Laying Down the Law
Kamala Harris blows into Bloom Café on Pico Boulevard, apologizing cheerily for being late. With her natty blue suit, groomed hair, heels and briefcase, she's an anomaly in this hip-casual L.A. eatery, the kind that serves organic coffee and seems to cultivate people with no steady jobs (including, on this day, yours truly). But Harris's energy does belong. Like so many of the vaguely employed who hang out here, she's trim and pretty. Over coffee and a cookie, she talks as energetically as the high-school girl two tables over who's exulting with a friend over having solved a math problem. Of course, Harris hopes to be in the business of problem-solving very soon: She's running for state attorney general. If successful, she'd be the first African-American AG in California history. Don't worry, the attorney general is not on the ballot this Tuesday--thank God. But the primary is a year from now, which in political time is practically today (political time works like fashion runway time, always two or three seasons ahead of itself.) That's fine with Harris, a 44-year-old former prosecutor and current district attorney of San Francisco. She has a pretty compassionate vision of the AG office (or empathetic, as Obama might say) that she's eager to share, programs she's pioneered as a D.A. that she thinks can't be implemented by the state a moment too soon. One of the things that needs fixing first is the dizzying recidivism rate in California's massive (and failed) prison system. As D.A., Harris helped create a program called "Back on Track," which targets for intervention a demographic most likely to spend their lives in and out of prison--18 to 24-year-old male ex-felons who are first-time, nonviolent offenders. Harris throws everything but the kitchen sink at these guys, including education, job skills training, even help with child-support payment schedules that are strangling already meager incomes. The idea, she says, is to focus on repeat offenders before they repeat.
She says the effort's been well worth it--the recidivism rate in her jurisdiction has dropped from 54 to an astonishing 10 percent. For Harris, the program is just common sense. "Eighteen to 24 are formative years, the college years, the years that studies have shown are where you develop morality and judgment," she says. "If you make these guy's lives work, now their chin is up, their shoulders are back. I know what these young people can do if you set a high bar."
A child of Berkeley-educated, politically active parents, Harris can critique the failings of systems--starting with prisons-- with her eyes closed. But she doesn't discount personal accountability either; for instance, she believes parents who let their elementary-school kids ditch school constantly should be arrested, or threatened with arrest. You can read all about Harris' somewhat eclectic philosophy in her forthcoming book, "Smart on Crime," which she says she wrote mainly to bust myths and introduce nuance into conversations about law enforcement that have polarized California for too long. "Low crime and prison reform are not a false choice," she declares. "And pro-education people don't think of themselves as pro-public safety. But they are."
Image courtesy KamalaHarris.org
