Can LA's top prosecutor transform the criminal justice system?

George Gascón was elected Los Angeles district attorney after promising to end “tough on crime” prosecutions, free people from overcrowded prisons and hold police accountable for misconduct.

But three months into his tenure, law enforcement leaders across California have launched an aggressive campaign to thwart his signature reforms. Gascón is facing court challenges and a rightwing backlash, and some are now pushing to recall him from office.

The stakes are enormous. Gascón’s success or failure could determine whether young people in LA are sentenced to life behind bars, whether elderly people get a chance to come home after decades in prison, and whether the DA’s office pursues criminal cases against police for misconduct and unjust killings.

And what happens in LA could affect the future of mass incarceration and reform policies across the US. The LA district attorney’s office is the largest in the country, with jurisdiction over a county larger than most US states, and Gascón’s term has become a crucial test for a growing movement of progressive prosecutors.

Related: George Floyd killing: Minneapolis on edge again as historic trial set to begin

“The norm is changing, and the police can’t accept that,” said Helen Jones, an organizer with the group Dignity and Power whose 22 year-old son died in LA sheriff’s custody in 2009. “They don’t want to have to worry about being held accountable, that one of them might go to jail for murdering somebody’s child. They know that change is coming. So they fight back.”

Fighting the ‘machine of mass incarceration’

Gascón, a former LA police official and district attorney in San Francisco, won his race last November after the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor brought mainstream attention to systemic problems in law enforcement.

Gascón gained traction as he explicitly spoke about the harms of California’s racist prison system. “We’ve created this machine of mass incarceration for the last 40 years, that we have normalized what is really abnormal anywhere else in the world,” Gascón recently told the Guardian. “What I’m doing is radical for the US … but sending people to prison for 60 years, 100 years, 150 years, or to death row, or prosecuting a 15-year-old as an adult – these are all concepts that in most of the rest of the world would be inconceivable.”

Gascón’s predecessor, Jackie Lacey, had faced fierce criticism for her ties to police unions, her refusal to prosecute police officers accused of misconduct and her continued support for the death penalty. Gascón, however, argued that “tough on crime” laws dating back to the 1990s, which exponentially increased California’s prison population and disproportionally affected Black and Latino communities, had torn apart families without improving public safety.

Following his election, he announced that he would stop seeking the death penalty; would no longer prosecute children as adults; would stop filing gang enhancements – the additional punishments tagged on to the sentence of defendants labeled as gang members; and would no long file three-strikes charges, which required life sentences for people convicted of multiple offenses.

He also vowed to no longer send DAs to parole hearings to oppose release and said he would re-evaluate thousands of cases for resentencing, prioritizing those at risk of death from Covid in prison. Taken together, the policies could affect more than 10,000 active cases and more than 20,000 people currently incarcerated.

“It’s a 180-degree turn,” said Jody David Armour, a University of Southern California law professor and expert on incarceration. “It’s a commitment to a different moral framework – turning away from retribution, retaliation and revenge as the dominant moral compass, and moving toward restoration, rehabilitation and redemption.”

The announcement of reforms gave some hope to people behind bars who have spent years believing they would die inside. “People grow – you have to give us a chance,” said Rahsaan Thomas, 50, who is jailed in San Quentin prison. Thomas had a 35-year enhancement added to his term for second-degree murder and has been imprisoned for the past 20 years. He has published essays and hosted a podcast behind bars. One of his friends recently died of Covid in prison shortly before his planned parole date. “I just don’t want that to happen to me,” he said.

“I would like people to know that young people are redeemable,” echoed Philippe Kelly, 37, in a call from San Quentin. He has been incarcerated since age 15, when he was prosecuted as an adult in a second-degree murder case in LA county. “We got stigmatized in the 90s as ‘super-predators’ … but people like me have done decades in prison and have worked on ourselves. We’ve been able to make changes so we won’t go back into society and hurt people again.”

But the backlash against the changes started within days of Gascón’s inauguration.

A Fox News-fueled backlash

In December, three weeks after Gascón took office, the union representing deputy prosecutors in LA sued to block Gascón from ending the use of enhancements. In January, the San Diego DA fought to reclaim a murder case from Gascón’s office, arguing that the defendant, accused of crimes in both counties, could face a less severe punishment in LA. The Orange county DA tried to reclaim a child sex abuse and murder case from LA, citing similar concerns.

