LARRY KRASNER WANTS to fix America’s criminal justice system, which imprisons more people per capita than any other country on the planet. Since 2018, he’s served as the district attorney (D.A.) of Philadelphia—one of America’s most highly incarcerated and crime-ridden cities.
Krasner spent three decades as a criminal and civil rights defense attorney before deciding to run for office. “Our move-ment did the uncomfortable thing: We took back power,” he wrote in a memoir about his successful run for Philadelphia’s district attorney. “We outsiders went inside and took over the institution we had fought against all our lives.”
In his first week as D.A., Krasner fired 31 staffers and replaced them with a new team that he described as “ideologically attached to the mission.”
“It’s a pretty basic mission for people who are in favor of freedom,” Krasner says. “One of those missions is to be less incarcerated than Vladimir Putin’s Russia….Another aspect is not to have what I would call the ultimate form of big government, which is to be the most incarcerated country in the world without a perceptible increase in safety.”
Krasner easily won reelection in 2021, but shortly after this interview was conducted he was impeached by the Republican-led state legislature, which blames him for the fact that Philly posted a record 562 murders in 2021 and is on pace for a similar outcome when 2022 statstics are finalized.
In October, Reason’s Zach Weissmueller sat down with Krasner for a video interview to talk about his reforms, his city’s spike in violent crime, the heat that progressive prosecutors have been feeling, and what it all means for the future of American criminal justice reform.
Reason: Straight out of law school, you went to work at a public defender’s office here in Philly. You spent decades as a civil rights defense attorney, and now you are the city’s top prosecutor. What made you decide to pursue that in 2017?
Krasner: When I came out of law school, I was a little bit naive. I actually started out as a state public defender in that “under-resourced rodeo” that Justice [Sonia] Sotomayor talks so much about.
