I generally neither oppose nor support more lenient sentencing as typically proposed in liberal discourse. I think the criminal justice reform movement exaggerates the effects of, e.g., structural racism, particularly as they relate to the finer details of the law and public policy. (IMO structural racism is far more consequential as it relates to economic opportunity, but that's the area least susceptible to legal remediation.)
So if, for example, a DA wants to have a policy letting all first time non-violent offenders walk, then so be it. I don't think it'll make a difference one way or another. For the same reason I don't think prosecuting such first time offenses was particularly consequential by itself in terms of creating a criminalized underclass of poor minorities, I don't believe that abstaining from such prosecutions would result in substantial changes in behavior--i.e. more theft.
OTOH, there are qualitative boundaries. If you quite literally remove the threat of jail or other serious repercussions regardless of number of offenses, then at the end of the day marginal effects will absolutely dominate. Unlike most crimes of violence, property offenses are principally crimes of opportunity--sociologically speaking, it's far easier to become a serial thief than a serial murderer. At some point the threat of material repercussions is too remote, and so a sizable subset of people will begin taking the opportunities to violate relatively weaker norms regarding inviolability of property.
For example, take parking tickets. Parking tickets and towing fees can be a huge, even life-changing, setback for the poor. But what do you think will happen if we tell people that, while we'll still ticket unauthorized parking, failure to pay those tickets would never result in any other consequence--no enforced payment, no wage garnishment, no suspended license? Illegal parking isn't exactly morally reprehensible. It'll skyrocket. But compare that to if you say that material consequences are suspended until the 4th offense? Are a flood of people going to go out and start to park illegally? Probably not. Why change your behavior when after 3 times you're back to the status quo ante? (To be clear, I don't deny that the latter will still see some marginal effects, but it's not the kind of thing I'm going to get worked up over as matter of politics. I'll be happy to let it play out in good faith, if that's what the majority wants, and then discuss policy once we can see the concrete results.)
If you're not going to argue with his specific points about Chavez, then you shouldn't, in my opinion, throw it out for the mere purposes of smear-by-association.
In other threads, I've seen people attack him for his parents, which also is really wrong, both in terms of blaming him for his parents' actions and in terms of letting people make wrong assumptions about what they were.
In order to find out who Boudin is, I read the Wikipedia page at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin
I can see how people can disagree with some of the things he's done and blame him for various things.
But it's also clear from reading it that he's been honestly trying to reform things, and many of the things he's done don't at all require you to be some sort of extremist, Marxist, whatever, to think they are reasonable. Some of the reforms have been echoed in other places recently, too.
You shouldn’t attack someone for their parents but how they react to their parents. Boudin has always claimed that his murderer parents are the ones who were somehow wronged. Whereas other children of much worse parents, like Adolf Eichmann, have fully repudiated the acts of their parents.
His parents were convicted of felony murder. That is not a violent crime per se.
I think if you just say "murderer" it is dishonest by omission, but I doubt "felony murder" is widely understood either without an explanation.
I think most people are like "oh, felony murder, yeah, obviously those durn liberals have reduced murder to a misdemeanor in most cases, must have been really heinous to be a felony".
And every time I see someone bring it up regarding Boudin, I assess them as a particularly nasty propagandist who for some reason doesn't care about their personal credibility.
I'm not saying that his father should or shouldn't be released from prison, but the sentence clearly was a lot longer than many actual murderers get, like for instance the guy who killed George Floyd.
I don't think I need to read extensively about the events and trial for it to be obvious that at the time, it was about terrorism, and so they were being punished for being part of a group of terrorists. One may agree or disagree with it for political reasons, but it's not at all the same sort of thing as the ordinary murders in SF that people are blaming on Boudin now.
It's not universally agreed that felony murder should be a thing at all, although people of all types generally salivate at using it against their political enemies as for example after the Jan. 6th events.
By 2009 Venezuela had already seen explosive amounts of crime and other ill effects of Chavismo--by neglect and absence of more normative policies, if not a direct consequence of the policies themselves. And Chavez had already revealed himself to have an amoral personality much like Donald Trump, one whose primary ambition was self aggrandizement. IMO the only way one could defend Chavez at that point (and almost nobody in the international arena did, including most European and American Socialists) was to be a true Marxist ideologue.
Why does Boudin maintain such exceptionally lenient policies wrt property crime, even more than those proposed in other cities, and even when suspects are multiple repeat, even professional offenders? Given that Boudin seems highly intelligent and sincere, I must conclude it's because he rejects on principal the salient effects of private property rights. Which isn't to say he would reject them outright in all cases, but that he sees private property rights principally as a tool of oppression, and so has no compunction jettisoning them if he feels that the harm done to minority communities in defending those rights outweighs the risk of capitalists walking away with their ball. Which also is pretty much the only way one could have honestly--albeit naively--defended Chavez.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to that view, at least intellectually. But I'm nowhere arrogant enough to believe anything good would come of imposing such radicals views. And as someone with a legal education, I think it's particularly unethical of him to use his particular office to impose such views. There are few schools of thought, Marxism and offshoots being the most well known, that believe such reforms can be effective without deep and abiding support within the broader society. Boudin is a modern day American revolutionary, and not necessarily in a good way IMNSHO. Our politics is already far too extremist, and only getting worse.
I recognize that he comes from a family that espouses similar beliefs. (Not just his parents, but his guardians and their circle of friends as well.) But I see no reason to speak to that--his own expressed views, personal and as an office holder, far more directly reflect his thinking.
It's possible to have been lukewarm towards Chavez, not so much because you're keen on Marxism, but because you weren't entirely sure about the opposition being genuinely pro-democratic.
I don't think you have to be particularly left-wing, let alone Marxist, to look back at history and see that fighting democratic movements because they were labeled as Communist or Marxist may not have been the right approach.
You compare Chavez to Trump. What if instead of having an election, Trump's opposition had forcibly removed him when it was clear impeachment was going nowhere? Some people would have made a sincere case for the negative consequences of that even if they opposed Trump.
>he rejects on principal the salient effects of private property rights
I think this accusation needs more support, surely Boudin constantly does things that imply private property rights.
It's not boudins heritage that people attack him over. He has publicly praised his parents for their attacks and portrayed himself as the ultimate victim of their prosecution.
>Well that’s just wrong, Kathy Boudin was driving the truck when they killed the police officer
She was waiting in a getaway vehicle at a different location from where the guards were killed by the people actually doing the robbery.
It seems like you are playing with ambiguous statements. If you disagree with any of my statements about the facts, could you please be specific and explain where your information comes from.