Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer

Who actually votes for people based on reading a book written by the candidate? I do. Barack Obama’s books were what convinced me that he had a decent balance of soul and pragmatism to capture the imagination of the American people so I eagerly signed up for his campaign. You should know the rest of the story. Now we live in a dystopian world post-Obama that confirms we literally cannot have nice things—the supply chain is teetering on the brink of collapse. A slew of candidates put their hats in the ring for the 2020 election. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Warren girl because she is more of a nerd and striver than I will ever be, but with the same anger (and awkwardness). No one else likes her because apparently the ability to drink beer with your national executive is a crucial part of the job during pandemics. I also liked Kristen Gillibrand because Hilary groomed her, but she was made on the streets. OK, not literally, but if the world hardens the mother who worked for big firms until she curses openly in public, then that is a Venn diagram that I cannot ignore and embrace.
Then there is Kamala D. Harris. As Obama would say, let me be clear. I liked her because out of all the candidates, she seemed not to get shaken when physically confronted in public, and I was sure that if Presidon’t started to get too close to her on the debate stage, she would shank him with her eyes, and God help him if she had coffee. She stood out because of her ability to verbally cut people to their face and find the soundbite. She is better than me. The bonus is that she also happens to be a biracial (different blend) black woman, which I knew would not be a bonus in the real world, and I was right. She is also married to a white guy and was a prosecutor, which I do not have a problem with, but other people seemed to distrust her. I have no idea if they are right or not. It is true that not all skin folk are kinfolk, but how do I decide these things? Books! I immediately requested her books from the library and proceeded not to read them until long after she stopped running for President, and somehow managed to wait so long that she is suddenly germane to the national political discourse again as a potential running mate for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe “It is a big fucking deal” Biden. Sigh. I only blame Obama for a few things and elevating Biden to becoming a viable presidential candidate after he tried and failed a zillion times in my lifetime is one of them, but will I vote for him? I would vote for anything or anyone else. The bar is low.
I started with Harris’ first book, Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. It felt as if it was written with the veneer of convincing the average person of her platform on criminal law and policy reform, but actually feels like a series of bullet points and platitudes that needed to be expanded to what sounds like a small amount of pages, around two hundred, but was roughly one hundred ninety-nine pages more than she needed or than her ghost writer, Joan O’C. Hamilton, could make interesting.
If I read Sarah Palin’s book (it was a tongue-in-cheek gift), and it is more engrossing than Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer, but The Truths We Hold ends up being better, I am going to blame Hamilton, not Harris. You had one job! I understand that Harris was still a local, upcoming star, not the national voice that she is today, but come on! You want to sell books, don’tcha! Warren’s book was boring because she has the heart of a policy wonk and a lawyer, which is the death of anything resembling literary excellence, but it had flashes of humanity and personality. I always said that law killed poetry for me, but if Harris is to blame for this barely readable pamphlet, law ran rampant and murdered prose, sent death threats to the ability to layout a proposal in a detailed or unique manner then ran amuck with speechwriters in outlining her proposals with other people’s stories and names.
Maybe it is not Harris’ fault. Maybe it is the world. In order to get anything done, you have to incessantly repeat yourself, keep things simple, then dilute reasonable, obvious concepts so they do not even have the faintest whiff of anything that sounds remotely liberal. Being black makes that job even harder. People looked at Obama’s skin and thought he was Che Guevara when he was always a moderate. Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer shows that as a woman and a black biracial person, Harris has to be shown as tough on crime and unrelenting, and she is risking her political clout by merely suggesting that maybe punishment should also contemplate rehabilitation and reentry into society as a crime prevention technique, not a standalone, common sense goal worthy of pursuit.
Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer shows that Kamala is not a woman with an innovative vision that she crafted on her own. She is a woman who is willing to depart from traditional bureaucracy if people with vision can prove through practical application that their ideas work elsewhere, but I think that it would be hard to get her to spearhead a proposal or question established thinking about a problem, which may explain why some people who are sex workers, not exploited victims, are so against her. I know that this book is old—it was published in 2009, and criminal law is definitely not my area of expertise, but as an uncreative lawyer who tends to believe what I am told until proven otherwise, even I thought that the broken windows theory of policing was just an excuse to racially profile and actually disproven yet Harris casually and unquestioningly discusses the theory in her book in support of some of her reform policies. We both cannot have the same blindspots, and the one with more power and ability to change things needs to be more perspicacious. It is a common human flaw, but one not usually so obvious when I am reading a book that the author believes is presenting the best version of her professional self.
I wish that someone with more criminal law expertise could read Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer and do a fact check to see which concepts are painfully outdated and actually could lead to more problems in criminal enforcement but seem harmless and helpful to an acolyte such as myself. Even in the worst-case scenario, Harris is still better and more open than many other candidates to change things and rethink traditional approaches, just not as much as she thinks she does.