Kamala Harris Defied Supreme Court Order, Kept Prisoners Incarcerated for Cheap Labor

Kamala Harris’ criminal justice record in California will continue to be a big problem for her in the presidential primary. In addition to being known as the ‘Top Cop,’ Kamala will have to answer for an effort to keep prisoners who were ordered to be released in prison in order to not lose a source of cheap labor.

The Daily Beast: “Ordered to reduce the population of California’s overcrowded prisons, lawyers from then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ 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.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that California’s prisons were so overcrowded that prisoners’ constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment were violated. Years later, the state was ordered to release “non-violent, second-time offenders who have served half of their sentence to be eligible for parole.”

However, Harris’ office was dragged back into court for slow-walking the release process. The argument that Harris’ lawyers in the California Attorney’s General Office made to keep those offenders in prison? They were a source of cheap labor.

The Daily Beast: “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 affect the prison’s labor programs, including one that allowed certain inmates to fight 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 tending 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.”

Most of the prisoners included in the to-be-released population were working as “groundskeepers, janitors and in prison kitchens, with wages that range from 8 cents to 37 cents per hour.”

Where was Harris during all of this? She claims she didn’t learn about the argument her office was making in court until she read about it in the papers.

BuzzFeed News: “I will be very candid with you, because I saw that article this morning, and I was shocked, and I’m looking into it to see if the way it was characterized in the paper is actually how it occurred in court,” Harris told BuzzFeed News in an interview Monday. “I was very troubled by what I read. I just need to find out what did we actually say in court.”

That’s right. Kamala Harris did not know what her own employees were arguing in state court.

However, the filing in the case was signed by Harris, and it argued that extending credits to all minimum custody inmates at this time would severely impact fire camp participation.

Harris’ record as the ‘Top Cop‘ of San Francisco and California will continue to be a hot topic throughout the rest of the Democratic primary. It’s clear that candidates such as Joe Biden and Tulsi Gabbard will continue to hold her accountable for her inconsistent record.