No one disagrees that undocumented criminals should be deported.
When I was a youngster, I and people like us, who are educated and progressive-minded, did not take interest in politics. But then I realised that half of the parliament is being run by politicians with criminal records.
Individual bankers are rightly being investigated by the police. I and all colleagues in the chamber hope that if criminality is proven, they will go to jail and bear the same brunt of punishment as any other criminal.
To confront criminals, we need to finish with corruption. If we don't do this, there is no hope.
Obviously, a power player in a criminal organization doesn't have to persuade anyone. He can just do what he wants.
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.
My mother negotiated a plea deal, and my father went to trial. I think one thing we notice in their case that kind of stands out is how, in some ways, arbitrary the outcomes in the criminal justice system can be. And they did basically the same thing, identical thing.
There's an awful lot about our criminal justice system that is dysfunctional. Everyone who sets foot in a criminal courtroom will see myriad ways the system is dysfunctional.
What we're doing in San Francisco and what we're doing with other criminal justice partners across the state and across the country is anything but indiscriminate. We are being careful. We are being focused and surgical in our efforts to decrease the jail population.
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.
