He took office on January 1. Alvin Bragg was elected District Attorney of New York County, taking the office once occupied by Frank Hogan and Robert Morgenthau, and most recently by Cy Vance, who decided to walk away. It is, by legend and history, perhaps the best district attorney’s office in the nation. And Bragg was elected to “fix” it.

Two days after he took office, Bragg issued a memorandum.

This memo sets out charging, bail, plea, and sentencing policies that will advance both goals [safety and fairness]. Data, and my personal experiences, show that reserving incarceration for matters involving significant harm will make us safer.

As a general precept, this certainly seems like a wonderful ideal. It suggests that what was done before failed to advance these goals, and that he seeks to do better. Not only is that fair enough, but that’s the promise upon which he ran for office and was elected. And who doesn’t want safety and fairness? But like all general precepts, the devil is in the details.

Bragg opens with some general “key principles,” and follows up with a fairly detailed list of specifics. While much of it is curious, both from the perspective of the limits of his authority and the constraints of law placed on sentencing, it all sounds generally good if a bit overly idealistic. But then there’s this concerning paragraph.

These policy changes not only will, in and of themselves, make us safer; they also will free up
prosecutorial resources to focus on violent crime. To that end, new initiatives and policies on guns, sex crimes, hate crimes, and other matters will be announced in the coming weeks. We also are mindful that, in all of the work we do, discovery logistics are a constant challenge, and we will be dedicating significant resources to address this challenge. Finally, while my commitment to making incarceration a matter of last resort is immutable, the path to get there through these policies will be dynamic, and, not static, and will be informed by our discussions (starting this week in the Trial Division) and our work together in the weeks and months ahead.

What this means is unclear. His immutable commitment to making incarceration a “last resort” sounds laudable, but what is meant by “new initiatives and policies on guns, sex crimes, hate crimes” and  “other matters”? This emits the unpleasant odor of changing the head on the corpse, taking the focus away from the favored defendants and putting it on those defendants disfavored by progressives. Or to be blunt, his immutable commitment isn’t so much to empty the prisons but to change who is in the cells from the “oppressed” to the “oppressors.”

To be fair, this is very much what progressive carceralism is all about, cognitive dissonance notwithstanding. Is the point that we can all ride the subways for free since there won’t be any prosecutions for turnstyle jumping and smoke weed on the sidewalks during lunch hour, but be fearful of post-hoc regret rape or miscalculating overtime pay? For the sake of all Manhattanites, I hope this turns out well, but is this a sustainable reaction to decades of over-prosecution, over-incarceration and over-policing?