In counties where a tough prosecutor narrowly beat a liberal candidate, young Black men stopped dying at an 18% lower rate. That is not a talking point. It is a body count comparison.

The answer is measured in deaths.

The progressive prosecution movement spent a decade telling Black communities that aggressive prosecution was the source of their suffering. Fewer charges. Less prison time. A lighter touch from a system its architects believed caused more harm than it prevented.

A new study by Panka Bencsik and Tyler Giles measured what that theory cost. Counties that elected tough Republican prosecutors saw all-cause mortality among young men fall 6.6% — roughly 9.8 fewer deaths per 100,000. The cause was not mass incarceration. It was consistent prosecution. And the communities that gained the most were the ones the progressives claimed to protect.

The Experiment That Ran Without Consent 

From roughly 2018 through 2022, radical prosecutors took office in major American cities. Chesa Boudin in San Francisco stopped pursuing entire classes of crimes. In Chicago, Kim Foxx cut felony charges across multiple crime types. In Philadelphia, Larry Krasner ran — and won — on the idea that prosecution itself caused community harm.

The theory was coherent, if untested. Conservatives warned of consequences that history and human nature could easily teach. Nevertheless, the experiment was applied to real people.

The reckoning came. Boudin was recalled in San Francisco — not by a right-wing campaign, but by residents of the very neighborhoods he was supposed to protect. Gascón was voted out in Los Angeles. Radical prosecutors faced ballot challenges across the country. The people who ran those recall campaigns were not political operatives. They were the people forced to survive an abject disaster.

That gap — between those who built the policy and those who lived under it — is the moral center of this debate.

What The Data Proves

The study’s design matters, because it rules out the easy objections. It looked at counties where prosecutor races were decided by a handful of votes — essentially a coin flip between two governing philosophies. That strips away the geographic and demographic noise that plagues crime research.

The sample covers 368 districts and 520 counties — roughly 23% of the U.S. population — from 2010 to 2019. That end date is important. This data predates COVID and the 2020 crime surge. It captures what prosecution philosophy does under normal conditions.

The key numbers: deaths from all causes among men ages 20 to 29 fell 6.6% under tough prosecutors. Gun deaths drove the entire drop — 6.7 fewer per 100,000, breaking into 4.2 fewer homicides and 2.5 fewer suicides and accidents.

Among young Black men, the results were stark. Deaths from external causes fell 18%. Gun homicides dropped 22.5 per 100,000. Liberals used Black mortality as the justification for its experiment. The data says the experiment made it worse.

How Prosecutors Actually Save Lives

The researchers checked the obvious answer first: mass incarceration. If tough prosecutors simply locked up more people, the drop in deaths could reflect dangerous people removed from the streets. But prison explains only one-third of the effect among Black men and none of it among White men. Locking people up is part of the story — not most of it.

The real answer is conviction rates. Misdemeanor convictions rose by roughly 1,615 per 100,000. Felony convictions rose by 650. The gains ran across drug, violent, and property crimes. Jail admissions did not change — meaning police behavior did not shift. Prosecution changed.

The path runs through federal law on the books. Felony convictions — and some violent misdemeanor convictions — bar a person from owning a gun. The whole household must comply. When a conviction lands, the gun has to leave the house. The study finds one gun death prevented for every 90 new legal bars on gun ownership imposed. In a city of 500,000, that means dozens of lives saved each year — with no new laws, no new spending, no act of Congress.

Conservatives have long argued that current gun laws, enforced consistently, can cut gun deaths without new legislation. This study is hard causal proof that they are right.

The researchers note that more convictions carry real costs — job losses, family strain, effects on children. That is a fair point worth more study. But it raises a question the Democrats never answered honestly: who counts the cost of 22.5 extra gun homicides per 100,000 young Black men?

The Argument That Collapsed

The progressive's core argument was never really about data. It was moral. Its claim: locking people up harms regardless of outcomes, and a flawed system cannot be fixed by using it more aggressively.

That claim made a testable prediction. Tough prosecution should hurt Black communities. Counties with tough prosecutors should show higher Black death rates. Instead they showed an 18% drop. The theory made its prediction. The data proved it wrong.

What liberals delivered, in practice, was a sense of purpose for its architects and a higher body count for the neighborhoods they claimed to serve. Those who paid the price were not law professors or foundation directors. They were young men where the distance from a policy idea to a funeral is short.

The data has spoken. Outcomes have to be the test of a policy. By that test — the only one that matters to people living inside these communities — Democrats failed.

What Comes Next

A pattern is emerging. Permissive governance keeps running the same experiment and getting the same result. Firm rules, applied consistently, produce better outcomes than their absence. The law has assumed this for generations. A movement spent years and enormous credibility trying to prove it wrong.

The data proved them wrong.

The next time a major city holds a DA election, the findings will be on the table. The candidate who promises fewer charges and a lighter touch is making a specific claim about outcomes. That claim has been tested. The results are in.

The communities that paid the price while cities stood down did not need another commission. They needed a DA who filed the charges, got the convictions, and enforced the laws that took guns out of dangerous hands.

Choose accordingly.