percent. Geraldine Miro, an interim board member since 2022 who formerly worked in corrections, granted the most petitions this year, with 9 percent. 

“A majority of the members do not believe in parole,” said John Blume, a Cornell University law professor who has represented prisoners sentenced to life without parole as children in front of the parole board.

Though supporters are allowed to speak in favor of parole during hearings, board members heavily rely on a file that’s weighted toward prisoners’ prior offenses. The file includes, among other things, a summary of the crime, law enforcement statements, and victim statements. Prisoners and their lawyers don’t have access to the victim statements.

Parole lawyers say that since last year, prisoners have only been allowed to submit 20 pages of supporting documentation such as letters, yet there’s no limit to what goes into law enforcement’s and victims’ accounts. 

It’s mandatory for prisoners to sign a form acknowledging that it’s their responsibility to notify the board if something in the packet is inaccurate. But prior to this spring, prisoners weren’t even permitted to review their files—a change that was forced by a court order. Even now, prisoners and their lawyers can’t access the file until the morning of their hearings. If they find mistakes within the file, any corrections they want to make have to be backed up with an official record, making it nearly impossible to ensure the parole board receives accurate information. 

“Obviously, there’s no way to substantiate with the official record when you’re at the prison at nine o’clock in the morning and your hearing is in 30 minutes,” said Allison Elder, executive director of Time Served, an organization that provides free representation for parole hearings to people incarcerated in South Carolina. 

Elder said she has seen files that list prior offenses that never occurred and don’t include mitigating details about a crime that may be helpful for the board to understand. But because the hearings are so short, sometimes lasting just five minutes, and she wants to focus on making the case for parole instead of debating inaccuracies, it’s difficult to make sure her clients are getting a fair hearing. The lack of a mechanism to correct the record during a hearing is “entirely problematic,” she said. 

Board members are supposed to consider a risk assessment tool that predicts prisoners’ probability of re-offending. Defense lawyers told Bolts that the board is ignoring those evaluations. Elder said she’s reviewed files that show her clients were scored a low risk yet the board has repeatedly denied them parole. 

Prisoners trying to convince the board they’re fit for release also haven’t been able to personally appear before board members deciding their fate since the pandemic and can only make their case by video, making their plea even more impersonal. “We say all of the time, if the board members could just come and sit with our clients for 30 minutes, we would get more votes,” Elder said.

The dwindling chances at parole have taken a toll on prisoners. Elder recalled a recent conversation with one of her clients, who told her, “There is no hope here.” 

“It causes depression, devastation,” Elder said. “I’ve seen psych notes about my clients where they go to mental health after having lost out on an opportunity for parole for the umpteenth time.”

Larry Blackwell, who has been serving a life sentence for murder since 1992, was a model inmate for more than a decade before going up for parole in 2014. He had gotten sober, was living in a character-based unit focused on rehabilitation, and had gone 15 years without being disciplined by prison staff.

Despite his successes, a false allegation that made it into Blackwell’s file a decade ago has blocked him from winning his freedom.

In spring 2014, Barry Barnette, the solicitor for Spartanburg County who helped prosecute Blackwell, received a letter from a prisoner using a fake name who accused Blackwell of making inflammatory comments about the prosecutor. “Larry has spoke so nasty of you,” according to a copy of the letter filed in court. “Said he wish he could get you wife drunk, have sex, and video it and sent it to you.” The letter suggested that Barnette tell the local sheriff and senator, and said, “perhaps yourself can oppose Larry’s parole attempt.”

The prosecutor immediately contacted the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) about the letter. While they investigated, Barnette sent his own letter to the parole board asking members to deny Blackwell’s release—erroneously claiming that “fellow inmates” had informed him of death threats by Blackwell. “Mr. Blackwell has recently threatened to kill me and my wife,” Barnette wrote to the board, which denied Blackwell parole.

Blackwell told state police investigators that he suspected the letter had come from Alan Yates, a prisoner who had sent similar letters trying to implicate other prisoners in the past. When questioned by investigators, Yates eventually confessed to writing the letter but maintained Blackwell had bragged about assaulting Barnette’s wife. According to the SLED report, Yates asked to be moved to another prison as a reward for informing on Blackwell. Instead, he faced disciplinary action for sending the letter under a false name. Investigators concluded their probe following Yates’ confession and sent their findings to the attorney general, who declined to prosecute Blackwell for any wrongdoing in the matter.

Despite the SLED report that did not find any wrongdoing by Blackwell, Barnette still sent letters to the parole board three more times over the following years, falsely informing them that Blackwell had threatened to kill him and his wife. The board continued to deny Blackwell parole. 

Blackwell’s lawyer, Jon Ozmint, tried to make the board aware of the SLED report documenting the ordeal prior to his hearing in 2021 but the general counsel refused, saying that he had conducted his own investigation into the allegations, which included talking to Barnette. The board’s general counsel concluded that the report didn’t clear Blackwell.

During the hearing, Ozmint still told the board that Barnette’s letter contained false information and that SLED had cleared Blackwell. After board member Taylor asked for the report, the board’s general counsel gave it to the panel but reiterated that he didn’t think it was exonerating. “I spoke with Solicitor Barnette about this, he stands by his statements to the board,” said the general counsel, according to a court filing.

Board director Valerie Suber meanwhile questioned the validity of the SLED report, reminding members that it was given to them by Blackwell’s lawyer, not an official from SLED. “This is simply something that his attorney supplied to us in order to refute a statement of [opposition] and we don’t investigate or legitimize statements of opposition,” she said, according to a court filing. 

Blackwell’s team has alleged that those actions violate this due process rights but have struggled to find someone in power who agrees. 
He challenged the board’s decision in the court responsible for overseeing state agencies, but the court ruled that it didn’t have jurisdiction over a “routine parole denial.” His legal team took the case to the South Carolina Court of Appeals, protesting that the Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services allowed the board to present false information and blocked efforts to correct it. The court heard oral arguments in April and has not yet issued a decision.

