Thread by @WalkerBragman

As media combs her record, it’s time to talk about Kamala Harris’ “Back on Track” re-entry program for first-time, nonviolent drug sales offenders. It was nowhere near as successful as media has painted it.

A thread. jacobinmag.com/2019/09/kamala…

Harris’ stated aim with Back on Track was to reduce prison overcrowding. But rather than overcriminalization, Harris had a theory.

As she told a crowd in 2010, “the one most effective issue we could address on this issue of prison overcrowding, is this issue of recidivism.”

Back on Track was really a pilot program designed to prove that recidivism could be reduced.

With that in mind, what Harris’ office did was select a narrow group of offenders—young, first-time, nonviolent drug sales offenders—and cull from there those deemed likely to succeed.

Already, you should be realizing that this program could never, in any meaningful sense, reduce the prison population. In fact, you can take it one step further and say that targeting prison overcrowding by focusing on recidivism specifically is misguided.

Any real solution to prison overcrowding can’t be a solution that requires a careful selection process for inclusion.

That’s why targeting overcriminalization and overprosecution are more effective remedies. But let’s continue.

Harris’ office screened participants with a 6-week trial course.

After that month and a half, the real work began.

Back on Track required 220 hours of community service and compliance with a personal responsibility plan with benchmarks like signing up for jobs and making child support payments. It also required meeting with a caseworker 3 times per week and appearing in court 3 times a month.

The best part of this program is the fact that under CA law, pre-trial diversion programs required a guilty plea. So failure to comply with this strict regimen risked incarceration.

Keep in mind, this is all for a single nonviolent drug sales offense—first-time offenders.

Predictably, the numbers @MarkColangelo and I were able to find from the San Francisco DA revealed that this program’s participant pool was tiny and its graduating classes even tinier. From our numbers, it seems more people failed or dropped out than successfully graduated.

I think that’s what is most damning of all. Harris has touted the lower recidivism rates among Back on Track graduates as proof of her program’s success—but the issue was never “can we find people who will benefit from this strict regimenting of their lives?” Of course you can.

The issue—which gets to the heart of the very justification for the program—is whether or not a program like this, targeting recidivism, could reduce prison overcrowding.

The answer is no. It did not and never really could.

Apologies if this wasn’t clear above: the six-week trial course was the 220 hours of community service.

Ultimately, Back on Track forced people to into a help program who may not necessarily have needed it and, even if they did, may not have wanted or been ready for it.

A better solution—though less politically advantageous because you don’t get to start a program that you can pitch as a model nationally—would be exercising prosecutorial discretion and not bringing charges against nonviolent drug offenders. Especially not first-time offfenders.

But that was never Harris, as she made clear in this snippet from her 2010 speech at the Commonwealth Club discussing the program.

Part of the reason media has called this program a success is that it was held up as a national model by the DOJ and similar programs have been adopted around the country.

But results—particularly the graduation rate—should matter more.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.