Prosecutors in Washington and Beyond Are Raising Alarms About Hiring and Retention Problems

Across the country, prosecutors’ offices are struggling. With many prosecutors saying they are underpaid and overworked, offices from Houston to Los Angeles to Yakima are experiencing the consequences of a mounting problem. People just don’t seem to want the job anymore. 

“What we’re seeing out of law schools, especially in younger attorneys, is they’re really not applying to our prosecutors’ offices,” said King County Prosecuting Attorney Leesa Manion, “and it’s a statewide problem.” 

In fact, it’s a nationwide problem. In January 2024, writing for Slate, Adam Gershowitz, the James D. and Pamela J. Penny Research Professor at William & Mary Law School, said “Prosecutors are quitting in droves and there are few applicants to replace them.” Gershowitz continued: 

“Fewer prosecutors do not translate into fewer defendants being charged. Instead, prosecutorial vacancies lead to existing prosecutors having impossibly high caseloads and making serious errors in those cases. Counterintuitively, huge vacancies in prosecutors’ offices are actually bad news for criminal defendants.” 

In a research paper further documenting his findings, Gershowitz reported that prosecutor office vacancy rates range from troubling to crisis-level: 15 percent In Houston and Los Angeles, 20 percent in Detroit, 25 percent in Alameda, and as high as 33 percent in Miami. “The situation is equally dire in many large and small counties across the nation,” he wrote. 

In Washington state, Gershowitz documented only statistics for Yakima. As of November 2023, the office had six open positions among its total allocation of 37 prosecutors, a 16-percent vacancy rate. Additionally, the county cut the office’s budget by $175,000, “which will force the district attorney to reduce the number of prosecutor positions from 37 to 35.” Even when the office bumped its starting salary for an entry-level prosecutor significantly, from about $63,000 to about $80,000 (about a 27 percent pay increase), it still had little impact on the position vacancy rate. (Though not documented in the report, in 2024, the county increased starting pay for an Attorney I position to $100,000.) 

“It’s literally: we’re not getting applicants,” said Joseph Brusic, the Yakima County prosecuting attorney and president of the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys Board of Directors. “If we don’t get applicants in the door, then we’re not hiring—we don’t have a body.” 

So what’s going on? The exact reasons are potentially many, varied, interconnected, and, at this point, somewhat mysterious—but there are a handful of common suspected root causes that are stopping many lawyers from accepting jobs as prosecutor. Perhaps most pressing is that fewer law students are seeing the value of being a criminal prosecutor, Gershowitz and other prosecutors say, and in some cases are being actively dissuaded by shifting societal and cultural trends and, most notably, even their law school peers. Brusic can attest firsthand. His daughter—now a prosecutor for the city of Yakima herself—was “bullied” over her chosen career path by her fellow law students. 

“Talking to people who have just taken the bar, I’ve asked them how it is looked upon if they say they want to become prosecutors,” Brusic said. “They said they’re almost ridiculed because students don’t see those positions as having value.” 

The issue has also been documented nationally. According to Gershowitz, “The murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 created an astonishing [negative] shift in public opinion toward law enforcement.” 

This shift has been sudden and unexpected, particularly because a job in prosecution has long been viewed favorably as a solid place to kick off a legal career. Since 2008, however, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office “has been under the threat of perpetual budget reductions,” Manion said. We have been told that our office’s 2026-27 budget may be reduced by as much as $15 million, which equates to the loss of 90 Deputy Prosecuting Attorneys, in an office that is already stretched thin.”

“I have an office where I have prosecutors with 50 homicide cases on their desk,” Manion said. 

And qualitative national data shows that most prosecutors are burning out and planning their exit strategies. According to a national survey of 4,500 prosecutors conducted by the National District Attorneys Association (NDAA), the 2024 “National Prosecutor Retention Survey,” more than half of prosecutors enjoy their work; however, about 70 percent are thinking about leaving. 

“It is no secret that effective recruitment and retention are dilemmas prosecutors’ offices are facing nationwide,” according to the NDAA survey introduction. “Prosecutors’ offices must be staffed with qualified, capable, and passionate advocates for justice to fulfill the promises of our criminal justice system and to provide for the safety of our citizens.”