Kamala D. Harris - Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutors Plan to Make Us Safer

Smart on Crime

A Career Prosecutors Plan to Make Us Safer

Kamala D. Harris
WITH JOAN OC. HAMILTON

Copyright 2009 by Kamala D. Harris.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

All quoted material is based on personal conversations with the authors unless otherwise noted.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

eISBN: 978-0-8118-7619-3

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

For my mother, Shyamala G. Harris (19382009), the toughest, smartest, and most loving person I have ever known.

Good choices demand a clear understanding of whats at stake. As a career prosecutor, I believe that nothing is more important than how we choose to keep ourselves, our families, and each other safe. Unfortunately, there are substantial gaps and flaws in the ways we handle crime today. If we choose merely to perpetuate the status quo, we will do so at great costa cost we can ill afford. We will miss the opportunity to improve public safety, and we will incur huge and unnecessary financial costs. It is well within our reach to find better solutions, to create a more effective criminal justice system, and to forge true partnerships between communities and law enforcement.

I am convinced that our country has an opportunity to adopt a modern, cost-effective crime-fighting agenda that delivers the safety we deserve. It is my hope that this book can play a part in that work by exposing some of the myths about crime that have bound us to ineffective approaches. I want to illuminate promising new models that we can build upon and use to make safety something entire communities both demand and deliver. I see extraordinary, exciting opportunities for change.

Crime and optimism do not always go hand in hand. But optimism and problem solving are part of my DNA. I was born in 1964 in Oakland, California, to two graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley. They came from very different cultures. My father, Donald, grew up in a large family in Jamaica, where he excelled in school, became a national scholar, and earned the opportunity to study economics at U.C. Berkeley. My mother, Shyamala, was born in India; she was the daughter of a diplomat from southern India who traveled the world as a government official. He didnt flinch at sending his nineteen-year-old daughter to the United States to pursue her passion and talent for science, specifically endocrinology and the complex mechanisms of cancer. My mother was supposed to return home to India and an arranged marriage when her studies were complete. But she was drawn to the Berkeley civil rights movement where she met my father, and she opted to sidestep traditions that, in my family, go back to 500 B.C. She pursued a marriage based on love instead, one of the greatest expressions of optimism any of us makes. That choice produced my younger sister, Maya, and me.

My parents marriage ultimately did not last. Nonetheless, Maya and I grew up with a deep sense of the richness of our parents cultures and their love of and appreciation for new ideas. I remember our trips to Jamaica when I was a child. I remember sitting on my grandmothers front porch for hours chewing on sugarcane. My father and uncles would talk to us about the complicated struggles of the people of Jamaicathe history of slavery, colonialism, and immigration.

Meanwhile, every two years we traveled to India, where my earliest memories are of walking along the beach with my grandfather and his friends, retired public servants who had spent their careers in government, working to solve public problems. I would watch them play poker and bridge and listen to them talk about politics, corruption, and reform. My grandfather would talk to me about the importance of doing the right thing, the just thing. He was part of the movement for India to gain independence, and later became Joint Secretary for the Indian government, a post akin to our Deputy Secretary of State. He had numerous foreign service assignments, including several years as an advisor to the newly independent government of Zambia in Africa. My grandmother was betrothed to him at age twelve and began living with him at sixteen, and she was quite a force in her own right. After they were married, she would sometimes take to the streets with a bullhorn to talk to poor women about how they could get birth control. My grandfather would joke that her community activism would be the end of his career. That never stopped her. She is still vibrant and interested in the world at eighty-six, and many a morning my mother would receive a phone call at dawn because my grandmother had read online about my career or some political development in San Francisco or elsewhere in the United States that she wanted to discuss and debate. Both of my grandparents impressed upon me their conviction that we each have the capacity and the responsibility to work for a better world and a more just society.

Maya and I were raised by people who had a passion for life and were engaged in the world around them, whether that world was Jamaicas struggling economy, the business of state for India, or the marches taking place in my hometown. As for me, I had a strollers eye view of a watershed moment in our countrys struggle for social justice, the civil rights movement that unfolded in Berkeley and Oakland. My early memories are of a sea of legs marching around the streets and the sounds of shouting. The conversations in our apartment in the Berkeley flatlands area on Bancroft Avenue would go late into the night, and, of course, we picked up the language of the movement. My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler: She leaned down to ask me, Kamala, whats wrong? What do you want? and I wailed back, Fweedom.

I spent many of my after-school days at the nursery school below our apartment. It was run by a wonderful, elegant woman from Louisiana named Regina Shelton, who became our second mother while ours was at work. Mrs. Shelton was a traditional southern woman in many waysparticularly in her kitchen, where she made fresh biscuits, peach cobbler, gumbo, and black-eyed peas. She always had children running around the house, but when it was time to serve her husband, Arthur, his dinner every night, she would shoo everyone away from the table and serve Arthur his dinner as if he were the king of Berkeley.

Ours was not an economically rich neighborhood, but it was a place where many families were deeply involved in the local community. In addition to running her nursery school, Mrs. Shelton, for example, constantly reached out to neglected children and to women who were struggling to hold their families together. She took in many foster children, and adopted at least one that I recall. Mrs. Shelton conveyed not only what was right and wrong but the importance of nurturing all the neighborhoods children. She never talked about these wonderful deeds; that would have violated some deep code of values where the starting point was that, of course, you treat all children in your community as your own; of course you reach out to a mother in hard times and share what you have, even if it isnt very much.

Like so many of us, I am a blend of my experiences and my history, my parents passions and interests, my communitys values, and the fast-changing world in which I grew up. Over time, I became very focused on the idea of justice and doing the right thing, echoing my grandfathers great preoccupations. And ultimately, I became an attorney because I was inspired by towering figures from the civil rights movement who found a way to channel the passion of activists for justice into important legislation and reformspecifically, Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Constance Baker Motley. They reached back to the intentions of the founding fathers of our country and created a more just world by interpreting those fundamental principles of equality, making them as relevant in the 1970s as they had been in the 1770s. They used the courts to go from outside to inside, to get a seat at the table and move government in a more just direction.