Kamala Should Have Smoked A Joint Before Going On The Air With Charlamagne Tha God

Kamala Takes A Tumble-- drawing by Nancy Ohanian

Kamala Harris started the week oddly. The syndicated Breakfast Club with hosts DJ Envy, Angela Yee and Charlamagne Tha God aired an interview with her Monday that ran in almost 40 cities, including NYC (Power 105.1), Houston (KQBT), Boston (WJMN), Detroit (WJLB), Cincinnati (WEBN), Las Vegas (WVEG), Milwaukee (WKKV), Orlando (W283AN), New Orleans (WQUE), Atlanta (WRDG), Miami (WBIM) and two stations in South Carolina-- W257BQ in Charleston and WHTX in Columbia. She was asked to defend her "blackness" because her parents were born in India and Jamaica, she went to high school in Montreal and she's married to a white guy. "I'm black, and I'm proud of being black," she said. "I was born black. I will die black, and I'm not going to make excuses for anybody because they don't understand... "I think they don't understand who black people are. I'm not going to spend my time trying to educate people about who black people are. Because right now, frankly, I'm focused on, for example, an initiative that I have that is called the 'LIFT Act' that is about lifting folks out of poverty."

She also said she has smoked marijuana-- a joint when she was in college (and when it was illegal)-- and that she thinks "it gives a lot of people joy and we need more joy." She says she's for legalization. What DJ Envy and Charlamagne Tha God didn't make Kamala address during their interview was a report that surfaced from the Daily Beast Monday morning, Kamala Harris’ A.G. Office Tried to Keep Inmates Locked Up for Cheap Labor. She has a mixed, though for good, record as D.A. of San Francisco and Attorney General of California. This report by Jackie Kucinich will make that record look even worse-- at least to Democratic primary voters. "Ordered to reduce the population of California’s overcrowded prisons," wrote Kucinich, "lawyers from then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris’s office made the case that some non-violent offenders needed to stay incarcerated or else the prison system would lose a source of cheap labor."

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Plata that California’s prisons were so overcrowded that they violated the Constitution’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Three years later, in early 2014, the state was ordered to allow non-violent, second time offenders who have served half of their sentence to be eligible for parole.

By September 2014, plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit were back in court, accusing California of slow-walking the process, which lawyers for Harris’s office denied.

According to court filings, lawyers for the state said California met benchmarks, and argued that if certain potential parolees were given a faster track out of prison, it would negatively impact the prison’s labor program including one that allowed certain inmates to work fighting California’s wildfires for about $2 a day.

“Extending 2-for-1 credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation-- a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought,” lawyers for Harris wrote in the filing, noting that the fire camp program required physical fitness in addition to a level of clearance that allowed the felon to be offsite.

Not only that, they noted, draining the prisons of “minimum custody inmates” would deplete the labor force both internally and in local communities where low-level, non-violent offenders worked for pennies on the dollar collecting trash and tend to city parks. A federal three-judge panel ordered both sides to confer about the plaintiffs’ demands and the state agreed to extend the 2-for-1 credits to all eligible minimum security prisoners.

“Once we ridiculed and flagged them for that, they changed their tune, but that was their initial response,” Donald Specter, executive director of the Prison Law Office and lead counsel on Brown v. Plata, said.

When the slave labor argument was made public, Harris ordered her staff not to use the argument any longer. She didn't change the policy, just did a p.r. move to make her department look less contemptible.

Prison Law Office Executive Director Specter is on the side of progressives who point out that this incident "is just a small part of Harris’s long career as a prosecutor, which has drawn scrutiny from Democrats and activists who describe her as a late comer to the social justice movement. 'As far as I know, she did very little if anything to improve the criminal justice system when she was attorney general... The way I look at it is, she was really late to the party and more importantly when she had the authority to do something as attorney general she was absent. I’m very skeptical of her views of criminal justice at this point, she basically carried on the policies of her predecessor for the most part in battling us on getting the prison population down and anything else that the government wanted to do to prevent prison conditions from improving'."