NEWS

‘Threading the needle’: Why California’s most innovative prosecutor might be in Yolo County

On Nov. 20, 2009, then-15-year-old Renwick Drake aimed a .22-caliber revolver at three kids he had just robbed at a West Sacramento skate park. Drake was reluctant to pull the trigger, but the 16-year-old he was with that night had already shot four rounds into the air and told him to “put in work” for the Tiny Rascals Gang, according to court records.

Drake opened fire, but the bullet ended up striking a tree.

The West Covina native avoided an attempted murder charge, but in January 2012, a Yolo County jury convicted him of second-degree robbery and two counts of assault with a firearm. With seven different enhancements tied to those charges due to his gang affiliation and discharging a firearm, a judge sentenced Drake to 24 years in prison.

Last month, the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office successfully petitioned for his early release. Drake’s remarkable rehabilitation — working numerous jobs and taking college courses; enrolling in anger management, parenting and youth offender programs; and launching his own weekly self-help workshop to help others transform — is the type of turnaround we like to think is possible. According to court filings, none of the victims objected to his release, and Drake will have the support of his mother and brother as he goes from transitional housing to full independence.

Using California’s penal code and the expanded powers of district attorneys under Assembly Bill 2942, Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig has secured early release for nine reformed inmates after the latest resentencing law took effect three years ago.

After resentencings for nonviolent offenders and drug crimes, this year’s cases — Drake and another reformed violent offender with gang ties — were the most ambitious yet.

Reisig, a 52-year-old career prosecutor who came up during the height of California’s 1994 Three Strikes Reform Act, is simply following the data, no matter how ugly it is. And he’s also respecting the fundamental truths of the criminal justice system: That our prison complex is far too big and costly, and it’s disproportionately filled with Black and brown people.

If humans can learn and evolve, so can a person in prison — and so can a prosecutor.

“I’m not an ideologue,” said Reisig, Yolo’s top prosecutor since 2007. “I’m not in the same category as hardcore progressives that are looking to fundamentally rip down the system and rebuild it. I view our job more as threading the needle of criminal justice reform and public safety at the same time.”

INNOVATIVE PROSECUTING

Yolo County has embraced restorative justice when it’s an option and, this year, became a national leader with a groundbreaking public platform, Commons, to boost transparency and public confidence. To avoid any chance of bias, the office launched a sentencing tool that completely removes race from the equation.

What Reisig and Chief Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Raven are doing in Yolo County is more than simply offering an innovative approach to prosecuting. They’re charting a sensible path to contemporary criminal justice and lasting change.

Their work contrasts with that of well-known progressives such as San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón. It’s a model that traditionalists like Sacramento’s Anne Marie Schubert can and should be emulating.

Protecting and serving victims is still the priority under Yolo County’s “bill of values.” They just do it differently.

“What we were doing 20 years ago was just too extreme,” Reisig said. “It was not justice. It was one size fits all. Everything looked like a nail and we were the hammers. Now we view this more as there are a lot of gray areas and we need to be very strategic.”

To avoid filling jails with people who suffer from mental illnesses, Yolo County created a mental health court. It was so successful that at least 26 other counties, including Sacramento, Placer and El Dorado, launched their own.

To avoid filling jails with people who enter the criminal justice system because of substance abuse, Yolo County created an addiction intervention court.

To avoid filling jails with people whose offenses could be rectified outside a traditional courtroom, Yolo created a neighborhood court. Using the restorative justice model, a popular school discipline technique that generally requires a victim, offender and other community members to meet, Yolo has successfully healed victims, reduced incarceration and diverted juveniles into pretrial programs that give them a second chance.

The strategy is employed on a case-by-case basis for charges ranging from resisting arrest and hit-and-run to possessing stolen property. It’s been incredibly successful. A University of Colorado audit of the program found that over 90% of victims were satisfied with the process, Reisig said, and there was a 37% reduction in recidivism.

PAY ATTENTION TO WOODLAND

Yolo County Chief Public Defender Tracie Olson aligns with her sometime rivals in the prosecutor’s office on the need to address race-based disparities and reduce mass incarceration. Second chances have become a shared value in the western Sacramento Valley.

“I can’t tell you how many men and women I’ve met, years after their initial sentence, who are simply different people,” Olson said. “They are insightful and deeply remorseful, and giving back by becoming firefighters, tutors, hospice workers and dog trainers who provide service dogs to those in need. They have families who love them, and children who need them.

