Part of the Series
The Road to Abolition
In the weeks since Joe Biden announced the end of his presidential campaign, a troubling phenomenon has taken hold of my TikTok “For You” page: Everybody is acting like they just fell out of a coconut tree.
Forgive my memespeak. What I mean is that, quite suddenly, large swaths of people have seemingly begun to embrace a revisionist history of Kamala Harris’s record as a prosecutor — one that, crucially, lacks context.
As numerous news outlets have reported, Gen Z is flooding the internet with viral Kamala Harris fan videos; many of the edits are, honestly, pretty fun. And the sense of relief among Democratic voters is palpable: Harris is a younger, fresher candidate than Biden, and preliminary polling shows that she stands a better chance of beating Donald Trump in the presidential race.
But the enthusiasm for a “Kamalanomenon” has also led to an uptick in misleading posts. In one emblematic TikTok, a young person asks, “So who’s the one that LIED and said that Kamala Harris was responsible when she was DA of locking up thousands of Black people for drug crimes?… Usually when you lie, there should be some sort of kernel of correct information, but in this case, this was just outright not even close to the truth. People need to stop lying about Kamala Harris.” The video received 489,000 likes and nearly 3 million views. Another viral post condemns “fake media” for promoting “Loch Ness Monster-style stories” about Harris’s character. “I’ll admit that I was drinking the ‘Kamala is a cop, Kamala locked up people, killer Kamala’ kind of vibe,” says the TikToker. “And my mind has been changed.”
During Harris’s time as attorney general of California, her office won 1,956 misdemeanor and felony convictions for marijuana possession. As another viral TikTok by NowThis Impact correctly explains, these convictions did not always result in jail time, and the state data is not broken down by ethnicity. But there is still a kernel of truth: Nearly 2,000 convictions for marijuana possession is hardly a “progressive” victory. And while videos have focused heavily on debunking this one fact, they have ignored other aspects of her record.
As California attorney general, Harris also fought against an order from the Supreme Court that instructed the state to reduce overcrowding in its prisons. As Alexander Sammon reported in The American Prospect in 2020, federal courts usually only order the release of incarcerated people as a “remedy of last resort.” But, as Sammon wrote, California had a “uniquely awful” prison system in the eyes of the Supreme Court: “At its height, it was stuffed to some 200 percent of its designed capacity. There were not enough beds or medical personnel but an extreme excess of bodies.… Preventable deaths due to substandard and overstretched medical care occurred every five to six days.”
Still, Harris’s office showed “extreme resistance” to the ruling; her attorneys submitted various legal filings that put forth different arguments for why the state should not release people from prison, despite the fact that there were thousands of people incarcerated on nonviolent charges “whom multiple courts had cleared as presenting next to no risk of recidivism or threat to public safety.” One of these arguments, submitted by attorneys for Harris’s office, said that reducing the state prison population would deplete the labor force needed to fight wildfires. Incarcerated firefighters earn as little as $2.90 per day. The attorneys also said that allowing people to receive parole early would deprive the prison system and local communities of a workforce that could be paid virtually nothing to do tasks like pick up trash.
Harris later disavowed these court filings, claiming she was “shocked” to learn her attorneys had submitted them when she read about it in the news. But this particular example highlights a key tension underlying much of the discussion surrounding Harris’s record: The function of a prosecutor is to secure convictions; attorney generals are, indeed, states’ “top cops,” and they’re tasked with arguing to protect the interests of those states, regardless of their personal views. These roles are, by their very nature, part of a criminal legal system that feeds into the prison-industrial complex. While there are reform-minded prosecutors, there is no such thing as an abolitionist prosecutor.
This also explains some of the contradictions that pepper Harris’s record. She has in recent years tried to rebrand herself as a “progressive prosecutor,” in light of the growing movement to reform the criminal legal system from within. Hana Yamahiro and Luna Garzón-Montano offer an abolitionist critique of the progressive prosecutor movement in the NYU Review of Law & Social Change, noting that while it is “an improvement on traditional prosecution, it does not offer a path to ending mass incarceration, and in fact may distract or detract from that goal.”
Indeed, Harris has made it clear that she believes in the importance of prisons and prison-like institutions. She has at times expressed her personal disagreement with her office’s legal filings, including briefs submitted by her office to block gender-affirming care for incarcerated trans people, but that does not absolve her of her complicity. “I had clients, and one of them was the California Department of Corrections. It was their policy. When I learned about what they were doing, behind the scenes, I got them to change the policy,” Harris told The Advocate in 2019.
We should be clear-eyed about the complexity of Harris’s record. A 2020 Vox article details more of the contradictory actions she took as a prosecutor, noting:
She pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent. She refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer, but also defended California’s death penalty system in court. She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings.
And these contradictions have continued during Harris’s tenure as vice president. NowThis Impact’s video praises Harris as a “champion” of the Biden-Harris administration’s “reclassification of weed as a less dangerous substance.” But reclassification is not legalization — or even decriminalization — something both Harris and Biden have spoken out in favor of. Biden also campaigned in 2020 on abolishing the federal death penalty, and Harris has stated that she has been “personally opposed to the death penalty” for her entire career. Nevertheless, the Biden-Harris administration has failed to follow through on putting a stop to capital punishment.
The United States is a long way away from having a truly abolitionist presidential candidate. That doesn’t mean we should give up the struggle for a better world. Now is the time to scrutinize Harris’s prosecutorial record, pressure her on past campaign promises, and advance a vision of a truly liberatory political agenda. We must continue to critique Harris’s role in the Biden administration’s rightward lurch on immigration and her support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. None of these are isolated issues. Sure, we can laugh about coconut tree memes and enjoy having a “brat summer” — but we must not forget, of course, the context.
As one TikToker said in a viral video, “People are talking out of both sides of their mouth” about Harris’s record, simultaneously saying that she “never did anything wrong, she’s perfect, how dare you question it, this is right-wing propaganda” or “she had to, it was her job to enforce the laws, what could she do, her hands were tied.”
But, as the TikToker noted, “Both of those can’t be true at once.”
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