From San Francisco DA to presidential hopeful: Kamala Harris’s evolving stance on criminal justice, in her own words.
Fifteen years before her presidential run, Kamala Harris, then San Francisco’s district attorney, spoke to me about her vision for being “smart on crime.”
In this special WhoWhatWhy podcast of a 2009 interview, Harris challenges the moment’s “tough on crime” rhetoric, advocating for innovative approaches to reduce recidivism and address root causes of criminal behavior.
She critiques the “revolving door” in California’s prison system and emphasizes the importance of tackling truancy as a predictor of future criminal activity.
Harris argues for post-incarceration support and job training, showcasing her “Back on Track” reentry initiative as a model for reducing repeat offenses.
As she vies for the presidency today, this 2009 interview provides illuminating insight into the origins of her policies and the evolution of her approach to one of America’s most pressing issues.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to this special edition of the WhoWhatWhy podcast, I’m Jeff Schechtman. In the ever-evolving landscape of American politics, it’s often illuminating to look back and see how our leaders’ perspectives have shifted or remained consistent over time. Today we have a unique opportunity to do just that. Fifteen years ago, in 2009, I had my first chance to interview Kamala Harris. At the time, she was the district attorney of San Francisco and was running to be California’s next attorney general.
The issues at the forefront of our conversation then were strikingly similar to those we grapple with today: crime, punishment, and the state of our criminal justice system. Back then is now. There was intense debate about whether prosecutors were doing enough to combat crime and provide effective deterrence.
The fear of crime and its perception in the public eye were central to these discussions, much as they are in our current national dialogue. Fast forward to the present, and Harris is now running for president of the United States. Her positions on these critical issues have evolved in some ways and remain steadfast in others. While the specter of crime is once again looming large in the public consciousness, I thought it would be both interesting and instructive to revisit that conversation from 15 years ago.
As we listen to this interview from 2009, I invite you to consider how Harris’s views have changed or endured over time. How do her past positions inform her current stance on criminal justice reform? What insights can we gain about her approach to governance and policymaking? Let’s journey back to 2009 and listen to that conversation I had with Kamala Harris, then district attorney of San Francisco, and aspiring attorney general of California.
Kamala Harris, welcome to the program.
Kamala Harris: Good morning, Jeff. It’s great to be here. Thank you.
Jeff Schechtman: Great to have you here. During the ’90s we saw a drop in the crime rate in this country. We’re seeing that rate come back up. Is it just the economy or is there something else going on?
Kamala Harris: Well, I think that there are a number of factors. The reasons are many but I think part of the problem is that the design that we have created to deal with, in particular, nonviolent crime has just not been working. And what we have instead is a revolving door in California’s prison system. As evidenced by the fact that on an annual basis in California we release 120,000 prisoners a year because they’ve served their time. But within three years of their release, 70 percent recidivate, 70 percent re-offend. It’s the highest re-offense rate in the country and it’s just not working.
Jeff Schechtman: Are the mistakes we’re making before we send these people to prison, or is the problem inside our prison system?
Kamala Harris: Well, there are a number of areas that I think we should focus more on if we really want safer communities. One is that the public health model has taught us that when we are faced with an epidemic — a health epidemic, or in this case a crime epidemic — it’s just smarter to deal with the prevention piece first, right? Swine flu, let’s all get inoculated, let’s deal with it at the beginning.
But if it has taken hold, if we have sniffles, then let’s deal with some early intervention. But if we’re at the point of treating the epidemic in the emergency room, it’s too late and it’s too expensive. So to that point, there are a number of discrete areas and factors that I think if we focus more on, we can really reduce crime in our communities and reduce the prison population.
One, for example, is I’ve focused on the area of truancy. Some might consider that a non-issue or a very small issue, but I’ll tell you, I’ve learned that of the elementary school students who are in our public schools, about 40 percent of those who are habitually and chronically truant are missing 60 to 80 days of a 180-day school year. And we simply can’t afford to have this happen. Both because they end up, of course, becoming the high school dropout and then the crime victim and the crime perpetrator, but it’s also a workforce development issue.