“By offering these individuals a second chance, we are helping to transform our system into one that is more humane, while also helping to safely end mass incarceration and saving California millions of dollars in the long run.”

Hillary Blout, a former San Francisco prosecutor under Kamala Harris and founder of For the People, helped write AB 2942 and has aided Yolo County’s resentencing efforts. For her, today’s prosecutors play a critical role in remedying the unjust and uneven outcomes of previous generations. What Reisig is doing “gives me hope,” Blout said.

“It gives me faith, it gives me certainty that this is possible,” she said. “We cannot undo what we’ve done in this country, as it relates to mass incarceration, without having prosecutors play a central role. Working with an office like Yolo — with career prosecutors — it gives me hope that … we can transform these offices and still protect public safety.”

Instead of looking to San Francisco, Los Angeles or Sacramento for examples of a California district attorney, we should be paying more attention to Woodland.

Reisig’s approach avoids sparring matches over ideology. By letting the data shape policy, he is letting the undeniable truths of the criminal justice system dictate how a modern prosecutor should enforce the law.

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How Yolo County DA is eliminating implicit bias with ‘race blind’ software

Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig implemented a new race blind charging policy in Yolo County in Woodland. The software doesn’t use names or race during the charging of crimes except for homicides and sex crimes.

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‘Yolo County DA wants to address racial bias. Why the Sacramento region should, too’ – Sacbee Editorial Board 4/12/21

“The data belongs to the people.  It’s the only way we can have truly informed conversations about criminal justice reform.” – District Attorney Jeff Reisig

Sacbee – 4/12/21 (text of article by Sacbee Editorial Board) – “Racial bias pervades the criminal justice system, but there’s some promising news coming out of Yolo County. District Attorney Jeff Reisig is pioneering reforms to increase transparency and shed light on potential disparities. Every DA in California — including Sacramento’s — should take notes.

Last week, data organization Measures for Justice launched a new website called “Commons,” home to an interactive platform to track Yolo County’s criminal processes and outcomes. All it required from Yolo County was $20,000 and a little faith in a third-party company — modest requests to achieve meaningful transparency measures that help reform a critical aspect of racial inequality.

“The site does not provide information on individual cases, but anyone with access to the internet can access the site and study, for instance, how often cases for certain drug offenses are filed against defendants of color versus white defendants,” The Bee’s Sam Stanton reported. “The site also offers individuals the ability to flag problem areas and with one click send their concerns to lawmakers, the media or simply post it to social media.”

The effects of systemic racism in criminal justice are well-documented. Black people are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white people after an arrest, according to a 2018 Sentencing Project report to the United Nations. Latinos are three times more likely.

In a recent study of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in New York, the Vera Institute found that the exercise of discretion at every level — from case screening and bail recommendations to charging and plea deals — Black defendants had more severe outcomes.

During the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, public defenders in Yolo County spoke out about racial disparities in criminal sentencing and joined protesters in a demonstration outside the courthouse. Reisig denied the claims. But It’s clear that he wants to be more proactive and address these realities head-on.

“The data belongs to the people,” he told The Bee last week. “It’s the only way we can have truly informed conversations about criminal justice reform.”

The Yolo County DA is also “working with Stanford University researchers to redact investigative reports so that a suspect’s race is not readily apparent and cannot influence a decision on whether to file a case,” Stanton wrote. The tool would scrub personal details so prosecutors can make unbiased decisions.

Launching these types of initiatives is a no-brainer. Why are other counties hesitant to embrace transparency and confront racial bias?

Typically, increasing criminal justice transparency has required passing new laws or filing lawsuits that force agencies to release information. Even then, officials resist.

The Bee sued Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones multiple times to force him to comply with Senate Bill 1421, which requires police to release records after use-of-force incidents. Judges sided with The Bee in each case as Jones and the county wasted taxpayer dollars in their attempts to evade the law.

Reisig’s new initiatives should be lauded, and other counties should follow suit. The opportunity to achieve meaningful change and deliver unbiased justice should be embraced by every district attorney.

Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert, who is considering a run for California attorney general, claims to champion innovations that provide greater public safety. Is she ready to embrace the same transparency measures as her peer next door in Yolo County?”

