The SF DA’s office lost a $3 million grant for restorative justice

At the end of 2023, the San Francisco DA’s office lost $3 million in potential restorative justice funds from the Crankstart philanthropic foundation, according to documents obtained in a public records request and shared with Local mission.

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, diverted people from prosecution by creating alternative forms of accountability.

Crankstart is the personal foundation of billionaire Michael Moritz and his wife, novelist and sculptor Harriet Heyman. Moritz is a venture capitalist that is deeply involved in San Francisco politics, giving or swearing something $17 million to public pressure group TogetherSF and spending heavily to elect mayoral candidate Mark Farrell.

The prosecutor’s office accepts millions in outside grants from foundations and the state to fund various programs, and Crankstart’s $6 million was the largest grant to date.

The program run by the DA’s office and funded by Crankstart was started as a pilot project under Boudin, but never fully took off. If both victims and offenders agreed, the offenders would apologize to their victims and take a series of remunerative measures, such as paying restitution for a robbery or participating in programs, usually overseen by a nonprofit organization. The program focused on adults and young people in transition between 18 and 24 years of age.

Under Boudin, the district attorney’s office hired staff and partnered with nonprofits, training staff to make referrals. It received $1 million from Crankstart in 2020 to start the program. The grant had a term of three years, from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2023.

But right after taking office in mid-2022, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins off all adult restorative justice referrals. 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 because restorative justice programs have been shown to reduce recidivism and even tough-on-crime advocates see their value.

“It really slowed down our work. There were so many delays, so many points of indecision; it was really confusing,” said Sandra Rodriguez, at the time a restorative justice program specialist at Impact Justice, one of the nonprofits selected to work with the district attorney’s office on the grant. “Seriously, when Brooke Jenkins took over, it completely stopped.”

The lack of attention paid to restorative justice convinced Crankstart to end funding, according to several people close to the program. The district attorney’s office on December 11, 2023 specifically requested an extension, citing Jenkins’ “support for restorative justice practices.”

But Crankstart later 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 the funding ended.

“We continue to believe in the power of restorative justice and the need to respond to what communities are asking for when it comes to criminal justice reform,” said Jesse Hahnel, program director for criminal justice reform at the Crankstart Foundation.

The prosecutor’s office, in a statementrejected the claim that movement was slow and laid the 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 employees and nonprofit partners said they were moving quickly when Boudin was recalled in 2022.

“In Chesa Boudin’s memory, voters gave me a clear mandate to end his reckless social experiments that compromised public safety in the service of a failed ideology,” Jenkins’ statement continued, calling it “absurd to question the administration’s commitment towards restorative justice.”

The city still has countless other diversion programs to avoid convictions and prison time, such as drug court and veterans court, both of which link offenders to treatment or services. Restorative justice programs, however, are different: they also allow offenders to avoid charges, but only if their victims admit their crimes and make amends. The city’s only current program is called Get it right and was started in 2013; applies to offenders between the ages of 13 and 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 followed the steps in an accountability plan. Importantly, victims had to agree to the program. Under Boudin, eligible crimes included felonies and felonies, but excluded violent crimes such as murder, sexual assault, and rape.

Angela Chan, deputy chief attorney at the San Francisco public defender’s office, said in a statement that Jenkins’ rationale for ending the program was flawed. The DA’s office “essentially killed” the restorative justice program “by seeking to narrow its scope to only apply to low-level charges,” she said, calling it an “unpleasant decision that was harmful to victims, clients and to the many community-organizations that have committed staff and dedicated time” to the program.

Restorative justice programs have been shown to reduce re-arrest. A Study January 2024 found that youth in San Francisco’s Make It Right program, run by the city and funded in part by Zellerbach Family Foundationwere 44% less likely to be rearrested compared to those undergoing traditional criminal 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 prosecutorial charges, according to a 2022 memo from the DA’s office.

A study 2023citing a number of other studies, has seen double-digit reductions in recidivism in more than 20 such programs nationwide. The 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 doing so is in the interest of justice and in the interest of community safety,” said Crankstart’s Hahnel.

The DA’s office lost at least two criminal justice reform grants under Jenkins. In August, the MacArthur Foundation informed the office that it would withholds $625,000 of a grant which was meant to reduce the city’s jail population. The foundation cited a dramatic increase in San Francisco’s inmate population and questioned the bureau’s commitment to reform; the DA’s office wrote that it “will not be used as a peddler for a foundation’s vision of criminal justice reform.”

Diversions, in which individuals can dismiss their charges if they agree to alternative programs, have declined under Jenkins: from 45 percent of all cases in 2022, the year Boudin left office, to 37 percent this year. according to the prosecutor’s office. Meanwhile, convictions rose from 36% of all cases in 2022 to 44%. Jenkins reversed a years-long decline in convictions which started in 2016.

After a decade-long decline, convictions are on the rise

Since Brooke Jenkins became District Attorney, the conviction rate has gone up and the diversion rate has gone down. Look at the rates of cases solved by different results:

DA Boudin remembered,

Jenkins appointed

DA Boudin remembered,

Jenkins appointed

Diagram by Kelly Waldron. Data from the San Francisco District Attorney’s office.

Jenkins, who campaigned against her former boss, Boudin, before being appointed to her post by Mayor London Breed, appears to have reversed the focus on reform in favor of traditional prosecution. All of the police shootings in which Boudin had accused an officer were dismissed by Jenkins within a year of her term, for example. As a result, dozens of employees left the officesaying they are no longer focused on reform.

After the Crankstart grant was dissolved, the nonprofit partners were left to fumble. Rodriguez, who was at Impact Justice at the time, and Celi Tamayo-Lee of San Francisco Rising, another nonprofit partner, said their organizations had hired staff waiting for the program to run, only to have those funds disappear.

After the nonprofits talked about the grant collapsing, Crankstart stepped in and topped up the funding by giving directly to the nonprofits, both said. “They made all the nonprofits as whole as possible,” added David Mauroff, CEO of the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project, another nonprofit partner. “They really stepped up. They shouldn’t have done that.”

But the work those nonprofits were planning on the adult cases has ended. Even though restorative justice is a “bipartisan issue,” according to Rodriguez, because of its effectiveness in reducing arrest and recidivism, San Francisco’s experiment in expanding it to adults has ended. “It felt like Brooke Jenkins’ office single-handedly took us back a decade.”