Numerous URLs and links/sources below.
Here by the way is my own back-in-the-day grant-funded work on and against racist mass incarceration and felony branding: Paul Street, The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago: Chicago Urban League, 2002).
The gross 2013 Chicago Ideas Conference talk I discuss in the conclusion of this audio:
Go to minute 11 to see her condescending bullshit about signs saying “Put money into education, not prisons.” Her comments on being from a progressive family and surroundings come in her first minute and a half. (I have apparently heard her reference pink hair and all that in a different talk.)
One thing that is kind of creepy in this opening minute and a half is that she throws her own parents under the bus a bit by saying that “my sister and I joke that we grew up surrounded by a bunch of adults who spent full time marching and shouting about this things called justice.” Her mother was a leading biologist and cancer researcher and her father was a developmental economist at Stanford. It does not seem likely that they “spent full time marching and shouting.”
In my audio, I unfortunately forgot to mention the punch line in Harris’s 2013 Chicago Ideas Conference talk: “There’s a fundamental problem with that approach” — with the notion that money should be taken out of mass incarceration and put into education — “and it is this, alright? I agree with it, conceptually, but you have not addressed the reason that I have three padlocks on my front door” (12:17-12:23).
The reason? …umm, because Harris and her multi-millionaire husband sat atop the savagely unequal socioeconomic/class pyramid created by contemporary capitalism-imperialism!
Here is a very useful reflection on Harris’s deceptive 2019 campaign effort to retrospectively airbrush herself as having been a “progressive prosecutor”: Lara Bazelon, “Kamala Harris was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’: the Senator was on the Wrong Side of History When She Served as California’s Attorney General,” New York Times, January 17, 2019.
Other Sources for this Audio:
Defended death penalty: https://www.kcra.com/article/kamala-harris-defends-california-s-death-penalty/6418496 and https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-death-penalty-appeal-20140821-story.html
Blocked gender reassignment surgery for a transgender prisoner: https://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-ff-prison-board-approves-parole-for-sexreassignment-inmate-20150521-story.html
Strong proponent of civil asset forfeiture: https://www.montereyherald.com/2015/02/23/luis-alejo-kamala-harris-back-asset-seizure-before-criminal-charges/
Violated defendants’ rights by hiding damaging information on a police lab technician: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Judge-rips-Harris-office-for-hiding-problems-3263797.php and https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html (Please note: my audio may have said KH did this as California AG. If so, wrong: she did this as San Francisco DA)
Failing to prosecute Steven Mnuchin and One West Bank: https://theintercept.com/2017/01/05/kamala-harris-fails-to-explain-why-she-didnt-prosecute-steven-mnuchins-bank/
Supported the prosecution of the the parents of truant children: https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-kamala-harris-truancy-20190417-story.html (Please note: this appears to have mainly about her San Francisco DA years. She championed a California law criminalizing the parents of truant children. See https://colorlines.com/article/new-calif-truancy-law-goes-effect/ )
Resisted efforts to have her office investigate police killings: https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/kamala-harris-criminal-justice-policies-california-rcna163518 and https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/Kamala-Harris-takes-measured-approach-to-probing-7955937.php
Opposed efforts to reform three strikes policy: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/magazine/23strikes-t.html (Please note: this appears to be about her years as San Francisco DA)
Worked to keep an innocent man in jail: https://www.splinter.com/kamala-harris-and-the-case-of-the-innocent-neo-nazi-1834760983 and https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html
Harris defended a prosecutor’s use of a false confession: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ca-court-of-appeal/1695398.html and https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/08/kamala-harris-prosecutor-california-san-francisco/
Harris fought a Supreme Court ruling ordering the release of nonviolent prisoners from overcrowded prisons: https://prospect.org/justice/how-kamala-harris-fought-to-keep-nonviolent-prisoners-locked-up/
American Prospect’s Alexander Sammon: “As California attorney general, she spent years subverting a 2011 Supreme Court ruling requiring the state to reduce its prison population. The overseeing judicial panel nearly found the state in contempt of court…Observers worried that the behavior of Harris’s office had undermined the very ability of federal judges to enforce their legal orders at the state level, pushing the federal court system to the brink of a constitutional crisis. This extreme resistance to a Supreme Court ruling was done to prevent the release of fewer than 5,000 nonviolent offenders, whom multiple courts had cleared as presenting next to no risk of recidivism or threat to public safety.”
(Please note: Harris was concerned to keep nonviolent prisoners under lock and key to be avaialable for being sent into fighting California wildfires resulting from the climate catastrophe caused by the capitalist-imperialist system that Harris is currently trying to give a multicultural re-branding).
Refused to back marijuana legalization: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/joegarofoli/article/kamala-harris-cannabis-19033979.php
Opposed police body cameras: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-kamala-harris-record-on-police-body-cameras-fits-into-the-2020-debate-on-criminal-justice
Harris defended a murder conviction even though it was shown that her office had presented false testimony: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/kamala-harris-criminal-justice.html
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