(Daily Signal)—Crime victims don’t have rights under the Constitution, former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was recalled by voters in 2022 amid an escalation of crime, said during a conference here at UC Berkeley School of Law.
Boudin’s surprising comment came as part of a larger debate between the Left and Right on criminal justice issues at the March 8 gathering, called “Justice Unveiled: Debating Crime and Public Safety Conference.”
The ousted San Francisco prosecutor led a discussion with California district attorneys that also included Cully Stimson, a Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow who is a crime expert and former prosecutor. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
Stimson, coauthor of the book “Rogue Prosecutors: How Radical Soros Lawyers Are Destroying America’s Communities,” pressed the district attorneys about the so-called progressive prosecutor movement.
Stimson includes Boudin, now executive director of the Criminal Law & Justice Center at Berkeley School of Law, as a member of that movement. Crime increased dramatically during the progressive Democrat’s two years in office, and it continues to be a major problem for San Francisco.
“There’s nothing progressive about the progressive prosecutor movement, at least as you define the word ‘progressive,’” Stimson said.
The Heritage scholar said the movement is dangerous because it does nothing to cultivate public safety or protect victims, but instead focuses entirely on criminal defendants.
Violent crime rates fell in the 1990s for two reasons, Stimson said. The first reason is that states passed laws to keep repeat and violent offenders in prison longer. The second reason is the creation of various courts and alternatives to prison programs.
“Longer [prison] sentences lower recidivism rates,” Stimson said, adding later: “The U.S. Sentencing Commission has seven separate studies that show just that.”
Unfortunately, Stimson said, the progressive prosecutor movement, inspired by those who would abolish prisons, has worked ingeniously to put ideological sympathizers in district attorney’s offices around the country.
Their election gives each prosecutor the ability to reduce the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences, he said.
Stimson then posed a question to the district attorneys about their philosophy.
“An offender-oriented approach to prosecution rests on the unstated and therefore unsubstantiated assumption that the perpetrators of crime stand on the same moral plane as their victims,” he said.
Protecting the vast majority of residents of a community who don’t commit crimes from those who do is a cornerstone of the social contract, Stimson explained.
“How do you, in your role as the [district attorney], uphold your end of the social contract?” he asked.
In his answer, Boudin said that putting more people in prison “of course” reduces the number of crimes. Putting everyone in prison would end crime, he added.
The former San Francisco district attorney then said that those people who have spent the most time in prison are the least likely to recidivate and that we keep convicted criminals locked up for far too long in America.
“That’s a decision we make that separates us from every other civilized country in the world,” Boudin said. “It’s a policy choice, and it really doesn’t have to do with safety so much as a desire for vengeance and retribution, with the history of racism in this country.”
He said the progressive prosecutor movement isn’t about putting defendants over victims.
The Constitution created rights for criminal defendants, Boudin said, but it “does not create rights for victims of crime.”
He then pointed to various services that some states have created for crime victims, such as providing access to therapy and paying for medical expenses.
“Suggesting that because progressive prosecutors seek to comply with constitutional rights, seek to avoid having cases dismissed because of discovery violations, because of racial bias, is somehow tantamount to disregarding victims’ rights is simply not true,” Boudin said.
He then said that prosecutors are not asked to represent victims of crime, but “all of the people of our jurisdictions,” and that focusing on victims disregards the Constitution.
While the national focus of rising crime has been on progressive prosecutors, Boudin said, the “highest murder rates” are in red states and counties. What’s happening in large parts of the country, he added, is the prosecution of poverty.
Stimson disputed Boudin’s claim that red states are driving crime. He mentioned his related research indicating that Democrat-run cities for the most part are producing the crime numbers in red states and counties.
Boudin countered that most cities in America are run by Democrats, so that’s why most high-crime cities are blue. Stimson replied that, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, most crime is concentrated in the “inner city” and has been for a long time.
Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton, a Democrat, later weighed in. Becton said she doesn’t focus on politics, but believes that safety is a human right “and everyone deserves that.”
Although she respects Boudin’s viewpoint, Becton said, she wanted to point out that he “never dealt as a prosecutor for the victims of crime, never looked at the 5-year-old that was shot and had the job of bringing that victim justice.”
“He cares about a lot of things,” Becton said. “But the lens that’s missing is the victim’s lens; it’s completely missing.”
If you go to a doctor for a heart problem, the Contra Costa County district attorney added, you want the doctor to understand hearts. It’s a problem, she said, when those who occupy positions of power, such as district attorneys, “never had the passion to protect somebody who has been victimized.”
Becton wondered aloud how someone who says the Constitution doesn’t recognize crime victims could become a DA.
Justice is not a “theory” or an experiment, she said, it’s about people’s lives.
Boudin answered that he did care about victims and expanded resources to care for them, including court interpreters. He also said, raising his voice, that conservative prosecutors treat victims only as “pieces of evidence” just to send more criminals to prison.
Crime victims don’t just want money as government services, Becton said, they want “justice” and “they want to know there is justice.”
It’s the duty of the district attorney to give them that, she said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
“Boudin’s surprising comment”
How could that possibly be surprising?!
Finally, will Stimson’s book be a REAL DATA POINT out of the OBFUSCATING★ Heritage Foundation?!?!
Hopefully, the book will finally answer the mystery question of just how many SOROS JUSTICE FELLOWS there were, how many SOROS EQUALITY FELLOWS there were, and how many now occupy STRATEGIC LEGAL POSITIONS across the nation?!?!
If the book does NOT answer those questions — it will most likely be another FAKE NEWS OP!
★ Heritage Foundation people routinely will report “Bill Gates bad” while never mentioning his command and control (financially) of the WHO and NIH (through the FNIH, or Foundation for the NIH)!
Ditto other important topics!!!
California. That’s all you need to know. That state has dutifully earned every bit of ridicule and derision it receives.
Insanity rules in the USA. DEI really means Democrat’s Evil Insanity.
Boudin parents are criminals. He’s a red diaper doper baby. It’s literally mental illness inculcated from the crib.
And, technically, the Constitution didn’t create rights, it acknowledged that they already existed.
Privatize the prisons. Democrat owners only. Watch the incarceration rate go through the roof.
This man is a menace to the legal profession and does not understand what the Constitution does, or the basis for rights of human beings. The Constitution does not create ANY rights. It restricts government from infringing on existing rights. Rights are granted by the Creator of human beings. Rights are an inherently held part of being human. What an insane moron.
Clearly a confirmed fascist democRAT Communist….. more concerned about Criminals than their victims.
Chess boudin’s parents were in the weather underground, they are Bolsheviks and bill ayres and Bernadine dohrn raised this cretin. There’s nothing surprising here.
Who thought he wouldn’t be a liar….
in fairness to the liberal nutcase prosecutor, his statement is correct. The Constitution contains numerous protections for an accused against the power of the state. The victim needs to turn to the state to seek redress. Usually the state is happy and motivated to assert the rights of victims as they are a large and sought after voting block. the victims/general population don’t need Constitutional protections as they have political power. Not just actual victims, but everyone normally wants to see crime punished (usually). Of course, with crazy blue areas, suddenly the criminal seems to have more political power than victims.
His momma and daddy were murderous POSs and he’s no better