Bernie stumbles

[SergeStorms]

56. I agree wholeheartedly...

that he U.S. prison system is completely broken. And yes, marijuana offenders, even sellers, should be released. We can thank Ronnie Rayguns for closing the mental health facilities and pawning them off on law enforcement. There used to be places for the mentally ill to get treatment, and it wasn't in prison. We can thank republicans for turning them out on the streets.

Kamala Harris's contribution to the problem was extremely minimal, at the worst. Coming from a law enforcement background would make her acutely aware of the problems with both our justice and penal systems. Here's some information from Mother Jones about her background in the justice system.

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"At the time, California led the nation in tough-on-crime legislation like three-strikes laws. As a prosecutor in communities like Oakland and Richmond in the early ’90s, Harris had had a front-row seat to the carnage the crack cocaine epidemic wrought on African American communities. “She [was] very clear that the war on drugs [was] an abject failure,” says Tim Silard, an advocate for civil rights and income equality whom Harris tapped to help run Back on Track. As Harris would later write of her time in the DA’s office, some 60 percent of the new felony cases annually were nonviolent drug crimes. “Many of the perpetrators are repeat offenders who commit a crime days after being released from jail or prison for the previous crime,” she explains in Smart on Crime.
“You can bring your advocacy into the office, but do you forever want to be on the stairs yelling and begging for people to support you, your cause? Why can’t you fix it from the inside?”

Harris saw this as both a vicious cycle and a drain on resources. “Each one involves an arrest, a booking, a prosecutor’s time, a judge’s time, often a public defender’s time, a stay in jail of short or long duration, and a probation officer’s time, for which taxpayers foot the bill,” she writes in her book. “These crimes carry all sorts of collateral and psychic costs as well—the social damage of a neighborhood from drug dealing or the cost of putting an offender’s children in foster care.”

So she set out to build a program for people who, if reached in time, were less likely to reoffend: first-time nonviolent drug offenders, specifically those aged 18 to 30. If these offenders pleaded guilty, they could join a 12- to 18-month program of individualized support, which included job training, more than 200 hours of community service, and a requirement to find steady employment or enroll in school. It leaned heavily on public-private partnerships to create job and support services. The DA’s office reserved the right to jail participants if they broke any of the rules—even missing appointments—or were charged with another crime. At the end, there was a graduation at which a judge, who typically volunteered his or her time, would expunge the felony charge from the participant’s record.
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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/the-secret-to-understanding-kamala-harris/

I believe Ms. Harris would be an active reformer of the U.S system that is so completely out of whack. As a woman District Attorney in San Francisco, and being a woman of color, she has a unique perspective on the problems inherent in the justice and penal systems. I trust her to reform both. Just my two cents.