George Soros spent $40 million putting soft-on-crime prosecutors in charge of some of America's biggest cities.
Now the think tank those prosecutors built is training a new wave of prosecutors to finish the job.
Soros and Zuckerberg are bankrolling a training program that is quietly rewriting what prosecutors are required to believe about the criminals they prosecute.
Soros-Funded Prosecutors Built the Soft on Crime Training Program Now Spreading Nationwide
The Institute for Innovation in Prosecution operates inside John Jay College of Criminal Justice – part of the taxpayer-funded City University of New York.
John Jay College and the Manhattan DA's office stood it up in 2015 using $3 million the DA's office had collected from bank settlements.
Rachel Marshall runs it today. She built her career as a top aide to Chesa Boudin, the San Francisco DA voters recalled in 2022 after he gutted cash bail and walked away from prosecuting low-level crimes while the city collapsed around him.
Boudin, the son of Weather Underground terrorists, was raised by fellow radicals Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.
The IIP's advisory board is a George Soros all-star roster: Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, former Cook County DA Kim Foxx, and George Gascón himself – the man Los Angeles voters twice tried to recall before he finally lost his 2024 reelection bid to a tough-on-crime challenger.
The program's training script directs prosecutors to assume that "all witnesses/victims/accused are dealing with trauma" and to consider whether there is "an alternative to charging the case as a crime."
That is not a guideline for unusual circumstances – it applies to every suspect regardless of what they did.
The script instructs prosecutors to ask whether a prison sentence is "a proportional response" or whether the accused qualifies for a "diversion program" instead.
A companion workbook directs trainees to weigh how race, gender, sexuality, and immigration status shape what it calls "the bias of the prosecutor."
This is not a fringe operation pushing pamphlets from a basement.
It provides trainings, webinars, and research papers to prosecutor offices nationwide and has done so for a decade.
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Vera Institute and Microsoft Are Bankrolling Criminal Justice Reform
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative pumped $710,000 into the program since 2020 – the same foundation that pledged $450 million to bankroll soft-on-crime policies and open-borders advocacy before quietly shutting down its advocacy arm after Trump returned to office.
Another $31,500 came from Arnold Ventures. Its founder, John Arnold, is a former Enron executive who has quietly pumped nearly $50 million into soft-on-crime causes – outpacing even Soros.
The MacArthur Foundation – ranked 12th among America's largest private charities – wrote a $30,000 check to convene prosecutors and "directly impacted people" around what the Foundation described as the "urgent problem" of quality-of-life crimes being prosecuted at all.
Microsoft's Justice Reform Initiative threw unspecified support behind the "Beyond Big Cities" program – a deliberate push to move these ideas out of Democrat-run coastal cities and into prosecutor offices across the country.
The program also partners with the Vera Institute of Justice, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit that has publicly called to defund police and abolish immigration enforcement – and which the Biden DOJ rewarded with millions in taxpayer grants before the Trump administration terminated them, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee majority staff report released by Chairman Chuck Grassley.
Soft on Crime Prosecution Puts Violent Criminals Back on the Street
In Colorado, a man named Debisa Ephraim knocked two men unconscious – striking their heads as they fell, then punching their faces while they lay motionless on the ground.
He walked free.
A 2024 state law – the kind these prosecutors champion nationwide – required charges to be dropped after evaluators determined he could not gain competency to stand trial.
Two weeks later, he was arrested for carrying a firearm on a university campus.
Weld County sheriff Steve Reams said Ephraim appeared fully competent while detained but knew exactly how to game the mental health evaluation system.
Months later, during his next detention, evaluators quietly determined his competency was "restorable."
The Heritage Foundation has called the Soros-funded rogue prosecutor movement "the most radical, deadly, failed criminal justice social experiment in American history."
Voters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Baltimore reached the same conclusion and threw these prosecutors out.
But the training operation that powered them never stopped running. It runs on Silicon Valley money from inside a taxpayer-funded New York college, and it has spent a decade teaching prosecutors that your attacker deserves more consideration than you do.
Sources:
- Jessica Costescu, "Trauma-Informed Prosecution: Left-Wing Billionaires Bankroll Training To Teach Prosecutors Criminals Are 'Dealing With Trauma,'" Washington Free Beacon, July 2, 2026.
- Senate Judiciary Committee Majority Staff, "New Grassley Report Shows Biden DOJ Sent Taxpayer-Funded Grants to Soros-Backed, Soft-on-Crime NGOs," U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, June 5, 2025.
- Paul J. Larkin Jr., "The Progressive Prosecutor 'Data and Science' Hoax," Heritage Foundation, December 3, 2024.
- Tom Hogan, "George Soros Gets Criminal Justice All Wrong," Manhattan Institute, March 3, 2023.
- Brooke Singman, "Mark Zuckerberg Cash Discreetly Leaked Into Far-Left Prosecutor Races," Fox News, August 2, 2021.
