Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make us Safer by Kamala D. Harris. 

4/5 rating. 206 pages.

Book #61 of 2020. Read August 26, 2020.

This is an amazing book about disrupting and changing the way we approach crime prevention and criminal justice.

Kamala does a great job using her experience as a District Attorney to explain many of the myths about the criminal justice system, crime in general, and what needs to change to reduce crime and make our country safer.

Her main takeaways are:

1) Some criminals need to be excluded from society permanently.

2) For those crimes that are severe but where offenders will return to their community, serious efforts at reform need to take place: educational programs, substance-abuse programs, job training, and so many more. But these cases need to be looked at in cases of recidivism and such, not just locking people up as retribution without a view of how to make them positive members of society when they return to it.

3) For nonviolent offenders, community-based interventions and programs need to be implemented. We need to look at how we can break these people of their cycle of release and re-arrests. Like the more serious offenders above, programs need to be thought of for how to effectively use any jail time, but re-entry is also vital for their future.

4) Victims need to be supported and empowered. So often, these people are left without help such as therapy, or community programs to educate, and promote healing after their experience. These people who are not helped can either become victims again or escalate into crime.

(This was written in 2020 before the election.) If you have questions about Kamala, definitely read this book! It gained my trust for how Kamala would act as VP for our country. She is incredibly smart and compassionate, but I love that she is also tough and open to new ways to fix old problems. Hopefully with the authority of Vice President, she could make a huge impact on our crime problems in this country. Her leadership as DA in San Francisco show that she will be great in any position of power. Now it’s time to vote for her and @joebiden in November!!

Quotes:

“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, what’s wrong? What do you want?’ and I wailed back, ‘Fweedom.’”

“The sad fact is that two-thirds of those released from prison or jail re-offend within two or three years. In California, we now spend more than $25 billion annually on crime—more than twice what we spend on higher education—but 70 percent of the 125,000 individuals released from our prisons each year are back behind bars within a couple of years.”

“Smart on Crime has three pillars: maintain a relentless and intense focus on violence and the prosecution of violent criminals; identify key points in the lives of young offenders and stop them from continuing and escalating their criminal behavior; and support victims of crime and, in the process, foster crime prevention.”

“According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 96 percent of all arrests are of nonviolent offenders.”

“What the numbers say loud and clear, however, is that most nonviolent offenders are learning the wrong lesson, and in many cases, they are becoming better and more hardened criminals during their prison stays.”

“The federal government spent more than $36 billion on direct expenditures for criminal and civil justice in fiscal year 2006, for example, while state governments spent over $69 billion, and local governments spent over $109 billion. We absolutely should not and cannot pinch pennies when it comes to convicting and removing violent offenders from our midst; but each nonviolent crime costs many thousands of dollars to prosecute, and it costs $25,000 to $30,000 annually to house each offender in prison.”

“In the chapters that follow, I will show you an award-winning initiative from San Francisco’s County Jail where our innovative Sheriff Michael Hennessey has transformed the days of some violent prisoners from hours of mindless television watching and simmering anger, to intense, twelve-hour sessions involving anger management training, peer counseling, and positive educational programs that sharply reduce violent behavior in those offenders both in jail and after they are released.”

“When you arrest people and send them 200 miles away and think they’ll come back fixed, all you’re really doing is punishing the public. They’ll come out meaner, madder, and more dangerous than when they went in.” – Former Texas District Attorney, Ronnie Earle

“What’s also different is that these individuals, instead of spending months or years in prison, have spent a year working hard and learning to be accountable to their families and communities. While others incarcerated for similar offenses have spent their days in crowded prisons watching television, trying to get their hands on smuggled drugs, and fraternizing with gang members, Back on Track participants have been performing community service. They have learned worklife skills—not just the mechanics of certain jobs, but things like how to behave in the workplace and how to be accountable. They have checked in regularly with the judge who supervises this program, reviews any signs that their commitment to the program has waned, and warns them that such a path will lead straight to prison. They have routinely undergone drug testing, and are graduating from our program drug-free and with, at a minimum, a high-school-equivalency diploma and a steady job. The fathers among them are now in good standing on their child-support payments, and they all have taken parenting classes. Because they have completed this rigorous program, the felony charge is going to be cleared from their records by the end of our ceremony tonight. And that means that their employment prospects will be infinitely better.”

“We did not develop Back on Track out of pity or compassion. We reserve the right to send participants straight to sentencing at any time if they violate the program rules. And if they are charged with a new offense, they go directly to jail, no questions asked. Not everybody makes it. But among those who have, we have reduced the re-offense rate to less than 10 percent in a population in which the average re-offense rate is over 50 percent. For every one hundred participants we have so far served, we have saved our city at least $1 million per year in local jail costs. When you add in the total expense of cases to taxpayers, including court costs, public defenders, state prison, and probation, the savings are closer to $2 million. And we can barely begin to calculate the value of these individuals’ future productivity, taxes and child support paid, and the improvement in the quality of their families.”