It’s an issue in terms of just the strain that those children cause on our social services and therefore on our diminishing resources as a state. So I’ve created a truancy initiative in San Francisco that’s focused on actually prosecuting parents for truancy and then also providing them with services to improve the attendance rate. And over the course of the initiative, we’ve improved the attendance rate for those children by 20 percent in San Francisco. That’s one area.
Another area is focusing on the fact that, yes, when someone commits a crime, they must be held accountable, but after they have served their time, let’s recognize 70 percent of them will re-offend if we don’t redirect them when they come back into the community. And that means addressing the fact that they need job skills development. We need to address the fact that they need educational help. Most of them are functionally illiterate. We need to get them in GED programs, and we need to give them support.
So these are some of the areas of focus that we’ve proven actually work. We created an initiative in San Francisco, a reentry initiative called Back on Track which has lowered the recidivism rate for that population from 54 percent to less than 10 percent.
Jeff Schechtman: You talk about truancy — isn’t that also an early indicator in many cases that something has gone wrong in the home or in that particular community that should be a warning sign for other parts of the social services network to address?
Kamala Harris: Absolutely right. Absolutely right. What we’re finding with the elementary school truant is that they are growing up in a home where perhaps the parent actually was also a high school dropout, where there are substance abuse issues for the parent. In some situations, we find that the older children are staying home to take care of younger children. If we focus on the fact that these children are not in school, we can then find out what’s going on with the parents and address it.
The way that I’ve chosen to deal with it is as a prosecutor, knowing that I have this carrot and stick. So my point is that, okay, we’re going to try and induce good behaviors, but if not, there’s going to be a punishment piece to it. But the reality is that if we don’t focus on it as an issue, we cannot address the underlying factors that are at play when that child is not going to school.
Jeff Schechtman: Of course, one of the other issues there is that the amount of funding that is available for the various social service networks that would address this problem early on simply isn’t there. The money is going into the prison system and some of these other aspects of law enforcement.
Kamala Harris: Sure, absolutely. But this is where we’re upside down, Jeff, because if we look at the cost of truancy as an example, it costs us as a state in California, $1.1 billion, with a B. $1.1 billion is the direct cost to our state that is associated with children being truant. And the related cost to the entire social service system, to your point, is over $20 billion a year. So if we deal with that as an issue, we will find that we will save ourselves a lot of money, and a lot in terms of our concerns about crime and public safety in the not-so-long run.
And I think that what we have to do is recognize that we all believe, and I think agree, when someone commits a crime, they have to be held accountable. But if we can do what we can to prevent them from committing a crime in the first place, it will save money. I’m not advocating that people are not held accountable. I’m simply saying that when you look at the cycles, when you look at the factors that are at play, that will allow us to clearly predict who will end up in the criminal justice system, and the adult criminal justice system, we can focus in large part on truant children.
Jeff Schechtman: One of the other aspects of children you talk about is PTSD in children and what price society pays for that.
Kamala Harris: Absolutely. So we first learned about it or it became part of the public conscience after Vietnam, and we talked about post-traumatic stress disorder, recognizing that when someone has been exposed to a great deal of violence, they experience trauma, and it’s actually a physiological experience, it’s not psychological.
So imagine the six- or seven-year-old who goes to sleep every night hearing gunfire, or that same child who goes to sleep every night with violence in the home because of domestic violence.
Invariably, that child is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but we expect the kid to go to school the next day and learn. And of course, that’s not happening. And any teacher can tell you that’s the kid who’s acting out in class, mostly because they’re experiencing flashbacks, mostly because they actually cannot physiologically sit down and be calm and absorb information.
And if we deal with that — and we are doing that. We’ve actually created an initiative in San Francisco addressing the prevalence of that, in particular for children who are growing up in communities where there’s a great deal of violence — then we’re able to teach them the coping skills that they need to actually be able to be in the classroom and learn.
