In Her Own Words: Kamala Harris Endorses Harsh Penalties for Non-Violent Offenders
Shane Trejo
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Sen. Kamala Harris (D-NY) is attempting to reinvent herself as a progressive after spending years as a tough-on-crime prosecutor who reveled in throwing minorities in jail for non-violent offenses.
Harris wrote “Smart on Crime” in 2009 where she re-affirmed her commitment to punishing non-violent crimes, indicating that she has not learned any lessons from the many abuses that have arisen from the federal war on drugs.
“Remember, “non-violent” does not mean “unimportant.” It’s important to fight all crime. Drug crimes in particular exact a terrible toll and rob people young and old of hope,” Harris wrote in her book.
“And remember that many of these offenders are small players in the underground business of drug sales and trafficking, and therefore are closely linked with gangs, violence, and gun crimes,” she continued.
Harris then reaffirmed her support for charging and arresting all non-violent offenders.
“While we need to arrest and make all offenders accountable for their crimes, we are finding ways to transform the status quo approach that results in offense-arrest-jail-offense-arrest-jail—a pattern I sometimes call “synchronized drowning”—into a new path of accountability and reintegration that builds stronger, safer communities,” Harris added.
In the era of Black Lives Matter, Harris’ pro-police sentiments put her out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic Party.
“Virtually all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see officers walking a beat,” Harris wrote. “This is as true in economically poor areas as in wealthy ones.”
She denied any assertion that law enforcement is racist, which is now accepted as a self-evident truth among radicalized liberals.
“There is a widely held notion that poor communities, particularly poor African-American and Latino communities, consider law enforcement the enemy and that they do not want police officers in their neighborhoods,” she wrote writes. “In fact, the opposite is true. Both my experience and scientific surveys reflect this fact again and again. … I can state categorically that economically poor people want and support law enforcement.”
Harris even boasted about how many people her tough-on-crime policies helped send to jail in San Francisco.
“We are sending three times as many offenders to state prison than we were in 2001, three years before I took office,” Harris wrote about her time as the city’s attorney general. “We also increased conviction rates for drug sellers.”
Harris is currently targeting former Vice President Joe Biden for his decades-long record as a career politician of supporting policies to eviscerate civil liberties and target racial minorities.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me,” Harris said, as she hammered Biden on opposing busing integration in the 1970s during a recent Democratic Party presidential debate.
But Harris has skeletons in her own closet that she must account for. Her tough-on-crime record that may ultimately prevent her from securing the Democratic Party presidential nomination, as more liberal ares demanding an extreme option than ever before.
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