As I sat alone in my new office, I recalled a time, as a young prosecutor, when I overheard some of my colleagues in the hallway.
“Should we add the gang enhancement?” one of them asked.
“Can we show he was in a gang?” the other said.
“Come on, you saw what he was wearing, you saw which corner they picked him up on. Guy’s got the tape of that rapper, what’s his name?”
I stepped out into the hallway. “Hey, guys, just so you know: I have family that live in that neighborhood. I’ve got friends who dress in that style. And I’ve got a tape of that rapper in my car right now.”
I reflected on it all—about why I ran for office, whom I had come there to help, and the difference between getting convictions and having conviction. In the end, I knew I was there for the victims. Both the victims of crimes committed and the victims of a broken criminal justice system.
For me, to be a progressive prosecutor is to understand—and act on—this dichotomy. It is to understand that when a person takes another’s life, or a child is molested, or a woman raped, the perpetrators deserve severe consequences. That is one imperative of justice. But it is also to understand that fairness is in short supply in a justice system that is supposed to guarantee it. The job of a progressive prosecutor is to look out for the overlooked, to speak up for those whose voices aren’t being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice. It is to recognize that not everyone needs punishment, that what many need, quite plainly, is help.
There was a knock at the door. It was Debbie. “You ready?” she asked, smiling.
“I’ll be there in a second,” I told her. I breathed in the silence for another moment. Then I pulled a pen and a yellow notepad from my briefcase and started to make a list.
* * *
• • •
I had just sat down at my desk when my administrative assistant came in. “Boss, there’s another mom out here.”
“Thanks, I’ll be right out.”
I walked down the hallway to the lobby to greet her. I’d been on the job only a few weeks, but it was not the first time I’d taken this walk. This was not the first time a woman had shown up and said, “I want to speak to Kamala. I will only speak to Kamala.” I knew exactly why she was there. She was the mother of a murdered child.
The woman nearly collapsed in my arms. Her devastation was visceral. She was grieving and exhausted. And yet her being there at all was a testament to her strength. She was there for her baby, the baby she’d lost, a young man killed by gunfire in the streets. It had been months since her son’s death, and yet the killer still walked free. The case was one of the more than seventy unsolved homicides languishing in the San Francisco Police Department when I took office.
I had known some of these mothers, and others I had met while I was campaigning. They were almost all black or Latina from high-crime neighborhoods, and all of them loved their children deeply. They had come together to form a group, Mothers of Homicide Victims. It was part support group, part advocacy organization. They leaned on one another to work through their grief. And they organized to get justice for their sons.
They weren’t sure if I could help them, but they knew that I would at least see them. And I mean literally see them. See their pain, see their anguish, see their souls—which were bleeding. First and foremost, they knew I would see them as loving, grieving mothers.
This is part of the tragedy. When people hear that a mother has lost a child to cancer or a car accident or war, the natural response is collective sympathy and concern. But when a woman loses her son to violence in the streets, the response from the public is often different, almost a collective shrug, as though it’s an expected eventuality. Not the horrific tragedy of losing a child, but rather just another statistic. As though the circumstances of her son’s death define the value of his life. As though the loss she has suffered is less valid, less painful, less worthy of compassion.
I walked her back to my office so we could have some privacy to talk. She told me her son had been shot and killed, that no one had been arrested, that no one seemed to care. She described the day she had to go to the coroner’s office to identify his body—how she couldn’t get that image out of her head, of him lifeless in a place so cold. She had left messages for the homicide inspector, she said, suggesting possible leads, but she never heard back. Nothing had happened, nothing seemed to be happening, and she couldn’t understand why. She grasped my hand and looked me straight in the eye. “He mattered,” she said. “He still matters to me.”
“He matters to me, too,” I reassured her. His life should have mattered to everyone. I told my team to get the entire squad of homicide inspectors to convene in my conference room as soon as possible. I wanted to know what was going on with all of these cases.
The homicide inspectors showed up not knowing what to expect. At the time I didn’t know it was uncommon for the district attorney to summon them for a meeting. One by one, I asked them to tell me the status of the unresolved homicide cases and pressed them for details about what they were going to do to help us get justice for these families. I had very pointed questions, and I pushed the inspectors hard—harder, I later learned, than they were expecting. This ruffled some feathers. But it was the right thing to do, and it needed to be done—regardless of whether it had ever been done before.
They took my call to action seriously. Within a month of the meeting, the police department launched a new campaign to try to encourage witnesses to step forward. And in time, we were able to reduce the backlog of unsolved homicides by 25 percent. Not every case could be solved, but we made sure we worked hard to ensure that every one that could be was.