With parole declining, the vast majority of people who are now released from South Carolina’s prisons are freed because they served the entirety of their sentence. In 2019, 16 percent of people released from prison were on parole. Last year, that figure was just 3 percent. 

At the same time, state prisons are operating at close to capacity in the midst of continued staffing shortages, creating conditions of unrest that contributed to a 2018 uprising at Lee Correctional Institution that left seven people dead; from 2001 to 2019, South Carolina had the highest rate of prison homicide in the country. 

Unlike many states, the South Carolina parole board operates separately from the corrections department. “They have no financial incentive to parole some of these people who clearly pose no danger to anyone,” Blume, the Cornell professor who has represented parole applicants, told Bolts. “The Department of Corrections would like these people to be released, because they have overcrowding problems and it doesn’t do them any good to continue to warehouse people who pose no danger and who have long served the retributive portion of their sentence.”

A report last year from the parole agency showed that the vast majority of people released on parole in South Carolina don’t pose a threat to public safety, with 83 percent of people on parole successfully completing their supervision period.

One of Douglas Jennings’ last clients was Jason Matthews, 55, who has been incarcerated since 1989 for the murder of Jerry Shelton, a local police chief who had been under state investigation for allegations of abusing his position. Matthews has long maintained that Shelton sexually assaulted his girlfriend and threatened them with a gun, spurring a gunfight. Though there was no evidence showing whether Matthews or his girlfriend fired the fatal shot, Matthews accepted a plea deal to avoid the death penalty. A jury acquitted his girlfriend after she took her case to trial. A federal judge in 1994 wrote a letter recommending that Matthews’ sentence be vacated because the case against him was so flimsy. 

Like Blackwell, Matthews got clean during his time in prison. He has never committed a disciplinary infraction, regularly participated in prison programming, and amassed a long list of certificates for sewing, custodial services, and plumbing.

“I’m asking for the privilege of parole, to turn my life around, to be able to move forward in life, to where I can go forward, and do even greater good that I’ve done while I’ve been in SCDC,” Matthews told the board, according to a recording of the hearing obtained by Bolts. “I’ve been a model inmate for nearly 35 years. Now I want to be a model citizen, law abiding, surrounding myself with good people.”

If released, Matthews told the board that he planned to take care of his ailing father and work as a volunteer in his local prosecutor’s office helping people addicted to drugs. He also has a job cleaning building exteriors waiting for him if he gets out. State Senator Gerald Malloy spoke in support of Matthews’ release, telling the board, “I have not had a case that is more recommended for parole than this.”

Miro, the interim parole board member who has approved more applicants than any other member this year, asked Matthews whether he’d reached out to the victim’s family, and he responded by telling her about letters he’d written to them expressing his remorse. 

During deliberations among the board, Miro explained that she supported parole for Matthews. “I am reminded of what I think I was charged to do when we came here,” she said.

Miro then felt she needed to further justify her decision to the other members. 

“I don’t know that I feel good about doing this,” she added. “But I think that’s what I think I may have to do. I just needed you all to hear me say that.”

The board denied Matthews parole by a vote of 3–2. 

Jennings called the decision “so damn disappointing.” 

“It just speaks volumes,” he said. “If this guy can’t make it, I don’t see how anybody can.”

The post Parole Plunges in South Carolina as Governor-Appointed Board Issues Denial After Denial appeared first on Bolts.

“We hold that the decision to terminate a pregnancy rests upon the utmost personal and private considerations imaginable, and implicates a woman’s right to privacy,” Justice Kaye Hearn wrote in the lead opinion, pointing to language embedded in the South Carolina Constitution.

The six-week ban was passed in 2021 by the Republican legislature, which saw it as an invitation for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. After the court’s Dobbs ruling in June, the ban briefly came into effect until the state supreme court blocked it in August. At the time, the justices left unresolved whether they thought that the law violated the state constitution’s privacy-rights protection—but they settled that question with their ruling this week.

The ruling is fragile since one of three justices in the majority is leaving the court next month, and another must retire by 2024. But advocates for abortion rights were quick to cheer the ruling, the latest showcase of the extraordinarily heightened stakes of state courts since last summer.

“The court’s decision means that our patients can continue to come to us, their trusted health care providers, to access abortion and other essential health services in South Carolina,” Jenny Black, the president of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, one of the plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement on Thursday.

After the Dobbs decision overturned federal protections for abortion and triggered bans around the country, abortion rights advocates turned to state courts, asking them to shield abortion access by affirming it as a right under their state constitutions. States are required to abide by the minimum protections recognized by the U.S. Constitution, but their courts are free to recognize a greater level of protection—and more rights—based on state constitutional provisions. 

The ruling from the South Carolina supreme court marks the first time since Dobbs that a state supreme court has rewarded that strategy and struck down an abortion restriction on state constitutional grounds.  

A dozen supreme courts had already affirmed by 2022 that their state constitutions recognize abortion rights, a state-by-state analysis by Bolts found in July. These rulings, like South Carolina’s, relied on interpreting language like an equal protection clause and privacy protections. In August, Kansans voted down a measure that would have overturned such a ruling; in November, voters in California, Michigan, and Vermont approved referendums that added explicit protections for abortion rights into their constitutions, becoming the first states to do so. 

The South Carolina Supreme Court flirted with that step on Thursday, though whether it actually affirmed a constitutional right to abortion is a matter of some confusion—even to its own members. Two of the justices in the majority wrote that the state constitution contains the right to an abortion. But the third, Justice John Few, took pains to distance himself from that conclusion, even while writing that abortion access falls under the constitution’s right to privacy. Justice John Kittredge, in his dissent, notes that Few’s opinion is “less clear, at least to me.”

Those nuances do not change the immediate fate of the 2021 law, said Jace Woodrum, executive director of the ACLU of South Carolina. 

“Although it is rare for… all the justices to write separately, the result is the same: the Legislature’s six-week ban is struck down as unconstitutional, and abortion in South Carolina remains legal up to 20 weeks,” he told Bolts.

