Gascon vs. Hochman for DA

Top line:

Who is Nathan Hochman? Hochman is a former federal prosecutor who has worked primarily as a white-collar criminal defense attorney for the past 24 years. Unlike Gascón, Hochman is not interested in creating systemic changes in the way prosecutors work. He has promised to reverse all prosecutorial policies in favor of an approach he calls “the hard middle.”

What else will we hear? Gascón and Hochman advocate for their respective approaches to running the country’s largest prosecutor’s office and have different views on criminal justice reform. The episode also features commentary from a criminologist who fact-checks both candidates and provides additional context.

Read on... for more details and to listen to part 4.

Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón faces a difficult re-election fight against challenger Nathan Hochman, who has a far more traditional view of the prosecutor’s role.

Many view the outcome of this race as a portent for the national criminal justice reform movement, which sent numerous progressive prosecutors into office in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the BLM protests in 2020.

Gascón was one of them. Since he was sworn in as head of the nation’s largest prosecutor’s office, his reforms have fundamentally changed the way Los Angeles prosecutors work.

The November 5 election will be a referendum on these reforms. LAists Imperfect paradise The current season of the podcast focuses on understanding his policies, their impact and the challenges he faced.

The outcome will tell us a lot about what we think justice should look like as a society in 2024. In the fourth and final episode of District Attorney Gascon., You’ll get a better sense of where Gascón and Hochman stand on the issues and what that could mean for the future.

Nathan Hochman says he will reverse Gascón’s policies

Hochman is a former federal prosecutor. For the past 24 years he has worked primarily as a white collar criminal defense attorney. Unlike Gascón, Hochman is not interested in bringing about systemic changes in the way prosecutors work. He has promised to reverse all prosecutorial policies in favor of an approach he calls “the hard middle.”

And he rejects what he calls Gascón’s “extreme pro-criminal decarceration policies,” adding: “I also reject the extreme mass incarceration policies.”

Gascón stands by his changes

The prosecutor defends his policies as important to reducing mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Gascón, for his part, warns that Hochman would take the office back to a time when it sought the harshest punishments for defendants. He says this approach is ineffective.

“The reality is that the best knowledge we have today, the most concrete knowledge, is that overcriminalization creates more crime,” Gascón told us.

Reality check on crime rates

UC Irvine criminologist Emily Owens told us it’s unfair to blame Gascón for crime rates, including the rise in retail thefts.

“The way I read the data is that it’s difficult to attribute the change in retail thefts to Gascón,” she said, “because Gascón is not in charge of law enforcement policy everywhere in the country and we see very similar crime trends everywhere.”

Listen to Episode 4 now

You can ask about it Imperfect Paradise: District Attorney Gascón wherever you get your podcasts. Or listen here: