It was 2011, and Tiffany Cabán, then a law student in New York City, braced herself for an awkward class assignment: She’d have to complete an internship at the district attorney’s office in Queens, where she grew up. The office had a reputation for being tough on crime. Cabán, who dreamed of becoming a public defender, cared more about closing jails than filling them. “See you on the other side of the aisle,” she recalls the prosecutors telling her when she said goodbye at the end of the stint.
After about seven years working as a public defender, Cabán, now 31, wants to get back into that office—only this time she hopes to lead it. In January, she threw her hat into a crowded race to become the borough’s next district attorney. (Democrat Richard Brown, who has held the position uncontested since 1991, is stepping down for health reasons.) Cabán, a queer Latina, has a radical vision for the position: She says she’d incarcerate as few offenders as possible and bulk up social services offered to people who are accused of crimes. She counts among her champions the same campaign manager, Virginia Ramos Rios, who helped newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez topple former Rep. Joe Crowley in their race for Congress last year. While the stakes of the races are different, Ramos Rios sees certain parallels between the candidates: They are both “taking on positions that other folks are like, ‘There’s no way.'”
District attorneys’ offices haven’t traditionally been known as hotbeds of criminal justice reform—especially in Queens. Under Brown’s watch, the office regularly took people to court for minor offenses, like marijuana possession and fare evasion, that DAs in other boroughs have started to ignore, and its prosecutors often asked for relatively high bail. “The Queens district attorney’s office continues to live in the past,” says Alyssa Aguilera, co-executive director of Vocal-NY, a grassroots group pushing for criminal justice reform. With the primary in June, “we’re at the cusp of a huge opportunity” to end the “deadlock on progressive prosecutorial practices,” says Nicole Triplett of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which does not endorse candidates.
Prosecutors decide which charges to pursue and which to drop, and how to shape plea bargain agreements that determine the outcome of roughly 95 percent of all cases.
In recent years, DA races have started to garner more attention nationally amid a growing conversation about the immense power that prosecutors wield in the criminal justice system. Prosecutors decide which charges to pursue and which to drop, whether to request bail, and how to shape plea bargain agreements that determine the outcome of roughly 95 percent of all cases. DAs like Larry Krasner in Philadelphia and Rachael Rollins in Boston successfully campaigned in 2017 and 2018 on platforms that promised to reduce mass incarceration and tackle racial disparities in the system.
In Queens, at least seven candidates have stepped into the race. Most of them are positioning themselves as progressive and forward-looking: By and large, they’re against cash bail and a surge of immigrant arrests, and in favor of closing the jail complex at Rikers Island and prosecuting fewer broken-windows offenses.
Cabán—the only public defender of the group, and one with prison abolitionist leanings—is pushing the conversation even further left. As a district attorney, she notes, she wouldn’t be able to close prisons, but she could try to reduce the harm she believes they inflict on communities. “Our prosecutorial system is entirely broken,” she told me, “because prosecuting right now means convictions and sentences rather than asking two simple questions: How do we make sure this harm doesn’t happen again, and how do we make our communities safer?”