In other states, lawsuits appealing to the state constitutions have seen some initial success but few courts have reached final decisions. On Thursday, though, the Idaho Supreme Court held that its state constitution does not protect abortion. The conservative court handed down an opinion steeped in originalist philosophy that concluded “the relevant history and traditions of Idaho show abortion was viewed as an immoral act and treated as a crime.”

The South Carolina court’s ruling hinged on interpreting the state constitution’s clause against “unreasonable invasions of privacy.” That provision, embedded in its Declaration of Rights, generally relates to “searches and seizures,” and so opponents of abortion in South Carolina argued that the protection is limited to the context of criminal procedure. But the state supreme court on Thursday rejected this argument, holding that this right to privacy applies to abortion even if “the words used do not specifically mention medical care or bodily autonomy.” 

Because the six-week ban “leav[es] no room for many women” to exercise their choice to continue a pregnancy, Hearn wrote, it “prohibits certain South Carolinians from making their own medical decisions.” This “cannot be deemed a reasonable restriction on privacy.” 

Hearn also drew on a broad history of privacy-rights protection in the United States to make that case, including the decisions of other state supreme courts, including Alaska, Florida, Minnesota, Montana, and Tennessee, that also applied the right to privacy to abortion rights. 

The majority’s decision came with limits, though. Hearn’s lead opinion states that the abortion right protected by the state constitution “is not absolute.” It emphasizes that a six-week ban limits abortion access “before many women . . . even know they are pregnant” and “severely limits” or “completely forecloses” its availability. And Few’s concurrence outlines seemingly weaker standards of scrutiny and pushes against the notion that the right to seek an abortion is “fundamental” in the state constitution. These leave open the possibility that the same justices would uphold other types of abortion restrictions in the future.

Still, Woodrum, of the ACLU, said the differing opinions that make up the majority are a sign of strength for the position that abortion bans are unconstitutional. “There are many different paths to take that arrive at the same conclusion.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that some of our legislators will respond to this decision with more misguided attempts to ban abortion,” Woodrum said. “For months last fall, some legislators attempted to pass a complete ban on abortion, arguing that even the extreme six-week ban wasn’t enough. They weren’t successful, but we remain concerned that some of our elected officials will continue to ignore the Constitution and push to limit the reproductive rights of South Carolinians.”

Plus, the court’s composition will soon change, which could also change its approach to abortion rights. Hearn, who wrote Thursday’s lead opinion, is leaving the court in February because she has reached the mandatory retirement age of 72. Chief Justice Donald Beatty, who joined her in the majority, must also retire within the next two years. 

Members of South Carolina’s supreme court are elected by the legislature, which has a large Republican majority. But the legislature does not have absolute autonomy. The Judicial Merit Selection Commission considers prospective candidates and presents a slate of options to the legislature, which can elect one of the nominees or reject the entire slate and start the process over again.

Conservatives in red states have expressed frustration at such arrangements for preventing them from nominating politically reliable jurists on state courts. South Carolina’s process is built on informal but entrenched customs, which have historically included pledges of support for judicial candidates and vote-trading among legislators. The creation of the merit-based selection process in 1996 eroded some of these practices, but informal jockeying still takes place. 

Still, for advocates in other states who are fighting similarly harsh abortion bans in the state courts, the outcome in South Carolina is encouraging and shows that even courts dominated by Republican appointees may be unwilling to sanction near-total bans on abortion.

The post South Carolina Supreme Court Recognizes that Privacy Rights Protect Abortion Access appeared first on Bolts.

Republicans lost sheriff’s elections last week in populous Southern counties that have been close ICE allies. This is likely to bring an end to prominent ICE contracts in Georgia’s Cobb and Gwinnett counties and in Charleston County, South Carolina. 

These results are major wins for immigrants’ rights advocates who have long worked to change policies in these jurisdictions, which are home to more than 2 million residents combined.

“We celebrate the ouster of the sheriffs who were responsible for the targeting of community members, working in collusion with ICE,” Azadeh Shahshahani, legal and advocacy director of Project South, told The Appeal: Political Report. “These incredible victories are the culmination of more than a decade of fighting back by immigrants’ rights organizers against the devastating 287(g) program which led to untold numbers of families being torn apart.” 

Charleston, Cobb, and Gwinnett are all members of ICE’s 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act like federal immigration agents within jails. The program has put thousands of people each year on ICE’s radar. Local officials justify this policy as a way to target people who commit violent crimes, though the vast majority of people affected were booked for lower-level offenses or were never convicted. As a result, people can be funneled into deportation proceedings and find themselves locked up in detention centers that are known for inhumane conditions. Project South is among the organizations suing ICE for failing to respond to a whistleblower complaint alleging that women in Georgia’s Irwin Detention Center were forced to undergo gynecological surgeries that could result in sterilization.

Participation in the 287(g) program is up to the sheriff—much like many other forms of cooperation with ICE—and the Democratic nominees in each of these counties ran on terminating it, a stance they reiterated in interviews with the Political Report in September and October. The Republican nominees favored the 287(g) program, by contrast. The three Democrats prevailed.

Cobb County’s longtime sheriff, Neil Warren, lost to challenger Craig Owens. In Gwinnett County, a sheriff with notoriously aggressive policies toward immigrants retired, and the resulting open race was won by Kebo Taylor. 

And in Charleston County, Sheriff Al Cannon lost to Kristin Graziano, who told the Political Report in October that the 287(g) program is “contradictory to what we’re trying to accomplish in Charleston,” namely “building our communities back up and building trust.” Charleston has a separate agreement to help ICE detain people the agency arrests elsewhere, and Graziano indicated to the Political Report she opposed detaining people on noncriminal grounds.

These results add to a series of recent wins by candidates who pledged to cut ties with ICE. 

In 2018, North Carolina was the epicenter of that surge, driven by extensive grassroots activism. Five of its most populous counties elected new sheriffs who ran on no longer assisting ICE, including by terminating 287(g) contracts. They promptly did so after entering office. All five of the new North Carolina sheriffs who ran on improving immigrants’ rights are Black, as are Owens and Taylor in Georgia, even as sheriffs nationally are overwhelmingly white.

