How America can get 'Smart on Crime'

How can we successfully rehabilitate prisoners? Can law enforcement better use technology to solve crimes? In her new book “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safe," San Francisco’s District Attorney Kamala Harris — who has been called “the female Barack Obama” — examines new, unconvential ideas on how our society can reform our broken criminal justice system. Read an excerpt:

Getting back on track
Responding to violent crimes and supporting victims is the everyday work of a district attorney. Like our colleagues in a wide array of emergency services, we are primed for a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week response to the threats against our community and the questfor justice for victims. But there is another dimension to the way I have come to view my responsibility that is also important. Twice a year there is an event that I and many others in my office attend after the courts close. As the clock ticks on through the day, we all cross our fingers that the fates spare us an emergency call for at least a few hours. Because if the essential and sometimes grim business of prosecuting offenders and defending the rights of crime victims is what occupies the bulk of our days, this event is a unique chance to hope. It’s evidence that we have found a new way to get tough on the underlying dynamics of a huge category of crime that is bursting the seams of our system.

Most recently, this event began in the early evening in the jury assembly room of San Francisco’s courthouse, across the street from City Hall. Unlike the responsible but often annoyed and preoccupied citizens who line up most mornings to report for jury service, this night a group of upbeat people, young and old, are entering the room, smiling and chatting happily.

I step to the podium and greet those on hand. Then, I turn and direct everyone’s attention to the main door. The crowd stands and claps loudly as eighteen men and women in black graduation robes walk down the aisle to take their seats. As they file in, many are smiling, some are serious, some are clearly fighting back tears.

Most of the people in gowns are in their twenties, but only a couple have ever worn a graduation robe before. At a time of life when many young people their age were taking their SATs and thumbing through college guides, some of these individuals had already dropped out of school, already fathered or given birth to one or more children, and already started making serious mistakes.

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My staff and I did not meet this group under pleasant circumstances. Each began his or her journey to our Hall of Justice in the back of a squad car after an arrest, one of 17,000 felony arrests the San Francisco Police Department makes each year. Each resembled many thousands of offenders that we charge and send to jail for the same crimes. And each spent some time with a prosecutor who laid out some cold, hard facts about the consequences of what he or she had done — consequences that had earned each of them the prospect of a prison sentence and the lifelong stigma that attends a felony conviction. Not so long ago, the District Attorney was the last person these people wanted to see.

So, why are we here? Not only their friends and families, but several judges, city officials, and district attorneys from other parts of the state are attending this graduation ceremony. What’s different about these people? How did it happen that the same prosecutors who regularly charge suspects with crimes are now greeting this group with smiles and applause?

The answer is that this group represents a new approach to an expensive and discouraging problem. The graduating class of our pioneering Back on Track program—is evidence that there are better and more effective ways to approach aspects of our crime problem than the one that helped create the revolving door to which we’ve become resigned. This initiative reflects one of the three components of what we call our Smart on Crime agenda in San Francisco. The first is a determined and intense focus on violent crime. The second is a commitment to empowering victims to recover from crimes, to attain a feeling that justice has been achieved, and to avoid becoming victims in the future. Back on Track falls into the category called “re-entry.” It attacks the cycles of crime that result in that revolving door, and it is designed to create success stories like that of a man I introduce to the group tonight.

Robert Lamson (not his real name) is thirty-eight years old.[1] He is a single parent to a total of seven children, his own biological children and children of other family members who were unable to raise and support them. Three years ago, he was out of work and living in a homeless shelter with his children. He says, “I was stressed out about not having a job and being able to pay bills. I chose to do something I had no business doing — I chose to sell drugs.”

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Lamson was not a violent man, and he had never previously been convicted of a crime. He was not a drug user. But after his arrest in 2005, the prosecutor who looked at his record thought Lamson’s parenting responsibilities in particular suggested he would be a good candidate for Back on Track, then a brand new program.

Fast forward. Just four years later, Lamson is a valued employee at an oil refinery, where he works as a supervisor. He has purchased his first home. He tells me he has recently experienced the bittersweet emotions of watching his oldest child leave home to attend Spellman College. He makes sure I realize that his next-oldest child is on track to follow her sister to Spellman.

Like Robert Lamson, the people seated in front of me have all made terrible decisions that once threatened to forever limit their prospects. The program participants were picked for particular attributes. They had been arrested for selling drugs, but they were not drug addicts. They did not have prior felony convictions; they were not gang members; they did not possess a gun; and they were not dealing drugs near schools. We gave priority to individuals with children. These attributes are common to thousands of people arrested every year.

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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.

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