39 Quotes by Chesa Boudin

Our criminal justice system is failing all of us. It is not keeping us safe. It is contributing to a vicious cycle of crime and punishment.

I want to give every victim of every crime in San Francisco the right to participate in restorative justice if they choose to.

The failure of both Congress and state legislatures to respond to the murder of George Floyd with any meaningful action reminds us that our nation's attempts at reform can often amount to nothing.

People are shaped in myriad ways by their upbringing and family. We also have agency in our lives, the people we become, and the lives we lead.

One of my priorities is giving victims the right to choose different paths to restoration and to healing. It's prioritizing having restitution available for economic harm, having victim services for the trauma and also recognizing that victims are far more than simply pieces of evidence to be used in order to secure a lengthy prison sentence.

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

Unlike many travel books I didn't set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.

My father, David Gilbert, is in prison in New York. He is lucky that he has a single cell, not shared with another person. His cell is about eight feet by eight feet.

Politics has always been personal for me. You know, growing up, I was in a very politically conscious household. We engaged with intellectuals and artists and academics from around the world who were thinking critically about politics and the intersection of politics and public life.