Over the past decade, a wave of progressive prosecutors swept into office in America’s largest cities, backed by millions in campaign contributions from political action committees funded by billionaire George Soros and allied donors. Their shared agenda was transformative: reduce incarceration, eliminate cash bail, decline to prosecute low-level offenses, and redirect defendants from the criminal justice system into diversion programs. The theory was that America’s carceral state had become bloated, racially discriminatory, and counterproductive — that less prosecution would produce better outcomes for communities. The experiment has now run long enough to evaluate, and the results are considerably more complicated than either side of the debate acknowledges.
The financial architecture behind the movement is well documented. Larry Krasner’s 2017 campaign for Philadelphia District Attorney received $1.7 million from Soros-funded groups, representing 90 percent of his total fundraising. Kim Foxx received $708,000 from Soros in her 2016 Cook County race and $2 million in her 2020 re-election. George Gascon’s supporters in Los Angeles received $6 million from megadonors and Democracy Alliance members. Alvin Bragg received more than $1.07 million from the New York Justice and Public Safety PAC and Color of Change PAC for his 2021 Manhattan DA campaign. By the Heritage Foundation’s count, Soros-backed prosecutors now serve jurisdictions covering roughly 20 percent of the U.S. population.
The Data Divide
The empirical evidence on bail reform’s impact on public safety is genuinely contested. A study by the Data Collaborative for Justice found no increase in recidivism during the pretrial period following New York’s bail reform, with results becoming more favorable over a two-year follow-up. The Brennan Center’s research across 33 cities found no evidence linking bail reform to changes in crime rates. In Illinois, one year after the state eliminated cash bail under the Pretrial Fairness Act in September 2023, statewide violent and property crime fell twelve percent, and judges issued failure-to-appear warrants in only five percent of 28,416 court dates — a rate that undermined predictions of mass flight from justice.
But aggregate statistics can obscure localized realities that voters experience directly. In Cook County, a study found that released defendants contributed between 0.4 and 3.2 percent of all arrests following bail reform — a small percentage in statistical terms but one that represents real victims of real crimes committed by individuals who would not have been on the streets under the prior system. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office issued a memo downgrading 52 percent of felony cases to misdemeanors, producing sharp drops in conviction rates for serious felonies. In San Francisco, DA Chesa Boudin sent a greater percentage of defendants in robbery, assault, and drug cases to diversion programs than his predecessor, including granting dismissals to individuals who subsequently reoffended and providing multiple diversion referrals to the same defendants.
The Democratic Backlash
The most telling indicator of public sentiment has not been crime statistics but elections. San Francisco voters recalled Chesa Boudin on June 7, 2022, with 55 percent voting for removal — in one of the most liberal cities in America. The recall campaign raised $5.96 million, reflecting deep community frustration with a DA whose policies had become synonymous with public disorder. Kim Foxx of Cook County declined to seek re-election. Kimberly Gardner of St. Louis resigned. Marilyn Mosby of Baltimore lost her primary. Rachel Rollins of Boston resigned from her U.S. Attorney position amid an ethics investigation. Andrew Warren of Tampa was removed by Governor Ron DeSantis. The pattern is unmistakable: voters in progressive cities, many of them Democrats, concluded that the experiment had gone too far.
George Gascon, perhaps the most prominent progressive prosecutor in the country, survived one recall attempt in Los Angeles on procedural grounds but faced persistent political opposition throughout his tenure. Alameda County DA Pamela Price faced her own recall efforts. The political trajectory of the progressive prosecution movement has reversed dramatically since its peak in 2020, when the social justice rhetoric of the post-George Floyd moment provided electoral tailwinds that have since dissipated.
The honest assessment of bail reform and progressive prosecution is that the movement identified real problems — racial disparities in pretrial detention, the criminalization of poverty, prosecutorial overreach — but implemented solutions with insufficient regard for their second-order effects. Eliminating cash bail for nonviolent offenses is defensible policy. Declining to prosecute quality-of-life crimes that define urban disorder is considerably harder to justify to the residents who bear the consequences. The progressive prosecutors’ fundamental error was not their diagnosis but their certainty — a conviction that the existing system was so broken that virtually any reform would represent an improvement, and that the communities most affected by crime shared the reformers’ priorities.
They did not. The recall elections, the resignations, and the defeats demonstrate that even deeply progressive electorates have limits. The challenge for criminal justice reform going forward is to preserve the legitimate insights of the movement — that incarceration is overused, that cash bail penalizes poverty, that prosecutors wield too much unchecked power — while acknowledging that public safety is not a conservative talking point but a fundamental expectation of democratic governance. That balance has proven elusive, and the cities that served as laboratories for the experiment are still counting the costs.
Sources: Wilson Center BRI Analysis | World Bank Debt Data | The Diplomat Debt Analysis | AidData Research Lab | IMF Sovereign Debt Monitor