In August, the San Francisco District Attorney’s office’s chief of staff sent a memo to the MacArthur Foundation that declared, “Our office will not be used as sharecroppers to a foundation’s vision of criminal justice reform.” As first reported by Joe Rivano Barros in Mission Local, the memo was written by Monifa Willis on behalf of District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. Directed to Monique Garduque, director of MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) program, it responds to the foundation’s decision to suspend payment of $625,000 in grant funds. The money was to have been the final installment of some $5.2 million in criminal-justice reform grants to San Francisco dating back to 2018 and would have been a small part of the $380 million MacArthur has spent nationally on criminal-justice reform during the past 10 years.
This episode is the latest reminder of the threat that can be posed to democracy by the philanthropic support of traditionally governmental functions. Willis’s memo, which runs seven lively and spirited pages, is the sort of feedback every foundation deserves when it seeks to flex its power over elected public officials. According to the memo, MacArthur focused excessively on one particular “deliverable” in the grant agreement, namely, the goal of reducing the jail population. “Success is solely being measured by how rapidly we release people from custody regardless of their risk to the public,” Willis writes. “The Foundation’s simple focus on jail population numbers, not holding people accountable, and/or offering no consequences for unsafe behavior is irresponsible.”