At the end of 2023, the San Francisco district attorney’s office lost out on $3 million in potential restorative justice funds from the philanthropic foundation Crankstart, according to documents obtained in a public records request and shared with Mission Local.
The foundation, in a three-year grant that began under then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin, pledged up to $6 million to fund a restorative justice program in San Francisco. Known as the Healing Justice Initiative, it diverted people from prosecution by creating alternative forms of accountability.
Crankstart is the personal foundation of billionaire Michael Moritz and his wife, the novelist and sculptor Harriet Heyman. Moritz is a venture capitalist who is deeply involved in San Francisco politics, giving or pledging some $17 million to the public pressure group TogetherSF and spending heavily to get law-and-order mayoral candidate Mark Farrell elected.
The district attorney’s office accepts millions in outside grants from foundations and the state to fund various programs, and Crankstart’s $6 million was its largest grant ever.
The program run by the district attorney’s office and funded by Crankstart was started as a pilot project under Boudin but never fully got off the ground. If victims and offenders both agreed, offenders would apologize to their victims and take a series of remunerative steps, like paying restitution for a robbery or attending programs, usually overseen by a nonprofit. The program focused on adults, including transitional-aged youth aged 18 to 24.
Under Boudin, the district attorney’s office hired staff and partnered with nonprofits, staffing up to make referrals. It received $1 million from Crankstart in 2020 to start the program. The grant had a three-year term, from Jan. 1, 2021, to Dec. 31, 2023.
But immediately upon assuming office in mid-2022, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins halted all restorative justice referrals for adults. She said at the time that the move was temporary, but her office never resumed adult referrals. That, several people close to the program said, was surprising, as restorative justice programs have been shown to reduce recidivism, and even tough-on-crime proponents see their value.
“It really slowed our work. There were so many delays, so many points of indecisiveness; it was really confusing,” said Sandra Rodriguez, at the time a restorative justice program specialist at Impact Justice, one of the nonprofits tapped to work with the district attorney’s office on the grant. “Really, when Brooke Jenkins took over, it completely halted.”
The lack of attention on restorative justice convinced Crankstart to cease funding, according to several people close to the program. The district attorney’s office on Dec. 11, 2023, specifically requested an extension, citing Jenkins’ “support of restorative justice practices.”
But Crankstart subsequently informed the DA’s office that it would not grant the extension. The DA’s office, which could have received up to $6 million for the program, effectively left half on the table.
Crankstart declined to elaborate on why it stopped funding.
“We continue to believe in the power of restorative justice, and in the need to respond to what communities are asking for when it comes to criminal justice reform,” said Jesse Hahnel, a program director for criminal justice reform at the Crankstart Foundation.
The DA’s office, in a statement, pushed back on the assertion that movement was slow and laid blame at the feet of Boudin’s administration. Boudin’s office “never operationalized” the program and was slow to spend funds, Jenkins’ office wrote; former Boudin-era staffers and nonprofit partners said they were moving quickly when Boudin was recalled in 2022.
“In recalling Chesa Boudin, the voters gave me a clear mandate to put an end to his reckless social experiments that compromised public safety in service to a failed ideology,” the statement from Jenkins continued, calling it “absurd to question my administration’s commitment to restorative justice.”
The city still has myriad other diversion programs to avoid convictions and prison time, like a drug court and veterans court, both of which connect offenders to treatment or services. Restorative justice programs, however, are different: They also allow offenders to avoid charges, but only if they acknowledge their crimes to victims and remedy them. The city’s only current such program is called Make It Right and was started in 2013; it applies to offenders aged 13 to 17.
But the Crankstart-funded program was the first restorative justice program to focus on adult offenders, who could have avoided charges as long as they were completing steps in an accountability plan. Importantly, victims had to agree to the program. Under Boudin, eligible crimes included felonies and high-level misdemeanors, but excluded violent crimes like homicide, sexual assault, and rape.
Angela Chan, the assistant chief attorney at the San Francisco public defender’s office, said in a statement that Jenkins’ rationale for the program ending was wrong. The DA’s office “essentially killed” the restorative justice program “by seeking to narrow its scope to apply to only low-level charges” she said, calling it a “rash decision that was harmful to victims, our clients, and the many community-based organizations who had hired staff and devoted time” to the program.
Restorative justice programs have been shown to reduce rearrest. A January 2024 study found that youth in San Francisco’s Make It Right program, run by the city and partly funded by the Zellerbach Family Foundation, were 44 percent less likely to be rearrested compared to those undergoing traditional felony prosecution. San Francisco’s Neighborhood Courts program, another such program, saw 90 percent of its 24,000 cases between 2011 and 2021 successfully completed without charges from the DA, according to a 2022 DA’s office memo.
