After working as a prosecutor for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office for six years, Hillary Blout is now the founder and executive director of For The People, a national nonprofit that reviews previous sentences and helps release formerly incarcerated individuals.
In addition, the former prosecutor is in charge of the nation’s first prosecutor-initiated resentencing clinic at the University of California, Davis Law School. The Bay Area native, who went to law school to be a public defender, told Essence, “It wasn’t what I had planned. I really wanted to fight for those same kind of kids I grew up with.”
She decided to switch her path after she met a Black prosecutor from the Deep South in Mississippi, who, she said, began speaking to her about the power that prosecutors have and the concept of “being able to create change from within.” The fact that Vice President Kamala Harris, who at that time “was the first Black woman to be an elected prosecutor,” also changed Blout’s mind.
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Harris’ pioneering efforts, she claimed, opened her eyes to the possibility that there would be a place for someone like her with her experiences at the prosecutor’s office. And that was how she started working at the prosecutor’s office following law school. But Blout said the defendants’ stories reminded her of the children she grew up with.
She recounted, “I really wanted to step back, and see what kinds of ways in which I could create change from a policy perspective. That led me on what I thought was going to be a short break doing some reform work in California.”
While doing the reform work, she said that she had this notion that the prison system was going to provide rehabilitation and when somebody was rehabilitated, they would be able to get released. She also said she “had no idea about all of the collateral consequences that people were exposed to when they did get out of prison or they completed their sentence.”
The revelation prompted her to reconsider the system she thought she knew so well.
In 2018, Blout led the effort to draft and secure the passage of AB 2942, the first Prosecutor-Initiated Resentencing law in the country, and is currently leading its implementation.
Five states have passed laws allowing prosecutors to review previous sentences and recommend reduced sentences to the court as a result of her work. She continues to campaign for further laws in other states to broaden her work.
As part of efforts to raise awareness “about the unique challenges incarcerated women face, and support prosecutors in identifying women who can be safely released from prison,” For the People also developed a new campaign called Together Home. This work has resulted in nearly 1,000 persons being resentenced thus far.
“We’ve got a lot of work to do, but every prosecutor in this country will see it as their job to ensure that there’s nobody serving a sentence when they can otherwise be home with their families, paying taxes, contributing positively to their communities, because that is the definition of public safety. And that is the job of the prosecutor,” Blout highlighted.
