For months, Democratic presidential candidates have courted liberal activists with wide-ranging criminal justice plans, but Harris’ plan carries special significance. She has long cast herself as a “progressive prosecutor,” but some criminal justice experts and activists have balked at that characterization, saying she operated with the same “tough on crime” instincts that helped create the criminal justice problems she now seeks to solve.
The plan, perhaps the most ambitious effort of Harris’ campaign so far, focuses on reducing the prison population, creating national standards in policing, ensuring humane treatment for incarcerated people and prioritizing historically vulnerable communities. It also embraces ideas that have gone from the policy fringe to largely consensus positions popular among Democrats, including ending mandatory minimum sentences, eliminating private prisons, legalizing marijuana and incentivizing states to untether themselves from a cash bail system that disproportionately burdens the poor.
Previewing the plan in an interview with The New York Times, Harris painted it as a full-circle moment in her decadeslong career in law enforcement. Her pitch to voters, she said, was that her years spent trying to change the criminal justice system from the inside had uniquely prepared her to lead its overhaul from the executive branch.
“I know the system from the inside out,” Harris said. “So trust me when I say we have a problem with mass incarceration in America. Trust me when I say we have a problem with accountability. Trust me when I say we have to take the profit out of criminal justice.”
“This is not just about rhetoric, or hyperbole, or grand gesture or, you know, some beautiful speech,” she added, dismissing the idea that the policy arrived late in her campaign. “This literally is what I plan to do, and that required thoughtfulness.”
There are several progressive policies in Harris’ new plan that she opposed during her career as a prosecutor. She pushed for higher cash bails for certain crimes in 2004 as San Francisco’s district attorney, declined to support marijuana legalization in 2010 and, as California’s attorney general, refused to back independent investigations for police shootings as recently as 2014.
When asked about her apparent evolution, Harris said the political environment had shifted — not her core ideology.
“I was swimming against the current, and thankfully the currents have changed,” she said. “The winds are in our sails. And I’m riding that just like everybody else is — because it’s long overdue.”
Harris said the work of social justice activists, particularly Black Lives Matter protesters, had opened eyes across the country to realities of racial injustices. She was always aware of these injustices, Harris said, but she was working in a system that did not have the political will to correct them.
And she pointedly said her critics should remember the tough-on-crime political environment that dominated in the 1990s and early 2000s, during much of her career as a prosecutor.
“If I want to get competitive about it,” she said, “I’d say to them, well, what were they saying about the system back in the ’90s? What were they doing to change the system in the ’90s?”
“But hey, if you’ve got, in the year of our Lord 2019, all the major candidates running for president of United States pushing for reforming the system? That’s a good thing,” she added.
Now, Harris is seeking to reclaim the mystique that catapulted her into the highest echelons of the Democratic presidential race just two years after her election to the Senate. After her performance in the first debate in June led to a surge in polling and fundraising, her poll numbers have slipped to the mid-single digits, putting her a step below the race’s top-tier candidates: former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
In response, Harris has sharpened her policy message. For her criminal justice platform, she sought input from an array of activists, including some of the black progressives who have criticized her record in California.
Harris is also leaning into an explicit pitch about her identity as a barrier-breaking woman of color. Apart from any professional experience, Harris said she was best suited to disrupt a criminal justice system that has disproportionately affected minority communities because she has more personal experiences with those communities.
“Communities, and particularly the black community has a righteous distrust of law enforcement based on histories of empirical evidence — they have a reason to distrust,” she said. “But I understand that, and it was — this is part of why I became a prosecutor, because I understood that there are good reasons to not trust the system, and it needs to be changed.”
Harris’ new plan is an attempt to break away from constant litigation of her record and win over Democrats with an affirmative criminal justice vision.
The plan calls for a national criminal justice commission that would study how to reduce mass incarceration and recidivism while still holding offenders, including violent ones, accountable. It would end the federal sentencing disparity between powder and crack cocaine — a disparity created by legislation sponsored by Biden, who has since apologized. And it would spend more than $75 billion on support services outside prisons, including “Back on Track” training and assistance programs, which Harris pioneered in California.
DeRay Mckesson, an activist and podcast host who helped found Campaign Zero, an initiative to end police violence, and who has discussed criminal justice platforms with several candidates, said criminal justice activists had been waiting for Harris to release a plan.
“The bar is different for her because she’s legitimately an expert” on criminal justice, said Mckesson, who has seen a preview of Harris’ plan. “We’ve been looking for a plan that will fundamentally transform the system, because we know it’s a system she knows.”
Several organizations, including Campaign Zero and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, shared memos with Harris’ campaign about what they wanted to see in a criminal justice policy, which included restoring voting rights for the formerly incarcerated, incentivizing police departments to adopt a national standard for the use of force, and reinstating former President Barack Obama’s executive order that prohibited sales of certain military equipment to local police departments. Harris adopted all of those ideas in her proposal.
The plan won praise from some policy experts Monday. Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, another group that provided input, said the proposal “meaningfully responds to many of the problems deemed front and center from a racial justice standpoint.”
Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, which mobilizes black voters, said Harris’ plan “hits all the buttons, and she gets that real reform has to incentivize transformation at the state and local level.”
Others saw room for improvement. Akunna Cook, a policy analyst and former executive director of the Black Economic Alliance, said that while the proposal was “comprehensive” overall, she would have liked Harris to have placed additional emphasis on how to help formerly incarcerated people reenter society.
“It will take more than this to quell the criticisms” of Harris’ record, Cook said. “She will need to roll this out in a much higher-profile way. Her strength is that she understands the criminal system having been on the inside.”
Other Democratic candidates have also released robust positions on criminal justice, including two recent offers by Warren and Sanders. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, the race’s other major black candidate, championed the bipartisan First Step Act, which President Donald Trump signed into law last year, and Julián Castro, the former housing secretary, has won plaudits for his early focus on policing. Biden and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, have also offered proposals.
Biden helped write, and Sanders voted for, the 1994 crime bill that has been widely criticized by civil rights experts for contributing to the rising prison population. Buttigieg has had strained relations with black residents in South Bend, and Booker has faced scrutiny for “stop and frisk” tactics used by the police when he was mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Still, Harris has faced some of the fiercest attacks over her criminal justice record.
“The people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor — you owe them an apology,” Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii told Harris at a debate in July.
Harris has become familiar with this line of criticism, including the internet memes that have labeled her a “cop” and, sometimes, a turncoat to minority communities.
She has defended her record on the debate stage, but she admitted in the interview that the attacks had stung, particularly when levied by black activists.
“It feels awful,” she said.
“I understand it intellectually. Emotionally, it’s hurtful,” Harris added. “I know what motivated me to become a prosecutor, I know what motivated me to do the kind of work we did, and I know that it was groundbreaking work.”
This article originally appeared in
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