A 2023 study, citing a slew of other studies, noted double-digit reductions in recidivism across more than 20 such programs nationwide. The United Nations found successful restorative justice programs in countries from Laos to Mexico.
“We hope that the DA’s office will continue to prioritize diverting people from the criminal justice system when that’s in the interest of justice and in the interest of community safety,” said Hahnel from Crankstart.
The DA’s office has lost at least two criminal justice reform grants under Jenkins. In August, the MacArthur Foundation informed the office it would withhold $625,000 of a grant that was meant to reduce the city’s jail population. The foundation cited a dramatic rise in San Francisco inmates and questioned the office’s commitment to reform; the DA’s office wrote it would “not be used as sharecroppers to a Foundation’s vision of criminal justice reform.”
Diversions, by which individuals can have their charges dismissed if they agree to alternative programs, have declined under Jenkins: They went from 45 percent of all cases in 2022, the year Boudin left the office, to 37 percent so far this year, according to the DA’s office. Convictions, meanwhile, have risen from 36 percent of all cases in 2022 to 44 percent. Jenkins reversed a years-long decline in convictions that began in 2016.
After a decade-long fall, convictions are on the rise
Since Brooke Jenkins became district attorney, the rate of convictions has risen, and the rate of diversion programs has fallen. Take a look at the rates of cases resolved by different outcomes:
80%
70%
DA Boudin recalled,
Jenkins appointed
60%
50%
conviction
40%
diversion
30%
20%
dismissal
10%
acquittal
2014
2016
2018
2020
2022
2024
conviction
diversion
dismissal
acquittal
80%
DA Boudin recalled,
Jenkins appointed
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
2014
2016
2018
2020
2022
2024
Chart by Kelly Waldron. Data from the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office.
Jenkins, who campaigned against her former boss, Boudin, before being appointed to his post by Mayor London Breed, appears to have reversed a focus on reform in favor of traditional prosecution. All of the police shooting cases in which Boudin had charged an officer were dismissed by Jenkins within a year of her tenure, for example. As a result, dozens of staffers have left the office, saying it no longer focuses on reform.
After the Crankstart grant was dissolved, nonprofit partners were left scrambling. Rodriguez, who was then at Impact Justice, and Celi Tamayo-Lee from San Francisco Rising, another nonprofit partner, said their organizations had hired staff in anticipation of running the program, only to have those funds disappear.
After nonprofits spoke up about the collapse of the grant, Crankstart stepped in and backfilled funding by directly giving to the nonprofits, both said. “They made all the nonprofits as whole as possible,” added David Mauroff, the CEO of San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project, another nonprofit partner. “They really stepped up. They didn’t have to do that.”
But the work those nonprofits were planning on adult cases has ended. Even though restorative justice is a “bipartisan issue,” according to Rodriguez, because of its efficacy in reducing rearrest and recidivism, San Francisco’s experiment with expanding it to adults is over. “It felt like Brooke Jenkins’ office single-handedly brought us back a decade.”
Once again Jenkins blames Boudin for the failures of her office, it’s ridiculous.
Thank you for such clarity in explaining restorative justice. Jenkins not only sidelined this universally embraced criminal justice project, she has sidelined convictions where innocence has been proven, another project initiated by Chesa Boudin. Her Boudin vendetta is laughable – routinely blaming her predecessor is her one and only defense. But its not at all funny. Human beings impacted on all sides of crime suffer because of her reactionary vindictiveness.
Dolores Huerta endorses Ryan Khojasteh for DA, and so should we.
If you want Ryan as DA, may I suggest that you first visit Haiti? They don’t prosecute criminals and it’s a lovely island!
Ryan is back to what we had two years ago. The public defenders office concocts stories to throw off the juries. I was in a jury, believe me.
Oh gee (rollseyes). Let’s go to basics and how that democracy thing’s supposed to work, no? From that perspective, justice reform needs to come through the legislature, both in terms of the legislation itself as well as finding adequate funding year in year out. Which means decidedly not from a billionaire trying to work the DA through the side door.
Say what you want about billionaires, but this isn’t the genius work around the side door you think it is…
In fact, a lot of non profits rely on this type of thing that do work in our city.
First, it’s a foundation by Michael Mortiz, a moderate who usually dislikes progressives.
Second, this 3m was in addition to expand resources and options in justice system capacity and admin, because the legislature is too slow and isn’t willing to try better ways to reduce reoffending.
And now we lost 3m of free money to basically increase services and options in the DA’s office because Jenkins failed to manage the program.
That isn’t a win. It’s a net loss.
More incompetence from Jenkins and another reason to vote for her well-qualified challenger Ryan Khojasteh for DA, who will restore balance to the office.
I mean, whether or not it is effective and the proper thing to do, the people of San Francisco don’t want restorative justice. They want to “lock up all the bad guys”, however ill-informed and racist that may be. She is giving her constituents what they want.
