The Truths We Hold

An American Journey

By Kamala Harris

The reason we have public offices of prosecution in America is that, in our country, a crime against any of us is considered a crime against all of us. Almost by definition, our criminal justice system involves matters in which the powerful have harmed the less powerful, and we do not expect the weaker party to secure justice alone; we make it a collective endeavor. That’s why prosecutors don’t represent the victim; they represent “the people” – society at large.

(Harris 2019, 28)

The criminal justice system punishes people for their poverty. Where is the justice in that? Between 2000 and 2014, 95 percent of the growth in the jail population came from people awaiting trial. This is a group of largely nonviolent defendants who haven’t been proven guilty, and we’re spending $38 million a day to imprison them while they await their day in court. Whether or not someone can get bailed out of jail shouldn’t be based on how much money he has in the bank. Or the color of his skin: black men pay 35 percent higher bail than white men for the same charge. Latino men pay nearly 20 percent more.

This isn’t the stuff of coincidences. It is systemic. And we have to change it.

In 2017, I introduced a bill in the Senate to encourage states to replace their bail systems, moving away from arbitrarily assigning cash bail and toward systems where a person’s actual risk of danger or flight is evaluated. If someone poses a threat to the public, we should detain them. If someone is likely to flee, we should detain them. But if not, we shouldn’t be in the business of charging money in exchange for liberty. My lead co-sponsor in this effort is Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky with whom I vehemently disagree on most things. But this is one of those issues that he and I agree on – that all of us should agree on. It’s an issue that can – and does – transcend politics, one way or another, we’re going to get it done.