Then, in 2019, Democrats took over Prince William County, Virginia’s second most populous jurisdiction, and used their newfound power to quit the 287(g) program this year.

A broader blue shift also contributed to last week’s results in Charleston, Cobb, and Gwinnett counties. Joe Biden carried each county by more than any Democratic presidential candidate since at least 1976. The two Georgia counties, in particular, are longtime conservative bastions that have seen tremendous change in their population and politics. For instance, more than two-thirds of Gwinnett County residents were white in 1996, when Butch Conway was elected sheriff and made his county a national leader in targeting immigrants. Now, it’s about a third.

Still, advocates emphasize that it took a lot of work to get these partisan flips to translate into policy commitments by candidates. 

Aisha Yaqoob Mahmood, director of the Asian American Advocacy Fund, which has opposed cooperation with ICE in Georgia, told the Political Report in August that, “four years ago, nobody knew what this [287(g)] program did,” whereas this year it was a core campaign issue. “The last few years of organizing were very important for us to make sure that 287(g) becomes a top issue in this election, and it really has become that way,” she said. 

Other organizations, such as Mijente, Project South, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and SONG Power, fought to curtail ICE’s reach through these sheriff’s races, and through protests and community events. And in a project sponsored by the Georgia NAACP, the group Informed Georgians for Justice sent questionnaires to all Georgia sheriff candidates, inviting them to clarify their views on immigration and other issues. 

Georgia organizers had already scored a win in the June Democratic primary. Sheriff Ira Edwards lost in Athens to challenger John Williams, who took issue with the incumbent’shis record of helping ICE. Athens is not part of 287(g), but Edwards had honored ICE detainers, which are requests that he detain people beyond their scheduled release to give federal agents time to arrest them. 

Williams said he would not honor ICE detainers. “It’s almost a level of terrorism when people are living in fear to the point that they will not ask for help,” he told the Political Report in June, right after his primary win. Williams also won the general election last week.

Graziano and Owens, the incoming sheriffs in Charleston and Cobb, also said during their campaigns that they would oppose ICE detainers. But Taylor, the incoming Gwinnett sheriff, left the door open to assisting ICE in ways beyond the 287(g) program. Advocates have said they will push local officials to be bolder to protect immigrants.

Graziano told the Political Report she has learned from organizers in Charleston’s Latinx community, whom she wants “sitting at the table making the decisions that affect their lives.”

Elsewhere in the country, two Republican sheriffs who have championed ICE and who joined 287(g) won in counties that narrowly went for Biden in the presidential race. Bill Waybourn in Texas’s Tarrant County (Fort Worth) and Bob Gualtieri in Florida’s Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) defeated challengers who had pledged to terminate these contracts. 

But many candidates who called for winding down local relationships with ICE prevailed. Charmaine McGuffey won a heated sheriff’s race in Ohio’s Hamilton County (Cincinnati); earlier this year, she secured a primary win against a Democratic incumbent who had honored ICE detainers, which McGuffey vowed to oppose. In Massachusetts’s Norfolk County, voters ousted a GOP sheriff who had championed greater ICE cooperation.

And in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, Democrat Daniella Levine Cava flipped the mayor’s seat from the GOP. Cava ran on curtailing cooperation with ICE, which has been spearheaded by the retiring Republican incumbent Carlos Giménez, and on opposing a new state law that mandates that local law enforcement assist the federal agency. 

Change will be most swift in the three 287(g) counties that elected new Democratic sheriffs.  Since Election Day, the incoming Cobb and Gwinnett sheriffs have confirmed to the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they plan to exit the program. And Graziano told the Political Report in October that she would terminate the 287(g) contract “immediately” upon taking office. 

She confirmed her plans through a spokesperson this week. “It will be a simple process, and I intend on keeping my promise to rescind the contract with ICE,” she said.

The post ICE Suffered Blows in the South in Last Week’s Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Immigrants’ rights activists have been protesting local officials that help ICE arrest and deport immigrants, pressuring them to end those ties, and candidates for these offices have felt the heat. 

Most significantly, their work has upended the usually quiet landscape of sheriff’s races, helping drive upset losses for longtime incumbents in places such as Minneapolis and Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2018, and already this year—in spring primaries—in Cincinnati and in Athens, Georgia.

Will November’s general elections add to that trend? 

The GOP’s declining fortunes in longtime conservative bastions that have soured on President Trump—who has made hostility to immigration one of his defining rallying cries—have opened the door to political turnover in areas such as Atlanta’s northern suburbs. Those areas were long impregnable to Democrats and any candidates running on cutting ties with ICE. Elsewhere, some Democratic-leaning jurisdictions face a reckoning over their ICE-friendly policies.

Below I look at 12 of the most important state and local elections on the ballot this fall that will affect ICE’s reach and local immigration policy.

The list covers different sorts of offices. But the lion’s share are races for county sheriff. These officials have tremendous discretion on whether and how to respond to or collaborate with ICE. That’s because most sheriffs are responsible for running local jails, which hundreds of thousands of people go through every year, often with little to no oversight from other public officials. And these jails are a major funnel into the country’s deportation machine, especially when a sheriff is keen on making them so, as The Appeal: Political Report explained in July. 

For one, most sheriffs have sole authority over whether their county joins ICE’s 287(g) program. This partnership directly implicates sheriffs in harming immigrant communities by authorizing their deputies to act like federal immigration agents. Only 145 counties in the nation have 287(g) contracts at this moment, but that pool includes very populous jurisdictions—and that’s precisely where Nov. 3 could upend the local landscape: In counties that cover millions of residents—in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas—candidates are running this fall on a promise of terminating existing 287(g) contracts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Sheriffs also decide whether they will agree to detain ICE prisoners in exchange for payments; and whether to honor so-called ICE detainers, which are warrantless requests asking sheriffs to keep jailing a person past their scheduled release to give federal agents time to arrest them. 

All of these arrangements are on the line on Election Day, and with them the prospect that voters may slash ICE’s reach, as they did in 2018, regardless of what happens in the presidential race.

