In this case, to the MacArthur Foundation’s failed, and democratically rejected, vision of criminal-justice reform.
“Our office will not be used as sharecroppers to a Foundation’s vision of criminal justice reform.” I confess my heart leapt when I read this courageous pronouncement from Monifa Willis, chief of staff to San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, as reported last week by Joe Rivano Barros in Mission Local.
This gutsy display of grantee push-back came in the face of the MacArthur Foundation’s decision to withhold $625,000 in grant funds from the DA’s office. The money was to be the final installment of some $5.2 million in criminal justice reform grants to San Francisco dating from 2018. The support—a small part of the $380 million MacArthur has spent nationally on criminal justice reform in the past 10 years—came from MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) program, managed by Laurie Garduque, the signatory of the foundation’s notice of payment suspension.
Willis’ response for the DA’s office to that notice ran seven lively and spirited pages, and is the sort of direct and frank feedback every foundation deserves when it seeks to flex its power over elected public officials. According to Willis, MacArthur focused excessively on one particular “deliverable” in the grant agreement, namely, the goal of reducing the jail population. “Success is solely being measured by how rapidly we release people from custody regardless of their risk to the public,” she argues. “The Foundation’s simple focus on jail population numbers, not holding people accountable, and/or offering no consequences for unsafe behavior is irresponsible and not trauma informed for the individual or the community we serve.”
Although MacArthur has a list of other complaints about grant compliance, it’s easy to see why Willis concludes that the foundation is obsessively focused on a single metric. As Garduque’s letter put it, “the Foundation is particularly concerned about the increases in [San Francisco’s] jail population and racial and ethnic disparities,” because “the average daily population in jail is now consistently above your SJC baseline of 1,210 and well above the target of 800 proposed in your sustainability grant (September 2022).”
As Willis notes, left unremarked in the MacArthur letter is the fact that the office of the DA in San Francisco underwent a dramatic change in mid-summer 2022—when the original grant negotiator, notorious radical Chesa Boudin, was recalled by 55% of the city’s voters. And among the leading reasons for that recall had clearly been his determination to reduce jail populations no matter what.The subsequent, grant-violating increase in jail-population relates directly to new-DA Jenkins’ determination to do whatever she can to reverse the spike in crime that Boudin’s laxity had brought about. But, MacArthur seems to be saying, electoral results be damned—there are measurable grant outcomes to be met! As the DA’s letter points out, “It is unfortunate that a Foundation of your stature is clearly engaging in politics and holds bias towards our office’s administration.”
Looking at you, the foolish and panic-driven
Garduque, who earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a Ph.D. in educational psychology from UCLA and has been with MacArthur since 1991, probably has a great deal riding professionally on the success of the foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge. As she noted on the foundation’s website earlier this year, she was proud that SJC had grown from 20 cities and counties in 2015 to 80 today. Foremost among the program’s accomplishments is the fact that “between 2016 and 2022, SJC cities and counties reduced their jail population by 20 percent, outpacing the national decline of 11 percent over the same period.” San Francisco can be forgiven for thinking that such reduction, no matter what, is singularly and overwhelmingly important to the foundation official with whom they’re dealing.
Clearly disturbed by events like Chesa Boudin’s recall, Garduque writes in the article that her program is now battling political headwinds. “The United States has grappled with changing perceptions about crime, violence, and community safety. Misleading media narratives, campaigns targeting reform-minded public officials”—looking at you, foolish Boudin-recall voters—“and a flurry of ‘tough on crime’ bills and policies have left many people feeling less safe and believing that reforms are to blame for crime and the diminishing quality of life in their community.”
MacArthur’s approach to criminal justice, in other words, is not going to yield an inch to the current belief—taking root even in the most-liberal West Coast cities—that we’ve now run an experiment with lax enforcement of laws concerning drug use, shoplifting, public camping, and criminal detention, and that it’s time to reverse gears. That conclusion, Garduque suggests, is just an irrational, panic-driven response to what MacArthur considers fake news.
One data point in particular illustrates the clash of views between Jenkins’ office and Garduque. Garduque maintains in the article that data from SJC cities show “that people who were released pretrial were very unlikely to return to jail for any reason and extremely unlikely to return for a violent charge.” So apparently progressivism’s controversial bail-reform program has proven a success! Well, not so fast. As if directly refuting this claim, the DA’s letter notes that “in San Francisco, 55% of those on pretrial release who had initially come in on a current or past violent charge have come back to jail on another violent charge during pretrial release.”
It’s simply breathtaking to behold such arrogance from a major national foundation mandating continued pursuit of reforms to citizens desperately trying to roll back a crime wave that they attribute precisely to those reforms. Willis’ letter for the DA captures this dimension of the relationship with particular insight and courage. “On multiple occasions you have sat in meetings with two Black women, lecturing to us about your concern for jail population increases, the injustices of the criminal justice system and populations that need serving,” she writes.
District Attorney Jenkins and I have full passion and stake in improving racial and ethnic disparities in the jail population. This is not a social experiment to us, or an obligation to meet the expectations of grants, it’s our real lives. It impacts our fathers, husbands, uncles, cousins, and dear friends. We are not doing this work out of inspiration from a book, article or ethnic studies course, we are doing this with full “lived experience” of the impacts of an unjust criminal system.
A larger lesson
There is a larger lesson to be learned from this incident. We have become accustomed to foundations involving themselves intimately in public affairs today, often through funding specific government programs and even designated officeholders. It all seems so public-spirited—until the inconvenient presence of the actual public is factored in. Suddenly, as is the case here, the deliverable outcomes from a foundation grant may seem to the electorate to be part of the problem, not the solution.
The MacArthur Foundation is now seeking to punish San Francisco’s voters for their failure to continue with a failed “social experiment,” because they have foolishly decided to substitute their “lived experience” for the judgment of MacArthur’s criminal-justice experts. It would be difficult to find a more-progressive city than San Francisco, the spiritual birthplace of Kamala Harris’ Democratic Party, but even it has had enough of MacArthur’s progressive reforms. This should remind us that we may pay a high price for philanthropy’s increasing influence over the direction of American public affairs.
(Hat tip to The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s ever-helpful “Nonprofit News from Elsewhere Online” for including Joe Rivano Barros’s Mission Local article.)