Some people were surprised I was so relentless. And I know some others questioned how I, as a black woman, could countenance being part of “the machine” putting more young men of color behind bars. There is no doubt that the criminal justice system has deep flaws, that it is broken in fundamental ways. And we need to deal with that. But we cannot overlook or ignore that mother’s pain, that child’s death, that murderer who still walks the streets. I believe there must be serious consequences for people who commit serious crimes.
I’ve handled cases for just about every crime imaginable—including a man who had literally scalped his girlfriend during an argument. I’ve prosecuted sadistic criminals who have committed the most heinous, unspeakable acts against other people. I’ve been at homicide scenes where people had been killed, and I’ve won guilty verdicts against those who did the killing. I’ve faced cold-blooded murderers in the courtroom as a judge laid down a sentence of life in prison. And I haven’t shied away from calling for harsher sentences in certain cases. In 2004, for example, I got a bill passed in California to lengthen the sentences for so-called johns who paid to have sex with underage girls. I believed that should be treated as child sexual assault.
But let’s be clear: the situation is not the same—nor should it be—when it comes to less serious crimes. I remember the first time I visited the county jail. So many young men, and they were mostly black or brown or poor. Too many were there because of addiction and desperation and poverty. They were fathers who missed their kids. They were young adults, many of whom had been pulled into gangs with no real choice in the matter. The majority weren’t there for violent offenses, and yet they had become drops in the sea of those swept up in a wave of mass incarceration. People whose lives had been destroyed, along with their families and their communities. They represented a living monument to lost potential, and I wanted to tear it down.
* * *
• • •
In 1977, in the heart of the San Francisco neighborhood known as Western Addition, my friend Lateefah Simon was born. She grew up in what was once a middle-class neighborhood as the crack epidemic was starting to take hold. Sh
e saw, firsthand, what it was doing to her community—the self-destructive addiction it fueled, the burden it placed on families that were already struggling to get by with little semblance of a safety net, the way it disappeared fathers and corroded even a mother’s most deep-seated instinct to care for her child. When Lateefah was a young girl, her desire was to help people, but as she got older, she became one of the many who needed help. She ended up on probation for shoplifting. She dropped out of high school.
But then someone intervened. Lateefah was a teenager, working eight hours a day at Taco Bell, when an outreach worker told her about an opportunity. There was an organization in San Francisco, the Center for Young Women’s Development, that provided social services, including job training, to girls and young women who were on the streets or in trouble. The center was recruiting for new staff to work there. Lateefah saw a lifeline and grabbed hold.
She started working for the center when she was a teenager and raising a daughter of her own; soon she was unstoppable. She was everywhere: at local government meetings, calling for changes to help girls who’d been trafficked; on the streets of poor neighborhoods handing out condoms and candy bars, along with information about how to get help; and at the center itself, working with vulnerable girls from her neighborhood. “I saw resilience in these young women,” she recalled. “There were people who had absolutely nothing but were somehow able to make it through the day. And the next day. And the next.”
The center’s board members were so impressed by Lateefah’s tenacity, skills, and leadership that they asked her to become executive director when she was just nineteen years old. She said yes—and that was when I came to know her.
At the city attorney’s office, I had been working with the same community of women that Lateefah had. I had been holding “know your rights” sessions for vulnerable women all across the city, and I asked Lateefah to join our efforts. I could see that Lateefah was a genius, and it turned out I wasn’t the only one who thought so. In 2003, she became the youngest woman to ever win the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” award (with only a GED).
When I became district attorney, I often thought to myself, “What if Lateefah had been picked up for a bag of weed instead of shoplifting? What if she’d been sentenced to prison instead of probation?” I knew what a felony conviction meant. It wasn’t just about the time in prison; it was about what happens afterwards. As a country, we specialize in releasing inmates into desperate, hopeless situations. We give them a little bit of money and a bus ticket and we send them on their way with a felony conviction on their record—not the kind of experience most employers are looking for. In so many cases, finding themselves rejected in the hiring process, they have no way of making money. From the moment they leave, they are in danger of returning. They end up in the same neighborhood, with the same people, on the same corner; the only difference is that they’ve now served time. Prison has its own gravitational pull, often inescapable; of the hundreds of thousands of prisoners we release as a country every year, nearly 70 percent commit a crime within three years. The status quo isn’t working.
I brought a small group of trusted advisers together, including my bold and brilliant chief of policy, Tim Silard, and posed a question: What would it take to put together a reentry program that actually worked? Put another way, if the best way of providing public safety is preventing crime in the first place, what can we do to prevent people from reoffending?
What if we could really get them back on track?
That question would become the name of the program Tim and I developed together: Back on Track. At the heart of the program was my belief in the power of redemption. Redemption is an age-old concept rooted in many religions. It is a concept that presupposes that we will all make mistakes, and for some, that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime. Yes, there must be consequences and accountability. But after that debt to society has been paid, is it not the sign of a civil society that we allow people to earn their way back?