Arizona | Maricopa County (Phoenix) sheriff

No local official is as closely associated with repressive immigration practices as Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County’s sheriff from 1993 to 2017. Arpaio ran a detention facility known as Tent City that he himself called a “concentration camp,” and he engaged in racial profiling in defiance of a court order. Arpaio was ousted in November 2016 by Democrat Paul Penzone, who subsequently closed Tent City, and Arpaio fell short in his attempted comeback this year, narrowly losing to Jerry Sheridan in the Republican primary. But Sheridan is Arpaio’s former lieutenant, and could carry on Arpaio’s legacy if he beats Penzone in November. Writing in the Political Report, Jerry Iannelli stresses that Penzone has disappointed immigrants’ rights activists over his first term. But he also reports that Republican nominee Sheridan is directly implicated in the racial profiling of the Arpaio years and he has vowed to reopen Tent City.

Florida | Pinellas County (St. Petersburg) sheriff

Bob Gualtieri has been an enthusiastic champion of ICE, both through his powers as the sheriff of Pinellas County and through his leadership role in the state’s Sheriffs Association. He helped design a new arrangement for Florida sheriffs to circumvent legal concerns and keep detaining people when ICE requests it; and he has contracted his office into ICE’s 287(g) program. Gualtieri, a Republican, faces Democratic challenger Eliseo Santana who has vowed to terminate both of these partnerships if he is elected sheriff and to reject forms of discretionary assistance with the agency. “I will not have my agents be the agents of destroying families in our community,” Santana told me in a Q&A last week. “These types of agreements are hurting our community, are destroying the family, and it’s anti-American.”

Florida | Miami-Dade mayor

In January 2017, as President Trump entered the White House and took aim at “sanctuary cities,” Miami-Dade County’s Republican Mayor Carlos Giménez announced a major policy reversal that has helped ICE target undocumented immigrants: The county, Florida’s most populous, would honor ICE detainers by holding people in jail beyond their scheduled release if federal agents request it. (Local governments typically leave the discretion on this matter to sheriffs, but Miami-Dade is the only jurisdiction in the state that does not have one.) 

The candidates vying to replace him, Republican Esteban Bovo and Democrat Daniella Levine Cava, have long been on opposite sides of this change. Both were county commissioners in February 2017 when the commission ratified Giménez’s order, despite hundreds of residents demanding a return to sanctuary policies. Bovo voted to approve the order, and Cava opposed it. Cava is now running on curtailing cooperation with ICE, including fighting a new state law that mandates that local law enforcement assist the federal agency. “I think it’s overreach and a pre-emption on how we take care of our people,” Cava said at a summer forum.

Georgia | Cobb County sheriff and Gwinnett County sheriff

Cobb and Gwinnett, two counties in the Atlanta suburbs that have a combined population of over 1.5 million, have undergone a similar transformation. Longtime Republican bastions with harsh policies toward immigrants, they voted Democratic in the 2016 presidential election for the first time since 1976, a change fueled in part by a significant rise in the local Latinx population. Now these counties’ legacy of tightly helping ICE will be tested, Timothy Pratt wrote in the Political Report in September. The Republican sheriffs of Cobb and Gwinnett have both joined ICE’s 287(g) program. And in each county, the November election pits a Democrat who has committed to terminating the 287(g) contracts against a Republican who wants to stay in the program. But even if the program falls, advocates say, far more policy upheaval will be needed to stop the repression of the region’s immigrant communities.

Massachusetts | Norfolk County sheriff 

Jerry McDermott and Patrick McDermott, no relation, are facing off on Nov. 3. Jerry, the Republican incumbent, was appointed by the governor two years ago. Patrick, a Democrat, is the county’s registrar of probates. The incumbent championed a ballot initiative last year that would have undone a state court ruling and authorized sheriffs to honor ICE detainers, which come without a judge’s signature. He did not respond to a request for comment on how he would partner with ICE if elected to a full term. By contrast, and as I reported in the Political Report in August, his challenger says sheriffs should not honor ICE requests that a federal judge has not signed, and that he would not enter into new contracts like a 287(g) agreement. “These contracts make it harder to ensure that all members of the communities … feel safe and secure,” he said.

Michigan | Oakland County sheriff

Sheriff Mike Bouchard, a Republican in a county that may be poised to reject President Trump in November, has honored ICE’s detainer requests, and as a leader in the Major County Sheriffs of America, he has worked to extend that practice throughout the country. “If ICE is coming after someone in the jail, it’s for a criminal charge,” he told Detroit News in 2017, downplaying the fact that most people in jail have not been convicted. In November, Bouchard faces Democratic challenger Vincent Gregory, a former state senator who told the Political Report that he would break with Bouchard’s policy on detainers. “I would NOT honor the request from ICE to hold the prisoners without a Court Order,” he said in an email. But Gregory also volunteered that immigration has not been central to conversations he has had during the campaign, and he does not feature the issue on his website.

North Carolina | Governor

In 2018, buoyed by the activism of advocacy groups such as Comunidad Colectiva, Action NC, El Pueblo, or Siembra NC, North Carolina saw a wave of wins by sheriff candidates—all Black Democrats—who ran on cutting ties with ICE in five of the state’s most populous counties. They promptly did just that upon entering office. This enraged Republicans, who run the state legislature. Last year, they passed a bill to require that sheriffs collaborate with ICE. But Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the legislation, effectively protecting sheriffs’ ability to not do ICE’s bidding. Cooper is up for re-election against Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest. If Forest wins, it would likely hand the GOP control of the state government, enabling them to revisit the 2019 bill. But the state could also swing in the other direction; a Cooper win may be accompanied by legislative gains for his party, strengthening the new sheriffs’ hand.

