Barbara Allan was 30 years old when her estranged husband Gene murdered his own father in her old home on Long Island. It was 1966 and Allan had just fled her abusive marriage with her two young daughters. If she hadn’t, she may well have been the one to end up shot dead on their kitchen floor.

Despite his abuse, Allan spent years visiting Gene behind bars, first at the Nassau County Jail and then at prisons in upstate New York. She found that the system that was supposed to keep people like her safe instead felt intimidating, dehumanizing, and counterproductive. She felt like she’d been punished with a kind of invisible sentence that ran parallel to his, only she did her time outside prison walls. In the 1970s, Allan co-founded the support group Prison Families Anonymous for relatives and loved ones of incarcerated people. Over the next few decades, she watched the expanding prison system catch more and more people into its grip. “Every time I thought about stepping back a bit, another tentacle drew me in,” she later wrote in a memoir. Now 88, she describes a sense of sadness at the entrenched machinery of mass incarceration “where punishment, revenge, and a lack of humanity is the norm.”

I first met Allan in 2015 at a conference connecting families of the incarcerated, in Dallas, Texas. At the time, I was reporting on then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s promises to roll back the era of mass incarceration, a vow that was met with skepticism by many attendees. Bill Clinton, after all, was responsible for some of the worst “tough on crime” laws of the 1990s, from the 1994 crime bill to the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Hillary Clinton herself had fed the myth of the juvenile “superpredator.” For many incarcerated people and their loved ones, the Democrats’ newfound embrace of criminal justice reform was highly suspect.

If there was a Democratic candidate who could have reached such an audience years later, it might have been Kamala Harris. Elected senator on the same night that Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential race, she went on to sponsor legislation to make the criminal justice system a little more equitable and humane. Although misgivings about her career as a prosecutor would derail her campaign during the 2020 presidential primary, her rise to the 2024 ticket was a chance to reintroduce herself to American voters, including the millions of people impacted by mass incarceration.

Instead, Harris has remained silent. In the years since her first run for president, the political mood has shifted back against criminal justice reform. The progressive gains on policing and bail policies following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 have given way to a new wave of “tough on crime” politics. Donald Trump, who signed the bipartisan First Step Act, has doubled down on his racist fearmongering about crime.

For anyone who pays attention to electoral politics, Harris’s abandonment of prison reform should come as no surprise. Nevertheless, Allan is firmly in Harris’s camp when it comes to the 2024 election. She summed up her feelings by sharing an exchange she had with a man at a diner in New York, who asked if she planned to vote for Trump. “I’d rather vote for my cocker spaniel,” she replied.

Allan mostly avoids talking politics with her fellow activists. Doing so would only interfere with her primary mission, which is to support prison families regardless of their political views. But she admitted that she does not have much patience for those who criticize Harris’s career as a prosecutor. “She has always talked about reentry and giving people an opportunity when they come out.” Besides, Allan sees Trump as a danger to future generations: “I’m old but I have grandchildren.”

For Allan,........

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