There was tremendous pushback at first. At the time, criminal justice policy was still trending toward things like harsher sentences or militarizing the police. The guiding belief among many was that the criminal justice system wasn’t punitive enough. More than a decade later, that attitude has, thankfully, evolved, opening up space for a more balanced approach. Reentry programs like Back on Track are now part of the mainstream conversation. But in those days, I faced intensive backlash, including from people I worked with on a regular basis. They saw a prosecutor’s job as putting people in prison, not focusing on what happens to them when they get out. That was someone else’s problem. I was accused of wasting precious time and resources. People would say to me, “You should be locking them up instead of letting them out.”
But we persevered. It was one of the things I valued about running the office. In the end, it was up to me whether we were going to pursue the initiative. I would hear out my critics, but I wouldn’t be constrained by them. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to prove it could be done.
So Tim and I got to work. We wanted to create opportunities by running participants through a rigorous program that I often compared to boot camp. It would include job training, GED courses, community service, parenting and financial literacy classes, as well as drug testing and therapy. The DA’s office led the charge, but we recruited a range of critical partners—from Goodwill Industries, which oversaw community service and employment training, to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and its member companies, which helped find jobs for program participants, to local trade unions, which provided valuable apprenticeship opportunities.
Though compassionate in its approach, Back on Track was intense by design. This was not a social welfare program; it was a law enforcement program. All of the first participants were nonviolent first-time offenders who had started their journey to the Hall of Justice in the back of a squad car. Participants had to first plead guilty and accept responsibility for the actions that had brought them there. We promised that if participants completed the program successfully, we would have their charges expunged, which gave them even more reason to put in the effort. We hadn’t designed a program that was about incremental improvement around the edges. It was about transformation. We knew what these young people were capable of achieving—and we wanted them to see it in themselves. We wanted every participant to reach for the highest bar.
When it came time to identify someone to run the program, one name immediately came to mind. I called Lateefah.
At first, she was reluctant. She had never imagined herself as the kind of person who would work for the DA. “I never wanted to work for the Man,” she told me.
“Well, don’t worry,” I laughed. “You won’t be working for the Man. You’ll be working for me.”
Lateefah worked incredibly hard. And so did the Back on Track students. And on a night I’ll never forget, we got to share in the fruits of that effort together.
Tim, Lateefah, and many others from my office joined me after the court had closed for the evening. We headed down the hall toward the jury assembly room. When we entered, the room was filled with people carrying flowers and balloons. The bustling, joyous mood was not typical in a jury room, to say the least. But this was not a typical night. I walked to the front of the room and opened the ceremonies for the first Back on Track graduation ceremony.
Through the main door, a group of eighteen men and women walked down the aisle to take their seats. With few exceptions, this was the first time in their lives they had ever worn graduation robes. Only a handful of them had ever had an occasion to which they could invite their family, an occasion that would make their loved ones cry happy tears. This celebration was hard-won, and they deserved every minute of it.
In the year since they started the program, each of them had, at a minimum, earned a GED and landed a steady job. They had all done community service—more than two hundred hours of i
t. The fathers among them had paid all of their outstanding child support payments. And they were all drug free. They proved they could do it—and that it could be done.
In exchange for that effort and that success, we were there to keep our promise. In addition to a diploma, the graduates would have their records cleared by a judge who was standing by.
A number of superior court judges volunteered to preside over Back on Track graduations, including my friend John Dearman, a former social worker who became the longest-serving judge in San Francisco’s history. Another among them was Judge Thelton Henderson, an icon in the civil rights movement, who in 1963 lent his car to Martin Luther King Jr. so Dr. King could make his way to Selma after his own car broke down.
Back on Track quickly proved its merit. After two years, only 10 percent of Back on Track graduates had reoffended, as compared with 50 percent for others convicted of similar crimes. It represented smart, effective stewardship of taxpayer dollars, too: Our program cost about $5,000 per participant. For comparison, it costs $10,000 to prosecute a felony case and another $40,000 or more to house someone for a year in the county jail.
Local officials don’t have the ability to make national policy. They have no authority beyond their jurisdiction. But when they land on good ideas, even on a small scale, they can create examples that others can replicate. That was a key goal of ours in creating Back on Track. We wanted to show leaders at every level of government in every state in the union that a reentry initiative could work and was worth trying. So we were especially gratified when the Obama Justice Department adopted Back on Track as a model program.
When I later ran for attorney general, I did so, in no small part, to take the program statewide. And that’s exactly what we did, working in partnership with the LA County Sheriff’s Department to create Back on Track–Los Angeles (BOT-LA), in the largest county jail system in California.
The Truths We Hold Page 6