Jeff Schechtman: Why is it so difficult nationally — San Francisco may be a bit of an anomaly in this regard — to really create the political will and the broader understanding to address these issues in the kind of way we’re talking about?
Kamala Harris: I think part of the problem is that we have really accepted status quo, which is mostly reactive. And I think that if we were instead to adopt certain principles and ways of doing business in science and medicine, we would actually be more effective. And that means looking at the causal connections and taking them seriously. And also, again, understanding this is not to the exclusion of saying, “Well, if all of these efforts did not work and someone commits a crime, yes, they have to be prosecuted and held accountable.”
But if we step back a couple of steps, we can see what will actually invariably lead to someone committing a crime and we can deal with it before that crime occurs.
And so this is about crime. This is what I’m talking about, addressing the myths in the criminal justice system such as the myth that children are resilient. That’s a myth. Let’s deal with that.
Let’s deal with the myth that all crime is violent crime. It’s not. Most of it is nonviolent crime. Most of the people who commit a crime are committing nonviolent crime. They’re going to come back to the community. They’re going to re-offend unless we intervene when they’re coming back.
And so it’s about just recognizing that, actually, we can take control of this. We don’t have to just react and live in a state of fear. But it requires us to really put away and stop talking about, “I want tough talk from my legislators and politicians and community leaders.” No, I want smart talk. I want you to focus on the factors that lead up to the thing that causes me to lock those three locks on my front door.
Jeff Schechtman: What about the issue of scalability? Simply that the system has gotten so big and so overburdened that it’s impossible in such a system to begin to really disengage from that kind of cliché thinking and do the kind of things you’re talking about?
Kamala Harris: We’re looking at some of the best of times in our country and some of the worst of times. And in times of crisis, I believe there are great opportunities. But in order to take advantage of those opportunities, we cannot be overwhelmed. And we have to also adopt a triage approach, which means we can’t solve everything at once. Let’s take on a couple of issues, do them well, and then move forward.
When it comes to the crime issue and the crime problem, if you will, one of the best ways to tackle it is to recognize, in terms of the government structure, that county government structures are best situated and suited to mobilize around the issue in that jurisdiction. Because it is the county structure that has the public health system and the social service system and the criminal justice system. It is the county structure that has the chamber of commerce and has the structure in place to actually mobilize around some of these issues.
And if we have leadership on a state level that mandates and supports and creates incentives for that kind of response, I think we can see movement forward. I know that we’ve been able to show that in the work that I’ve done here in San Francisco. In fact, the United States Department of Justice just posted our Back on Track initiative as a model for innovation in law enforcement for the country.
And that brings me, I guess, to one of the most important points in my mind, which is that in many ways we’ve become obsolete in the way that we’re doing business. And I think we all have to dedicate ourselves or rededicate ourselves as Californians to innovation and recognize that it should not be an oxymoron — innovation in government, innovation in law enforcement. There are best practices and we should have the courage to move beyond tradition and try out these new models, recognize that there may be an aspect that we’re taking some risks because it hasn’t been done before, but they’re actually models that have been proven to work.
Jeff Schechtman: What impact has the Victims’ Rights Movement had on the way we deal with crime and law enforcement?
Kamala Harris: Well, the Victims’ Rights Movement came about out of necessity because there were many cases and many examples of how the system was not hearing their voice. And law enforcement, for example, we have as our responsibility and duty to be a voice for the voiceless. But what had been happening in the history of our criminal justice system is the victim was feeling like and actually being treated like a commodity.
So out of that movement, the Victims’ Right Movement, was born the idea that DA’s offices should have a victim services division. So almost every DA’s office in California has such a division, where we have people who are counselors who literally will hold the victim’s hand through the court process, give them the services and the support they need. So it’s very important to acknowledge and support the right of a victim to have her or his voice heard.
But what we want to do is also recognize that to deal with a former offender and be focused on getting them job training and giving them education is not to the exclusion of supporting the victim. In fact, in my mind, it’s about preventing the future victim from being victimized. And in that way, I think we should not accept false choices, which is that you either care about the victim or you care about the offender. It’s a false choice.
Jeff Schechtman: How does all of this relate to the problems that we’re facing here in California with prison overcrowding and really the courts that say, “We have to empty out half of our prison population”?
Kamala Harris: Jeff, you’re right. And there’s been a lot of debate and discussion and concern about the prison overcrowding issue. But I would tell you that, again, that’s not the problem. That’s a symptom of the problem. The problem is that we have not come up with a meaningful plan for reducing the likelihood that former offenders will re-offend. And that’s why the reentry initiatives I think are very, very important and why we must adopt those models.
The reality is that the average prison sentence in California is 24 months. And I’ll tell you what that means because my colleagues— I know them all throughout the state. I’m on the board of the California DA’s Association, these are tough men and women who make sure that offenders are held accountable. When someone is serving a term of 24 months, I will tell you it is most likely that person has committed a nonviolent crime.
And the other thing that fact tells you, that 24-month sentence, is that they’re all coming out. But our system has been designed with blinders on to believe, “Okay, we’ve taken care of that guy. He’s gone.” No. He’s coming back in just a few months. And what is our plan for making sure he doesn’t commit another crime in our community and go back in and crowd up our prisons and take up all of our resources?
I’ll tell you something in terms of the money and the economic impact of this. It costs me $10,000 every time I prosecute a felony. It costs $35,000 a year to house someone in the county jail, $49,000 a year to house them in the state prison. Our Back on Track reentry initiative costs less than $5,000 per participant. So I would suggest to you that we simply cannot afford to maintain the status quo for two very big reasons: We can’t afford it in terms of our public safety and we can’t afford it in terms of diminishing public resources in frankly a state that’s on the verge of bankruptcy.
Jeff Schechtman: And how do we address this, within the context of what The New York Times editorial this morning says is the hardest market to find a job in over 50 years?
Kamala Harris: Well, okay. Again, [laughs] I have this thing which is that if we can’t throw up our hands, I think we need to instead roll up our sleeves. And the reality of it is, absolutely, it’s a very, very difficult time for everyone. There are so many families in our state and country who were doing everything they were supposed to do to live the American dream. They were holding down one and two jobs, they bought a home like they were supposed to, paid their taxes and their bills and their mortgage on time, and now they’re finding they’re out of work.
And in a lot of situations also we’re finding that there are predators coming in, in the form of brokers and financial institutions that are stripping these families of their dignity and their few remaining assets. And a lot of people are facing very hard times. There are no absolutes. It does not mean that there are not opportunities available. I’ll tell you one thing, if we decide that we don’t want to educate people and train them for jobs because jobs won’t be available, then I think we’ve reached a point of no return.
We do see the economy is picking up. There are jobs that are out there. And the bottom line is this. When we educate people and give them skills, they will find a way to be creative in a productive way, and in that way contribute to our society as opposed to working against our society and being destructive.
Jeff Schechtman: And this goes to the heart of all of this in a broader perspective. What do we need to change in the public mindset in terms of how we talk about, the language we use in talking about, crime?
Kamala Harris: Well, I think that we need to dispense with this old rhetoric that simply asks of our criminal justice system and leaders, “Well, are you soft on crime or are you tough on crime?” And instead, we need to ask, “Are we smart on crime?”
And part of that is about adoption of the public-health model. Part of that is also about recognizing that crime essentially is on a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid is the most serious and violent crime: murders, rapes, child molestations, because of the impact to our society and that victim and the horrendous nature of the conduct.
But truly what is occupying most of the space in that pyramid is what is on the middle and lower level: the nonviolent crime. So part of what I think we need to do to move forward is we need to recognize that when we’re talking about criminal justice policy, let’s stop and ask, “Which category does this fit into? Are we talking about violent crime or nonviolent crime?” For violent crime, I say lock them up. Nonviolent crime, let’s recognize we cannot adopt a one-size-fits-all approach and we need to look at the causal factors and figure out a way, again, with the public-health model, to prevent or at least engage in early intervention.
Jeff Schechtman: What do we need to be looking at from a public policy perspective in our communities, particularly communities such as Oakland, for example, where there is a profound increase in the amount of crime? And what do we need to look at besides the law enforcement aspect of it but increasing attention paid to other aspects of what’s going on in that community?
Kamala Harris: Well, as we’ve discussed, I think one big issue is looking at truancy. Again, when there is a sixth-grader who is missing half of the school year, that kid is never going to be productive. And let’s not even talk about the fact that they’re missing the educational opportunity. It’s also in elementary school where we invariably will figure out that, “No, little Johnny’s not dumb, he just can’t see. Get him some glasses,” or, “Amy, it’s not that she’s a bad kid, she needs a hearing aid,” or we figure out at that stage of that child’s life that the child is being abused or neglected. So we deal with it then instead of letting it take hold of that child.
So that’s one specific issue. And again, I have to stress if you did a survey— Listen, I’ve run for office. I’ve been involved in many campaigns, so I’ve stood in many living rooms talking with people and asking them their priorities. Most people, in the top five, their personal safety. If you ask them what they thought about truancy, it may have hit the top 100 list. But I would suggest to you it’s one of the biggest factors that if we address and deal with and fix, we’ll see so much benefit on the back end in terms of the money it takes to deal with that kid and our own safety. So that’s one issue.
The other is that we have not even de-emphasized, we’ve ignored the prevalence of the mental health issue and its relationship to who will be a crime victim and who will be a perpetrator. And again, if we dealt with an issue like post-traumatic stress disorder in children, I think we would find a huge benefit on the back end, again in terms of public resources and public safety. So I’m just going to throw those two out there. Let’s start with those two.
Jeff Schechtman: I know you talked about the cost factor, that the Back on Track program costs a lot less than prosecuting. How do we begin to refocus those resources in, as you said before, a state that’s near bankruptcy?
Kamala Harris: Well, one of the things we’ve done actually is that, I’m proud to tell you, our Back on Track initiative was chosen by the National DA’s Association as a model for DA’s offices around the country. And there are a number of DA’s offices that are in the process of replicating or have already replicated it, and they’re showing huge benefits. In fact, we wrote a piece of legislation that Speaker Karen Bass sponsored and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law last month, that puts Back on Track as a model and reentry specifically as a model for what we should be adopting throughout the state of California.
So I think the next step is that now we have a law that says that we have the power and we hopefully have the incentive to recognize that reentry is actually one of the antidotes to the crime problem. So now I think, and thank you, it’s a matter of engaging the public in this conversation and in motivation to demand this and ask it and take some leadership and ownership of it in their communities.
Reentry initiatives — Back on Track, for example, let me tell you what it is. It is simply about breaking down the silos in a county-structured government so that we’ve got the Chamber of Commerce at the same table with the labor unions, the building trades guys in particular, the plumbers and the carpenters together with our non-profit organizations.
And let me tell you the conversation they have around my conference table. The business leaders say, “Okay, I’ll give you the jobs if you show me that you’re going to give them the skills and the support they need.” So nonprofit organizations, let’s deal with their housing needs. Let’s deal with the fact that they need daycare for their kids, labor unions, plumbers and carpenters. They’re saying, “Hey, I’m going to step up and enroll them in my pre-apprenticeship programs.”
And, as I mentioned before, because of this collaboration, and I’d even venture to say coalition, we have, as a community, reduced the recidivism for this population from 54 percent to less than 10 percent.
Jeff Schechtman: Kamala Harris, I thank you so much for joining me this morning.
Kamala Harris: Thank you, Jeff. Thank you very much.
Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. We’ll take a break. I’ll be right back.
My 2009 conversation with then-San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris as she was running for California state attorney general. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another radio WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman.
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