Ohio | Hamilton County (Cincinnati) sheriff

This is the only election featured here that has a candidate who wants to scale back collaboration with ICE, and one who wants to ramp it up. The incumbent sheriff, Jim Neil, is a Democrat who attended a Trump rally in 2016, honors ICE detainers, and has faced protests from activists. He could not overcome that record in the Democratic primary, losing to Charmaine McGuffey, a former sheriff’s deputy who is running a reform-minded campaign, as Teresa Mathew reported in the Political Report. McGuffey told Mathew that she would no longer honor detainers if elected. 

Now McGuffey faces Republican Bruce Hoffbauer, a police lieutenant who has said the county should be even more active in partnering with ICE than it has been under Neil; he did not respond to a request for comment on how he intends to partner with ICE, though. (Neil has endorsed Hoffbauer since his primary defeat.) Hoffbauer is also running on increasing enforcement against what he calls “street-level crimes” such as drug offenses, which could increase arrests and jail bookings. This approach to policing, combined with a goal of helping ICE arrest people held in the local jail, could lead to even more people being funneled into deportation proceedings.

South Carolina | Charleston County sheriff

Charleston County may have voted for Democrats in the last three presidential elections, but it also has a Republican sheriff, J. Al Cannon, who has made it one of ICE’s closest allies in the state. Charleston is one of only four South Carolina counties in ICE’s 287(g) program, enabling deputies to facilitate defendants’ transfer into ICE custody. Cannon also has an agreement to detain people that ICE arrests elsewhere, including during raids, which has drawn protests. This record is on the line in November. Cannon, who has been in power since 1988, faces Kristin Graziano, a sheriff’s deputy he put on leave when he learned that she was running against him. 

Graziano, a Democrat, told me this week that she would “immediately” terminate the 287(g) program. “It’s contradictory to what we’re trying to accomplish in Charleston,” she said, namely “building our communities back up and building trust.” She added that she would not honor ICE detainers, and would “end completely” agreements that involve detaining people on non-criminal grounds. Graziano, whose website takes the rare step of laying out her views in both English and Spanish, said she has “learned” from “dialogue” with advocates from the Latinx community, whom she wants “sitting at the table making the decisions that affect their lives.”

Texas | Tarrant County (Fort Worth) sheriff

In this county of nearly two million residents, Republican Sheriff Bill Waybourn has been a vocal cheerleader for Trumpian immigration politics. Speaking at a White House event in 2019, he praised ICE for “standing on the wall between good and evil for you and me,” and defended jailing people who face criminal charges on immigration grounds because otherwise “these drunks will run over your children and they will run over my children.” But Tarrant County has rapidly shifted toward the Democratic Party during the Trump era, and this has made Waybourn vulnerable to Democratic challenger Vance Keyes, a former police officer who says he is running to end the incumbent’s “fear mongering tactics.” The ICE out of Tarrant County coalition has fought Waybourn’s participation in ICE’s 287(g) program. Keyes has vowed to terminate it if he is elected. 

Tarrant is by far the most populous Texas county in 287(g). There are only two other 287(g) counties that were carried by a Democrat in a federal race in either 2016 or 2018, a mark of potential competitivenss: Williamson County (Georgetown) and Nueces County (Corpus Christi). In each, the incumbent sheriff is a Republican with a Democratic opponent; but neither of the challengers answered my requests for comment on their views on immigration and 287(g), nor do they indicate a position on their website, in a stark contrast with Keyes’s willingness to tackle the issue in Tarrant. 

Texas | Travis County (Austin) district attorney

Travis County may elect as its next DA a candidate who describes himself as an “immigrant rights activist.” José Garza, a former public defender and leader of the Workers Defense Project, an organization focused on labor and immigration law, ousted the incumbent DA by an overwhelming margin in the Democratic primary. He is now favored against Republican candidate Martin Harry, given the county’s large Democratic lean. Garza told me in June that he wants to avoid immigration consequences for people facing criminal charges or convictions. “A simple proposition for me is that no one should face a more severe punishment simply because of their status,” he said, noting that for some cases it would be a matter of keeping the penalty for a crime under one year, which is a threshold that triggers deportation. 

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This is not an exhaustive list of every local election whose result will shape immigration policy; there are thousands of elected offices that will be decided on Nov. 3. I have selected elections in counties that are at least somewhat politically competitive, as well as elections that pit candidates with clear political differences.

The post These Twelve Elections Could Curb ICE’s Powers appeared first on Bolts.

In and around Charleston, South Carolina, this summer of nationwide protests has compounded grievances and Black Lives Matter activism that have been building for years against racial injustice.

The protesters who gathered after George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s deaths also remembered Walter Scott, a Black man killed by a North Charleston police officer in April 2015. Two months later, in June 2015, a white supremacist shot nine African American church-goers in Charleston.

Residents are also speaking up about the persistence of Confederate monuments at the expense of Charleston’s Black history, and against the towering inequalities of the local criminal legal system. Recent studies found African Americans likelier to be prosecuted over marijuana and to be struck from the jury pool, for instance. The state also faces litigation for suspending driver’s licenses over court debt, a practice that disproportionately affects Black South Carolinians.

Earlier this month, I talked to Ben Pogue, who is running to be the chief prosecutor of the Ninth Judicial Circuit (home to Charleston and Berkeley counties), about how he would confront these issues. He replied that we cannot confront the criminal legal system’s “systemic racism” without also addressing the region’s wider inequalities.

“If we continue thinking about justice as criminal justice, it’s not really justice,” he said.

Pogue wants to launch a “racial audit” of law enforcement that can connect the decisions made by police and prosecutors to broader socioeconomic discrepancies. Absent that comprehensive outlook, he argues, programs that are meant to divert people from conviction or incarceration are setting them up for failure. “We can come up with a prearrest diversion program,” he said, “but if we don’t know that the kid who’s involved in it doesn’t have any transportation resources, and his mom’s only transportation resource is a vehicle used for two jobs, then what are we doing?”

Pogue is the Democratic nominee against Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, a 13-year GOP incumbent. (Of South Carolina’s ten prosecutorial elections this November, this is the only one with more than one candidate on the ballot.) The Ninth Circuit split nearly evenly in the 2016 presidential race, and Democrats are optimistic that they can score breakthroughs in the state this fall. Jaime Harrison, the party’s nominee against U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, tweeted in June about this prosecutor’s race that “local elections are sometimes even more important than national ones.”

