The first time I saw Matt Mahan’s name was on a lawn sign during his run for the mayor of San Jose. It had his name above the words “Join the Revolution!” in loud font. When I came closer, I saw the invitation clarified, “…in common sense” in smaller, italicized font, like it was winking.
In 2021, in a period shaped in the wake of George Floyd protests around racial justice, a community departure in confidence from police being the solution to every social challenge, and declining incarceration rates - Mahan’s campaign message of a “revolution” was just that, a return to the San Jose of the past, before all these changes. In a subtle, conservative Democrat way, it served as a localized dog whistle version of Make America Great Again.
Three years into office as the Mayor of San Jose, Mahan has continued this cosplay of dressing in the language and branding of the outsider, of the anti-establishment change-maker, while simultaneously leading the city back to regressive, conservative policies of the “tough on crime” eras of the 80’s and 90’s. Those policies from prior decades were defined by the War on Drugs, the myth of the “super-predator” label on Black and Brown youth, and an expansion of mandatory minimum sentences. Applied locally and nationally, these supposed crime reduction strategies eventually become widely debunked as profoundly racist and dramatically exacerbating the very same societal issues it claimed to address. But the admittance of the devastation of those policies only came after they created the largest, fastest growing, increase in jails and prisons in American history, now known as “mass incarceration.”
In 2025, in a city that is deemed by many as the innovative center of the world, by bringing the past to the future, Matt Mahan is defining a new prototype of an American city leader - the Mass Incarceration Mayor.
The levers of local incarceration are largely held at the county level - through courts, prosecutors, sheriffs, and jails; and at the state level through the determining of laws and control of the prisons. But as a city mayor, Mahan has found a way to expand the carceral system through his city policies around policing, arrests, and taking aim at county and state reforms that reduced incarceration.
Since Mahan has taken office, in rapid fire, he has advocated for policy approaches that aren’t new innovations, but rather cribbed carbon copied moves from the tough on crime era mapped onto 2025 through veiled language like “beautification,” “accountability,” and of course, “common sense.” He became the face of Proposition 36, a state ballot initiative which allowed for prison commitments for those suffering from substance abuse, and an increase of felony level mandatory minimum sentences for what was previously labeled low-level misdemeanor charges. A statewide policy organization Californians for Safety and Justice that conducted county level analysis on the impact of Proposition 36, projects that in Santa Clara County it will result in over 2,000 more admissions to the jail in the next three years, and over 500 people sent to prison.
Mahan was so vocal in opposing bail reform measures made to reduce the pretrial detention of poor people, some codified by the California Supreme Court, that he forced the County to change arresting and jail booking procedures to increase the amount of people jailed. The language he chose to compare bail reform to was “catch and release” - analogizing incarceration of disproportionately Black and Brown people to fishing.
Just last month, he and the police chief called for a repeal of legal protections for youth from being adjudicated in the adult court system, asserting that the current laws do not allow for enough incarceration of some young people. When ICE began raids in San Jose shortly after Trump took office, Mahan’s message to the public wasn’t to condemn the intentional fear-invoking actions of an immigrant city, but rather to say he just hoped they arrest residents in San Jose in a way consistent with his vision. He didn’t rebuke the terrorizing raids; rather he said that he hoped ICE focused on detaining “criminals,” not “neighbors who are contributing and law-abiding members of our community.”
It’s not that increasing incarceration is the end game of Mahan’s platform, it’s just that arresting and jailing people who he does not want seen is his most viable means to making them become unseen.
And while his policy directions point backwards, Mahan presents his politics as a current, forward looking, big city politician. For example, he is prolific and adept at using social media to propagandize himself and his agenda. While the public was criticizing his encampment sweeps that went into effect just as torrential storms were about to hit, he posted a video of himself taking action. The clip starts with a shot of him in a rain jacket and jeans surveying a creek bed with concern, looking for potential houseless people who had set up camp there. Mahan spots someone down by the water’s edge and scurries down the steeply declining creek bank to presumably escort the person to safety while a staff member recording the video warns him, “Be careful mayor.” When he was advocating for an increase in police funding as officer retention was dropping, he posted a similar action video. This one showed him attempting to complete the police training course agility test. It shows him running to climbing walls, carrying body dummies, while the Rocky theme song plays in the background. As he was campaigning for Proposition 36, he and the San Jose Police Department took to X to post social media perp walks to make their case. They would post photos of people, usually young people of color, handcuffed in front of some storefront or downtown street, with a description of their alleged criminal actions.
His latest attack on the poor, delivered though a budget plan, is unabashed, conveyed without the pretense of sanctimony that his prior attempts had. Before, when he wanted to move houseless people out of San Jose to make them disappear, he said it was to re-unify them with families. When he wanted to make it illegal for people in RVs to be parked in proximity to schools (asserting an inherent danger and criminality from those who could not afford to be anywhere else) he said it was to protect youth. And when he mandated sweeps of encampments with threats of arrests, displacing houseless residents in freezing winter months, he said it was to get them into housing alternatives that never came.
This go-around, emboldened from learning that his policies of criminalizing the poor not only goes largely unopposed from his elected counterparts, but actually grows his political capital (there is now rumblings of a potential run for higher office) - he plainly says - if a homeless person does not agree to go to the shelter, arrest them. His newsletter explains that it’s about “Holding Homeless Neighbors Accountable.” In his logic, it is not the forces and factors that cause homelessness that need to be confronted, it is those who are suffering from it. In his video message announcing this plan, he was visibly frustrated, angry even while describing what should be done to what he describes as “service resistant” houseless people in his plan called Responsibility to Shelter. After a few of years in office, he has zeroed in on the key antagonist of his administration, the reason that fueled his revolutionary charge to begin with, and it comes in the form of any poor person who is alive and visible in San Jose.
Last week a houseless man named Oscar was severely beaten by San Jose police. The assault was caught on camera phone by locals in the neighborhood of the man being surrounded and punched by police. One of the residents, Jennette Holzworth, who recorded and posted about the incident told a local media outlet, the San Jose Spotlight, “This kind of stuff is expected when the mayor says get off the streets or go to jail.” Mahan though was undeterred by the accounts of the houseless man being beaten, the media coverage, or the outrage from the local residents. He too made a connection between the incident and his policies. But his rationale was reversed. He used the episode of police violence as yet another example as to why his Responsibility to Shelter policy is needed. He responded, “If this person received the care he clearly needs, a neighbor would have never had to call 911…”
Matt Mahan’s San Jose is a punishing place for many. And that is perhaps the point.
(Graphic by Adrian Avila)