Meanwhile, the LA sheriff, Alex Villanueva, threw his weight behind a recall campaign backed by the families of murder victims who fear the suspects in their cases won’t get the maximum punishment of life in prison. The families accuse Gascón of “setting violent habitual criminals loose”.

Gascón said he wasn’t swayed by the elected DAs targeting his policies: “These are all very hardcore ‘law and order’ kind of people, who have opposed every single criminal justice reform,” he told the Guardian. “So to that end, I’m not surprised. But I am surprised by the lengths they are willing to go to mislead.”

“These people are dying for political attention ... and a news cycle,” he added, noting that the defendants in the San Diego and Orange county cases were going to face life in prison in LA, anyway. This kind of “political posturing”, he argued, was a waste of taxpayer money and cruel to victims’ families. “You’re feeding into [victims’] fear and anger and using them, which is really unfortunate, because it traumatizes people.”

The union fighting Gascón has said that the reforms created an “ethical dilemma” for line prosecutors by directing them not to use enhancements. But the prosecutors’ unions, like police unions, have a long history of opposing reforms and lobbying for harsh sentencing policies. And the criticisms from Villanueva came after Gascón vowed to investigate misconduct and abuse in his embattled sheriff’s department.

Cable news has amplified the criticisms of Gascón, echoing the news cycles and backlash that progressive DAs have faced in San Francisco, Philadelphia and Portland.

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired a segment featuring mugshots of people convicted of gruesome crimes, claiming the new DA was “letting more criminals off the hook”. And Fox11 LA has repeatedly run stories about heinous crimes, quoting outraged police officers and raising concerns about potential parole considerations decades in the future.

“It’s propaganda,” Gascón said of the Fox News and law enforcement backlash, adding that his opponents were trying to argue that people convicted of crimes never change or deserve a second chance. “The implication is that there is no room for redemption or rehabilitation … But I tell people I’m not the same person I was 10, 20 or 30 years ago.”

“History is repeating itself. During the war on drugs, the campaign was fear mongering,” added Michael Saavedra, a 51-year-old community organizer in LA, who was in and out of prison starting at age 14, labeled a gang member and ultimately had ten years added to a prison sentence due to enhancements. “I just find it flagrantly racist.”

Related: These US cities defunded police: 'We're transferring money to the community'

While a number of crime victims have spoken out against Gascón, there is also a growing group of survivors who support his reforms, saying the DAs fighting for excessive punishment don’t speak for them.

The victims advocating for reform

Yvonne Trice, 59, wants justice for her son, Monte Russell, who was murdered in 2015 in an LA homicide that remains unsolved.

But she doesn’t support gang enhancements. Before he was killed, her son had also been incarcerated, with gang allegations adding to his sentence.

“The reality of you putting that on any child – you’re doing your best to double their time and lock them away for ever,” she said. Adding enhancements to the sentence of her son’s killer would not bring her peace: “Y’all wanna give so many enhancements so people can never come home. And that’s a lazy way of saying, ‘I don’t ever want to deal with this person.’ You don’t have the right to shut down a human being.”

Survivors and victims’ families who support the move away from tough-on-crime prosecutions said they were often left out of the discussions of reform.

“Survivors need healing, not more punishment,” said Lanaisha Edwards, a South LA organizer who lost two brothers to gun violence and has also lost loved ones to the prison system. Not all survivors want retribution, she said, adding that the groups fighting to maintain decades-long prison terms “are not worried about us receiving services”.

“They are more worried about keeping things the way they’ve always been. In their communities, they don’t feel like the system is broken … And some people are OK with creating safety in their community even if it creates harms in ours.”

Edwards said she was generally distrustful of working with police and prosecutors, but she agreed to join Gascón’s victims’ advisory board, which was focused on support services. She appreciated that he was offering resources to families of those killed by police.

A holistic approach to public safety includes reuniting families torn apart by prison, added Zakiya Prince, an advocate whose husband is incarcerated due to the three strikes law. She and their two-year-old daughter haven’t seen her husband in a year due to Covid: “There are generations of people who have been removed from our families because our systems were not there to support them prior to their incarceration.”

Thomas, who is incarcerated at San Quentin, said he was eager to meet his grandchildren for the first time and help mentor young people outside prison: “There are a lot better ways to stop crime than more violence. And I consider throwing somebody in handcuffs and in prison more violence … I think the person I am today would really be an asset out there.”