In the course of my Q&A with Pogue, he stated that he would not prosecute marijuana possession, nor would he prosecute cases of driving with a suspended license. He laid out how he’d fight racial discrimination in jury selection. But he also repeatedly stressed that he would approach reform incrementally—he said for instance that he would for now treat simple drug possession as a criminal issue, despite calls to approach it as a matter of public health—invoking a need to gain community “buy-in.”

Still, Pogue was quick to delineate a stark contrast with his opponent on sentencing policies and reliance on incarceration. Asked about Wilson’s call for lawmakers to toughen the state’s “truth in sentencing” rules, which severely limit early release opportunities, Pogue answered that such a proposal is indicative of a “mass incarceration mindset” that has failed at reducing crime. Locking people up longer and making it harder for people to re-enter their communities, he added, only compounds recidivism.

“We are consistently using our current incarceration system to turn out people who have no resources to do anything but reoffend,” he said. “We’re perpetuating the depletion of the resources that a lot of times gets people in the situation where they offend to begin with.”

The Q&A has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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The renewed national calls for racial justice this summer resonate in the Charleston region, not just given its long history, but also due to the events of recent years. To what extent do you think the local criminal legal system has been responsive to the Black Lives Matter movement, and if elected how would your tenure advance the goals of this movement?

Our current criminal justice system has been inadequate, to say the least. Black Lives Matter should not be a controversial statement. We should be going to communities, especially communities of color, to listen, to understand what the issues are. This is of specific importance as it relates to people who look like me, people who are white folks who have lived in an environment of white privilege: We’ve got to make sure that we’re actively investigating where our blind spots are as far as racial bias is concerned. 

We need a racial bias audit—of the solicitor’s office, not simply the police department and the sheriff’s department. That needs to be done by an independent advocate and also needs some means of community input, because any racial bias audit has got to go to the community to hear what their complaints are. This is how we create community accountability, especially in an area in the South when we know that folks are marginalized, especially racially. What we’ve done is create our community action team: These are people who are connected to various networks in our community, and they’re a continual accountability measure. We want this to be part of the solicitor’s office.

Your opponent recently, in July, launched an initiative to collect demographic data and information about some charging and sentencing decisions. What is the difference between the racial audit that you were describing and that initiative? 

I think that a major issue that our community has with our current solicitor is an issue of trust. We need all cases to have all the data that is available to the public to the greatest extent possible.  But we’ve also got to be finding other data sources that we’re not even asking about: The huge problem when it comes to criminal justice in our area is that we’re not even asking the relevant questions. We’re not gathering the relevant data. It seems that we’re not really trying to find what the root causes of crime are, so that we can understand criminal behavior.

What is a relevant question that you think isn’t being asked, and how would the racial audit approach capture that?

It’s not enough to say, “OK, we’ve got racial bias in terms of our criminal procedure.” In every single step there’s racial bias: It’s why it’s systemic racism. We’re trying to keep people safe, reduce crime, increase people’s access to their rights. If we don’t have a real idea what their life is like, and we’re not gathering the data that reflects that, and not really interested in finding the root causes of crime, then we’re not really interested in what we’re communicating. Part of that is socioeconomic data, family situations.

An example is a teenager who is 15 years old and was caught for marijuana possession. How many parental figures do you have to watch you throughout the day? What kind of transportation resources does he have to go to after-school programs? What about how many vehicles does the entire family unit have access to? We can come up with a prearrest diversion program, but if we don’t know that the kid who’s involved in it doesn’t have any transportation resources, and his mom’s only transportation resource is a vehicle used for two jobs, then what are we doing? Before you know it, some ludicrous line prosecutor is going to suggest that we put this kid away for years and try him as an adult.

So you are saying, to audit the racial injustice of the criminal legal system, it’s essential to have information about other systems—housing, transportation, education are not separate.

Precisely. If we continue thinking about justice as criminal justice, it’s not really justice. 

It’s interesting to hear you bring up transportation resources as this is an issue that has deep ties to a prosecutor’s discretion: Advocacy groups are suing South Carolina for suspending people’s driver’s licenses when they cannot afford paying off their court debt. This is an issue that disproportionately affects Black South Carolinians, who are more likely to be pulled over, and people face prosecution if they then drive with a suspended license. Some prosecutors around the country, for instance in Nashville and Memphis, have announced they will not prosecute cases for driving with a suspended license. Would you?

The presumption needs to be that we’re not going to criminally prosecute those cases. A disportionate share of Charleston’s African American community is at or below the poverty line. What are we doing when we prosecute cases for not having a driver’s license? We’re taking people who are in a deep resource-starved hole, and we’re putting them in an even bigger hole. We’re eliminating their transportation resources. 

What other prosecutorial tools do you think have been wielded in a way that’s too punitive?

I think it’s easier to answer your question when we look at some of the things that more progressive prosecutors are doing: seeking lighter sentencing; making sure that we don’t use unethical charging procedures like adding charges that you’re going to drop anyway and creating leverage of time in jail to get somebody to plead guilty to something that they may not have done in the first place; trying to really eliminate or reduce cash bail at every opportunity; making sure that people are represented during bond hearings. And we need an additional community relationship aspect to it, to build trust, to get the information flowing back and forth.

And there are funding issues, making sure that public defenders are more well funded.

Let’s look at marijuana. According to a recent study, in Charleston and Berkeley counties, Black residents were four times more likely to be arrested than white residents. Would you prosecute cases involving the possession of marijuana or would you not charge these?

No, not at all. 

What about cases involving possession of other drugs? On your website, you recommend a list of books for people to read, many of them about mass incarceration (with the caveat that you don’t agree with everything in them). One is “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander, who argues that the policies that have fueled the war on drugs are mechanisms of “racialized social control.” What lesson do you draw for how you would approach drug possession? Do you think the criminal legal system should be involved at all? And if you think it should, would you have a goal of avoiding incarceration and/or convictions?

