Kamala Harris Wants to Distinguish Herself From Joe Biden. Criminal Justice Is a Place to Start.
It did not take long after Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden on the campaign trail for pundits to seize on an irresistible theme for the Harris/Trump matchup. “Prosecutor versus felon” was repeated ad nauseam on TV and online for days. “People are very excited to see her out there, and they love the narrative of the prosecutor against the felon,” a political strategist told CNN. The Rev. Al Sharpton gushed on MSNBC that if the election were a boxing match, it would be billed as the Prosecutor versus the Felon.
“Convicted felon” was a favorite liberal insult against Donald Trump before Harris’s ascension to the top of the presidential ticket. Trump’s conviction on 34 criminal counts launched a thousand gleeful Facebook memes. Candidate Harris fulfilled a heady fantasy of a fight between an evildoer versus the one who could bring him to justice.
But formerly incarcerated activists pushed back, arguing that labels like “felon” are less harmful to Trump than they are to the millions of Americans with convictions on their record. Sheena Meade, CEO of the Clean Slate Initiative, wrote that such dehumanizing language bolsters the barriers preventing people from securing jobs, schooling, or housing after prison. “These barriers are driven by harmful narratives about people with records that exclude us from our communities long after we have paid our debt to society,” she wrote. Through this lens, Harris’s first official campaign ad — set to Beyoncé’s “Freedom” and appealing to Americans’ desire for bodily autonomy and the chance “not just to get by but to get ahead” — served as a reminder of the things that remain out of reach to people leaving prison.
Harris has not disavowed the prosecutor vs. felon theme. But she hasn’t quite embraced it either. While her stump speech includes a crowd-pleasing riff about a career spent prosecuting predators, fraudsters, and cheats — “So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type” — her tough-on-crime rhetoric is thus far focused on border enforcement, an area where she is seen as vulnerable (and where Democrats have never hesitated to move right).
If there are hints of how Harris might move on other criminal justice areas, her VP selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who signed sweeping reform legislation last year, suggests at the very least that she’s not running away from the issue. More recently, news broke that New York City Council Member Yusef Salaam, one of the Exonerated Five, has been invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention — a nod toward the problem of wrongful convictions. (Trump notoriously called for the death penalty for Salaam and his co-defendants in the Central Park jogger case.)
But a few weeks into her presidential campaign and with the convention only days away, Harris has thus far remained silent on what, if any, role criminal justice reform would play in her presidency. (Her campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.) This may simply reflect a strategic desire to avoid more over-the-top attacks from Republicans, who have already accused her of destroying San Francisco. Regardless, other policy areas have taken more of a priority, with Harris poised to unveil a new economic platform — her first substantive plan on any issue. In the meantime, a draft of the Democratic National Committee’s party platform, released last month, echoes Biden’s uninspired rhetoric — “We need to fund the police, not defund the police” — while highlighting goals the White House laid out last year in a “multi-year blueprint that applies a whole-of-government approach to improve the criminal justice system.”
That document broadly aligns with Biden’s previously promised reforms as well as the priorities Harris laid out in her last presidential run. Her previous criminal justice platform called mass........
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