“The first and most stubborn myth that surrounds the crime debate, a myth that is a direct product of partisan politics and one that keeps us from reforming our criminal justice system, is that as a law enforcement leader you are either tough on crime or soft on crime. This myth is harmful because it has created campaigns, laws, and initiatives based on false choices. It fuels the notion that we are playing a zero-sum game, in which every dollar spent on crime prevention takes a dollar from a murder investigation. The alternative, and the more productive course is to forge partnerships that operate at different levels and create systems that break complex crime cycles down to elements we can target more effectively.”

“The truly tough response to a crime problem always begins with being smart about it, understanding the causes of crime and what makes individuals offend and re-offend. It takes into account a broader understanding of victims—who they are, how they’re being victimized, and how we might intervene to teach them to protect themselves in the future. This is as true for violent crime as it is for nonviolent crime.”

“As Texas D.A. Ronnie Earle puts it, officials who don’t differentiate between types of crime and just talk tough about all of it ‘are really tougher on the taxpayer than they are on crime. They’re not reducing crime.’”

“The Rockefeller Drug Laws filled prisons, but they didn’t appear to dampen the drug trade. Meanwhile, the combination of large numbers of newly released felons without jobs, in many cases without high school diplomas, and often with an active drug addiction, created what prosecutors in Brooklyn and elsewhere saw as a revolving door of addicts committing crimes to get money for drugs, getting arrested and sent to prison, emerging from prison still wanting drugs, and starting the cycle all over again.”

“We can’t prison-build our way to a safer society.”

“But as we discussed in the last chapter, recent decades reversed the posture of law enforcement, both police and prosecutors, from focusing on preventing crime to reacting to crimes after they occur. The new thinking was: Catch more criminals and lock them up for longer sentences, and the rest will take care of itself. Today, many prosecutors, like myself, have come to believe that this simplistic approach to crime is falling tragically short of the goal of making our streets safer and is emblematic of a system badly in need of reform.”

“A 2008 report by America’s Promise Alliance, which is chaired by Alma Powell, the wife of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, showed that 17 percent of the nation’s fifty largest cities had high school graduation rates lower than 50 percent. In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District.”

“Overall, about 70 percent of U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually.”

“As Secretary Powell put it: ‘When more than 1 million students a year drop out of high school, it’s more than a problem, it’s a catastrophe.’”

“After I took office and began to focus on truancy, I asked for a study of our murder profiles from 2004 to 2008. It turned out that 94 percent of San Francisco’s homicide victims under the age of twenty-five were high school dropouts. The demographics of the murderers are the same.”

“Our jails and prisons are packed to overflowing with nonviolent offenders who are there for drug crimes, property crimes, and parole violations related to previous offenses, and they typically are serving relatively short sentences. Nationally, the average is about two years.”

“The broadly held assumption that simply increasing the penalty for any crime will automatically deter more people from committing the crime is a myth.”

“With strong leadership, we can have attentive policing in poor communities without racial profiling and excessive force. The two are not mutually exclusive.”

“‘Traditional incarceration does not lend itself to introspection or accountability,’ [Sunny Schwartz] notes. ‘That offends me as a taxpayer and as a citizen. I think to be held accountable in a smart, effective way, we need programs from sunup to sundown in prison. Every cell should be filled with educational, vocational, therapeutic programs that respond to the deficiencies and anti-social behavior of the inmates.’”

“We have to ask, ultimately is it safer to the communities to which they eventually will be released to simply warehouse them in prisons where gangs have become increasingly strong and let them ‘do time’ or to develop initiatives in prison that require them to work on anger management, overcome addictions, improve their educational status, and possibly prepare for some kind of job so they can pay their bills.”

“Eventually, we need to evolve to the point where re-entry is an established and respected process that involves partnerships among community stakeholders, and we need to think outside our own boxes not only to deal with re-entering prisoners but to better anticipate what the consequences of re-entry and other smart programs will be in our communities.”

“Prosecute the violent offender, break the cycles of crime, and support and empower the victim.”

“The Fulton County District Attorney’s Office initiated an incentive program at three elementary schools in the Atlanta Public School system that were struggling with high absenteeism. The Dwight Howard Foundation, Target, Inc., and AirTran Airways got together and offered a special incentive for perfect attendance: a new bike and a helmet. The three schools gained a 39 percent overall increase in their perfect attendance record for the 2007-2008 school year. Few things in life are more exciting to a young child than a new bike. Linking that prize to the notion that school attendance matters and that it is a priority for the community is not an obvious activity for a district attorney’s office to coordinate, but I can almost guarantee that there are crimes that don’t happen and don’t have to be prosecuted because many of those children are walking to school dreaming about those bikes instead of ditching class.”

“Says Chief Fealy, ‘I used to do the typical cop thing when crime went up. I’d say “Well, it’s the economy, or there are so many things we can’t control.” But I worked for Chief Stan Knee in Austin, Texas, before I came here, and one day when I said that he looked at me and said, “B.S., Jim. The crime stats are our report card and we’re failing.” That began to open up my eyes. My prior viewpoint was all about response; what I now believe is that through focus and attention we can influence crime.’”

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