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12 Years After Being Locked Up as a Teen, He Finds Mercy from the D.A. Who Put Him There – Los Angeles Times

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‘Yolo D.A. offering up first-in-nation online access to data on criminal prosecutions’ – Sacbee 4/6/21

“I’ve been frustrated for my entire career as the district attorney with the lack of readily available, accurate data from California’s criminal justice agencies, and that goes all the way to the top, to the attorney general’s office. I decided I could do my part in being more transparent with the data.” – District Attorney Jeff Reisig

Sacbee 4/6/21 (text of article by Sam Stanton) – “In a bid to make decisions on who is prosecuted for crimes in Yolo County more transparent, District Attorney Jeff Reisig and a criminal justice non-profit group are unveiling a new website Tuesday offering access to a trove of data on race, age, gender and other information related to criminal cases.

The new site, dubbed “Commons” and available online beginning Tuesday morning, is designed to allow the public to access information dating back to 2016 and study anything from the length of time a case takes to complete to how frequently defendants of one race are charged compared to other races.

“I’ve been frustrated for my entire career as the district attorney with the lack of readily available, accurate data from California’s criminal justice agencies, and that goes all the way to the top, to the attorney general’s office,” Reisig said Monday. “I decided I could do my part in being more transparent with the data.

“The data belongs to the people. It’s the only way we can have truly informed conversations about criminal justice reform.”

Reisig’s office teamed with Rochester, N.Y.-based Measures for Justice, paying about $20,000 and turning over information to the group for what it says is the first site in the nation to provide access to such an amount of data.

“There is probably a lot of anxiety that some in law enforcement might have in turning over all their data to a third-party and saying, ‘Here you go,’” Reisig said.

But he added that the decision comes after regular meetings with members of the office’s Multicultural Community Council to offer up information available electronically since Reisig transformed the Yolo D.A.’s office into a paperless operation in 2012.

“I’m already using it,” Reisig said. “I’m able to quickly dive in on, let’s say, cases rejected by a prosecutor,” he said. “And I can immediately go through agency by agency and see how many did I receive from the agencies and how many did I file and how many did I reject.

“So if I see in one particular agency there’s a very high rejection rate, then that begs the question, what’s going on? Are we rejecting them because of investigations that aren’t complete? Or are there some troubling issues perhaps that we need to look at.”

The site does not provide information on individual cases, but anyone with access to the internet can access the site and study, for instance, how often cases for certain drug offenses are filed against defendants of color versus white defendants, he said.

The site also offers individuals the ability to flag problem areas and with one click send their concerns to lawmakers, the media or simply post it to social media.

“We’re really excited about this,” said Fiona Maazel, communications director for Measures for Justice. “The goal is to bring it to prosecutors’ offices all over the country.”

The data is being provided as law enforcement agencies nationwide grapple with criminal justice reforms efforts – and as the trial of fired Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin plays out on national television daily nearly a year after George Floyd died while Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck.

Tessa Smith, chair of the county’s multicultural council and a Black woman, said the data “is going to be a way for us to keep the conversations on the rails.”

“It’s going to show where the disparities are, and in that way you can be surgical in your approach to real solutions,” Smith said, adding that the involvement of Measures for Justice as an independent group lends credibility to the information Reisig provided.

“They’re independent, so if there’s not credible or confirming data they’re not going to put it in there,” she said.

Greg Totten, chief executive officer of the California District Attorneys Association and a former Ventura County D.A., said there may be district attorneys who are not willing to provide such information to Measures for Justice, but added that providing accurate data to prosecutors on how they are doing their jobs “can be used to make wise decisions.”

“Jeff’s a cutting-edge kind of guy from a data standpoint,” Totten said. “He’s one of the leaders in California, if not the country, because he’s not afraid of the data.

“He wants to be as transparent as possible.”

Reisig, who is slated to become CDAA president in July, said his office also is working on a plan to become the first D.A.’s office in the nation to make decisions on filing cases essentially color blind.

Reisig said he is working with Stanford University researchers to redact investigative reports so that a suspect’s race is not readily apparent and cannot influence a decision on whether to file a case.

“The tool that they’re building will scrub the race of the defendant and the name,” he said, adding that he hopes to begin introducing that program in May. “You won’t see the surname at all, you won’t get any information about the location.

“Then the prosecutor reviews the police reports in this race-blind module and makes a charging decision blind, without seeing any of the racial information.””

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A Prosecutor’s Success Story: Change Without Labels

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Yolo DA & Museum of Tolerance Partner to Provide Unique Training to Prosecutors on the Elimination of Implicit Bias

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Yolo DA Partners with Superintendent of Schools in 1st Annual Youth Academy

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Environmental Protection is a Priority for Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig