Song of an Open Road Without Potholes
By Hema N. Nair. A writer based in New Jersey*
When Kamala Harris encourages Venus, a young black law student from Oakland, to get an inside view of the criminal justice system by interning at the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, Harris tells her it is because her mother always told her, “You may be the first. Don’t be the last.” Harris too had interned at the Alameda County District Attorney’s office in 1988 as a final-year law student. She credits that experience with fueling her conviction to use the law to help those in need.
Throughout the book titled, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, Harris quotes her mother to illustrate or emphasize a belief or an action she takes. Those are the most genuine moments in this rather one-sided autobiography. The daughter of an Indian woman Shyamala Gopalan and a Jamaican father Donald Harris, she is uniquely placed to give us a perspective of growing up as a black middle-class immigrant of educated parents. Harris’s young parents came to Berkeley as students pursuing post-graduate degrees in the late 1950s and met and fell in love while joining campus protests during the civil rights struggle.
However, in her book, Harris uses her American journey to present a case, like the experienced lawyer she is, on why she is eminently qualified to run for office. The book came out in 2019, just before Harris announced her campaign to run for president and it is an unabashed portrayal of her skill, compassiion, and zeal to lead this country.
When President Barack Obama published his first book Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance in 1995, he was about to run as a senator. It went on to become one of the best-selling books in the US and established Obama as a gifted writer. His memoir talks candidly about his childhood growing up with an absent black father and a loving white mother, weaving race, class, prejudice and expectations in a moving narrative that ends with him entering law school. Harris does not have Obama’s powerful pen and no one can fault her for that. But what she also lacks is trust in the reader to see her with a few warts and take us on the trajectory of her journey illuminated with awareness of her growth, flaws and all.
There is no doubt that Harris has painstakingly carved a unique path to her goal. When she first set out to run for district attorney in 2003, only a mere six per cent knew of her in San Francisco. But Harris turned up on Saturday mornings at local supermarkets with an ironing board (substituting as a desk) to hold up a sign that said Kamala Harris, A Voice For Justice. Talking to strangers about their lives and the problems they were facing reminded Harris of jury selection where in the space of a scant few minutes she had to assess their suitability to decide on a defendant’s life. Her listening skills paid off and she defeats the other top voter in a debate to win the election. Were there other factors that contributed to her win? Probably, but Harris does not delve deeper that that. We see her after a grand celebration alone in her new bare office musing that not many DA’s looked like her and vowing to “make a difference for the better in the lives of troubled peoples before they ever commit a crime.”
Harris served as DA for seven years from 2004 to 2011, after being reelected in 2007 and her record does not often reflect her promise. In 2010 her tenure was tainted by the scandal of a crime laboratory technician who had stolen cocaine from the lab and even more worrying, could have tampered with evidence in hundreds of cases. A prosecutor working in her office had not passed that information to defense lawyers, which was required by law. Harris blamed the police for not informing the defense lawyers, insisting that only about 20 cases could have been affected and said that the judge who ruled that her office was to blame was biased because her husband was a defense lawyer. More than 600 drug-related cases had to be thrown out and Chris Kelly, a former opponent of Harris for the Democratic attorney general post, said that Harris had “violated defendants civil and constitutional rights.” In a 2019 interview with the Washington Post, Harris admitted she should have had a written policy in place for her office that stressed that defendants be given all information that could affect the outcome of their cases.
Soon after she became district attorney a mother whose son had been shot dead during gun warfare, came to meet Harris and wept saying her son’s killer was still walking the streets. Harris responded by putting pressure on homicide inspectors to speed up their work. It resulted in a 25 percent of unsolved homicide cases getting a conviction. In 2005, she and her team developed Back on Track (BOT), a program designed to rehabilitate offenders instead of punishing them. “Prison has its own gravitational pull,” Harris notes. Over 70 percent of released prisoners commit a crime in three years after coming out of prison and BOT aimed to stem that flow back. It was a pretrial program which worked with adults between 18-30 years old charged with nonviolent crimes to which they admitted responsibility. A successful completion of BOT, which also offered job training, and mental health resources, gave participants a diploma and their charges being dropped. Within a few years about 33 cities across America adopted BOT, it was held up as a model program by the National District Attorneys Association and inspired Harris to write her first book Smart on Crime. While BOT did prevent a relapse of criminal behavior what Harris does not say is that BOT had very little effect in reducing prison population. In fact, the year after BOT began San Francisco jails actually saw an increase of population in state prisons. The problem of overcrowded jails is another issue altogether. But, by singling out only the aspect that reflects glory on her, Harris leaves out unpleasant truths. By the time BOT program had ended in 2011 jail and prison populations had begun a downward trend mainly due to a federal order to cut down overcrowding throughout the state’s prisons.
Harris says her decision to run for attorney general of California was in part to extend BOT programs statewide. Harris was state attorney general for two terms from 2011-2017. In her book Harris focuses on her fight to provide a fair deal to homeowners who were facing foreclosure and her efforts to cut down truancy, both causes where she made a difference. But when Harris also claims that a 2015 California mandatory provision for police to use body cameras when working happened under her watch, she omits to clarify that the rule applied only to police directly working for Harris. She also skips telling us that when the Legislative Black Caucus asked her to support bills that made it mandatory for all police officers to wear body cams, Harris declined. The reason she explained in an interview was because she felt the decision should be left to departments “to figure out what technology they are going to adopt based on needs that they have and resources they have.”
Critics of Harris have often pointed out that she frequently used technicalities to prevent wrongful convictions to come up for a retrial, that may have led to a reduction in prison population, a cause dear to her heart. A death row inmate Kevin Cooper was denied DNA testing that could have led to a change in his conviction. And in the case of George Gage, who is doing life imprisonment, Harris refused to allow that the prosecutor had withheld information about the questionable credibility of the only witness who testified against him. Harris ran and won as Democratic senator from California in 2017, just when the Trump administration took power. She served on four committees: Intelligence, Homeland Security, Budget, and Environment and Public Works and voted loyally along party lines. During the confirmation hearing for General John for secretary of Homeland Security, Harris tried to press Kelly on his stand on the DACA program and voted against his nomination. As a child of immigrant parents,
Harris has had close encounters with the prejudice and struggles to be accepted that is the lot of dark colored entrants into the country. She has vivid memories of her mother being judged because of her Indian accent or being followed around suspiciously in department stores solely due to her brown skin. Defending the rights of undocumented immigrants who were being “scapegoated for problems they didn’t create,” is a reflection of her conviction, born out of her own experience, that immigrants provide a irreplaceable role in American life. In Truths We Hold, Harris serves up a burnished image of her achievements, reminding us that her self-labeled description of being a “progressive prosecutor” amply qualifies her to take charge of the nation. It is a bold assumption and one built on years of toil in the justice system. Her case would have been infinitely more powerful if she had asserted it with deeper self-reflection and humility, showing us that the milestones of her progress also had glaring potholes.