I really don’t want to see convictions for those cases. But I do want to see data. The studies out there really show us that a great many of these crimes are either poverty or mental health crimes, and they should be treated as part of a larger health issue. But I think that if we’re going to take immediate steps to communicate to all law enforcement officers and all communities that we’re not even going to look at any of this kind of stuff, then we have really better make sure that we have the infrastructure to gather the data and address the health problem as well. An issue is that we don’t: We don’t have enough state funding to have a public health infrastructure. 

The goal is that within the span of one four-year term, we go from where we are now to no drug possession charges. But we can’t simply stop it right away because a key element of what we’re doing is trying to gain the trust of community members. 

Another proposal we hear nationwide, as to what prosecutors can do for accountability, is to maintain a public “do not call” list of police officers with a history of wrongdoing they will not rely on. Would you do so?

Absolutely. Having a do not call list is a great idea, and I know some good prosecutors around the country are doing it. And in Charleston we’re rife with a history of racial bias by law enforcement officers. 

Another book on your list is “Prisoners of Politics” by Rachel Barkow, who argues that on top of the moral and human injustice, the “tough-on-crime” practices or policies have been harmful in the sense that they haven’t promoted safety. What is your perspective on that?

This is a personal thing for me. I was held up at gunpoint back when I was living in Richmond, Virginia. It really affects your perspective. But ultimately, most victims and survivors who I’ve spoken to want to make sure that this does not happen to somebody else. If we look at things from a safety standpoint, are we going to put somebody in prison for an extended period of time, especially if they’re not an imminent threat to the community? Ninety-five percent of the people in jail or prison are getting out of prison. We know that prison actually makes people more likely to do crime, especially violent crime, increasing stress and decreasing personal growth and access to all kinds of resources. 

Your opponent, Solicitor Wilson, has spoken up for legislative proposals that would toughen some sentences. She has said for instance that the state’s “truth in sentencing” statutes (which require that people serve at least 85 percent of their sentence) be expanded to more cases. She has also proposed toughening penalties for unlawful carrying of a firearm. What do you make of these proposals, and how do they fit what you were just saying?

That’s not what we need. This so-called tough on crime stuff doesn’t work. It doesn’t reduce crime. It really perpetuates crime: It manufactures people who have no other perceived path. What we’re doing with these kinds of policies is we’re creating a floor, we’re creating a crime rate which we will never go below, because we are consistently using our current incarceration system to turn out people who have no resources to do anything but reoffend. We’re perpetuating the depletion of the resources that a lot of times get people in the situation where they offend to begin with. We create a gotcha system, that our law enforcement officers are incentivized to go along with. It’s oversensitizes police to waste time on bringing those people back into the system. 

We could save a whole lot of money and reduce crime substantially, like we are doing in other places around the country, if we just shut off the mass incarceration mindset, and said we’re gonna focus on what reduces crime. Mass incarceration, longer sentences and putting more people in jail just doesn’t do it.

An issue you’ve talked about in your campaign is the composition of the jury pool, and how many prosecutors are likelier to strike Black jurors from the jury pool. What exact policies would you implement to avoid this? I ask because it’s been, legally speaking, rather easy for prosecutors to get around rules against racial discrimination through excuse.

There was a study in 2016 — the study that was limited, and I understand criticisms — and it said that our solicitor, in the cases that were evaluated, struck African American jurors seven times more often than white jurors. We know that when juries are all white, or nearly all white, the chance that an African American defendant is going to be convicted is substantially higher. And that should be a major concern, especially with the backdrop of inequity in Charleston area.

It has to be a multifaceted approach here. First and foremost, don’t strike a juror because of the way that they’re dressed, or the way that their hair is, or because of what a white person thinks that their mood is. Another thing is that In South Carolina, you don’t have to be compensated for your time on the jury; jurors in Charleston county and Berkeley County get paid 25 bucks a day to be on the jury. Well, if you’re hourly and working a full day shift, you’re getting 80 bucks to 100 bucks a day. So you end up paying the court system for your jury duty time. So how are we going to get by that? I’ve started working with members of county council to have more juror pay or at least have the option of people being paid a full day of living wage for their jury service so they don’t have to worry about that. It also takes community involvement. It takes having a “community action team” that is primarily African American to say we’ve got members that are elevating your voice, and it takes hiring African American attorneys. 

A lot of what we’re discussing, in terms of charging levels and involvement in the criminal legal system, shapes people’s right to vote through felony disenfranchisement. How would you want that change, if at all, in South Carolina? 

In South Carolina, once you’re off probation and parole, your rights are automatically restored. But a lot of folks don’t know that. We don’t have any programs to let people know that they have these rights. They think if they’ve been arrested before, they can’t vote. They’re afraid to show up at the polls because they’re afraid they’re going to be harassed because they owe some fees. So the first part is, you should have your rights restored even as you are on parole and probation. 

As long as the law is not changed: There are cases nationwide where individuals who make a mistake and cast a ballot while on probation and parole are prosecuted and sent to prison. Would you ever file criminal charges against an individual who has cast a ballot while on probation and parole? 

I really can’t see that ever happening. We know also from data that actual voter fraud is such an extraordinarily rare occurrence. The data shows it time and time again that it’s not much of a concern and prosecuting those cases often has a chilling effect on other people voting. So no. 

A concern voiced about progressive prosecutors, writ large, is that they often end up pursuing law enforcement solutions to things best left outside of criminal justice. One book on your list, “Usual Cruelty” by Alec Karakatsanis, advances a version of that criticism, for instance. How would you, as solicitor, shrink the system’s foothold and through that your own authority?

I think that it’s not practical to think that you can absolutely completely overhaul a system if you want continued buy-in and investment and trust from your community. But the overall goal of a prosecutor should be to prosecute less crime, make his or her own position less necessary. And that’s what we should be doing. If we’re doing our job right, then we have less reason to have all these resources devoted to justice and all these biases. We can reduce the cost of the system. We can increase funding for education, for healthcare, for housing, for transportation.

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