Restorative justice has been shown to be effective, far more effective in fact at reducing recidivism than locking people up in jails and prisons. This DA’s cruelty and politicization of the criminal legal system are without precedent.
The court system is buckling under the weight of her terrible management. Every trial courtroom is full with a trial, and criminal cases are being sent to trial at Civic Center courthouse, bumping civil trials.
And the clerks can’t handle the volume and rightfully went on strike. And the reason is failure to exercise DISCRETION. The clerks cannot keep up with this DA’s politicization of the courtroom and failure to accept the limited resources of this system.
Resources are limited in every system.
This system only has so many judges, courtrooms, clerks and jurors.
Back in “normal” times, during Kamala, Gascon and yes, Boudin, there was a “normal” and healthy exercise of discretion whereby plea offers were made that the accused might actually want to take, or an agreement to utilize alternative treatment courts. But if the plea is worse than the likely trial outcome, it’s not an “offer” and the case will go to trial.
Because of this DA’s failure to accept reality, nothing is settling before preliminary hearing because the plea offers are so ridiculous, so an insane number of felony cases are going to prelim, and there simply are not enough resources to accommodate this. So cases are missing deadlines, people are getting released because their preliminary hearing isn’t happening within their statutory right to a preliminary hearing within 10 court days, or they are getting a “first dismissal” and refiled (the DA gets 2 bites at the apple on a felony) and to add insult to injury for them, the DA’s office is losing a lot of trials, because they are taking garbage cases to trial.
It’s called ineffective utilization of resources and failure to apply discretion.
This DA is corrupt (https://sfstandard.com/2022/08/29/tangled-web-how-all-3-nonprofits-that-paid-da-brooke-jenkins-have-links-to-the-chesa-boudin-recall/), guilty of prosecutorial misconduct (https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/brooke-jenkins-misconduct-18338499.php), and nepotism (https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/26/nursing-professor-monifa-willis-a-friend-of-brooke-jenkins-took-on-the-300k-role-in-march-and-continues-to-pull-in-a-six-figure-salary-at-ucsf/). She is unethical and undeserving of this office, which requires the highest level of integrity (https://sfist.com/2022/10/14/retired-judge-files-state-bar-complaint-against-sf-district-attorney-brooke-jenkins-citing-dishonest-conduct/#:~:text=%22Instead%20of%20the%20honesty%20required,Attorney%2C%22%20Judge%20Goldin%20writes.)
Oh and for the first time in the history of SF, the DA is prosecuting peaceful protestors for protesting a GENOCIDE. WTF?
Why is she in office? Because Republican billionaires bought and paid for her to be there to accomplish their agenda – ridding SF of compassion, harm reduction and unsightly homeless people (heaven forbid one has to see the poor while moving through our beautiful city). The fearmongering about “crime” has been incessant and blamed on Chesa who hasn’t been in office in 2 years. This is really about money in politics and the desperate need for campaign finance reform, but that’s for another comment.
VOTE HER OUT.
Bring back common sense!
Bring back restorative justice to help actually reduce recidivism!
this reply is an education! thank you.
This sounds like good news to me.
“Restorative justice” sounds like a Chesa Boudin thing. What we need from the DA’s office is “restorative prosecution.”
I agree Henley. The voters got rid of Chesa because they wanted to see the back of programs like this.
If all a bank robber has to do, if caught, is say “sorry” and give back the money he stole, then there would be a lot more bank robberies.
In a word, no. They got rid of Chesa because he was successfully blamed for the failures mostly of Superior Court judges and their prescriptive sentencing guidelines – also, Covid occurred the day he took office which lead to Court-mandated 50% reductions in prison and jail populations in CA. Yeah, it’s a lot, and he failed (as a DA?) to “handle” the combined storms or manage his PR effectively at the same time. He failed at “the job” in a political sense, and some of his priorities were definitely out of line with the sudden bipping crime spree that seemed to accompany the pandemic. There’s a lot of things to point to before you get to the “restorative justice” concept itself, which was somewhat successful in achieving outcomes that both sides found fair to good. How often do you see that in any context in the legal system? *(Most people have no idea about the legal system, and if their chosen news source says the DA controls who goes to prison or not, they tend to believe that.)
It’s also true that the asian population that makes up a big % of SF voters was being attacked in a seeming wave during the pandemic and that played a big part too. What’s amazing to me is that all of these things being true and perhaps a reason to want to remove Boudin, how are those same people failing to hold Jenkins to at least her own standard how many years later now, as she CONTINUES to try to lay all blame at Boudin’s feet for her legal and administrative missteps? I mean it’s the Breed playbook to a T. Everyone else’s fault, always, and if you don’t agree you’re soft on crime or a racist/misogynist. That’s going to be Breed’s outgoing grappling hook to higher office, wait for it and do not be fooled.