The Kamala Harris campaign is over. So is the era of the tough-on-crime Democrat

After being lauded as one of the strongest contenders in a very crowded 2020 Democratic nominee field, Kamala Harris has ended her campaign. While the decision might seem premature, given that she had already qualified for the next round of debates, it seems like a wise decision for a candidate who went into the campaign season expecting her background as a prosecutor to be an asset, but quickly found herself defending her record more than boasting about it.

Harris’s firm-handed approach to criminal justice may have been popular when she held the office, but it is increasingly out of step with current thinking and feeling on criminal justice. There has been a strong shift in the last decade on issues like incarceration, cash bail, the criminalization of drug use and sex work, and her record was often diametrically opposed to new ideas on these matters. Her inability to understand that shift, let alone elegantly navigate it, seems to have been her downfall.

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But more than simply resulting in one fewer candidate on the debate dais, Harris’s exit from the primary process might signal the death of the tough-on-crime Democrat, a role Harris was once able to easily play on her path to power. The us vs them mentality, after all, only works if the majority of the electorate considers themselves as one of the “us”. With the world’s highest incarceration rates and a record number of people under supervision in probation and parole systems, however, more and more Americans are finding themselves or their loved ones as one of “them”, the ones the others want to be protected from.

It’s easy to see how Harris might have missed the change in the culture, as her career started in an era when building supermax prisons and California’s three strikes law enjoyed tremendous support. Four years after she became a deputy district attorney in 1990, Bill Clinton would sign the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which resulted in the largest increase in incarceration rates in American history. It not only expanded the number of offenses that qualified as federal crimes and increased the number of death penalty offenses, it also eliminated Pell Grants for poor prisoners to continue their education while imprisoned, stripping away even the veneer of incarceration being a time of rehabilitation rather than pure punishment.

As Harris ascended into the position of San Francisco district attorney in 2003, the electorate made it clear its primary concern was safety. It was the year of the Abu Ghraib scandal, when photos surfaced of army and CIA personnel torturing and humiliating prisoners in an Iraqi prison. And while there was some outrage, there was a greater sense that Americans would tolerate whatever it took to “keep us safe”, even if that included torture, the loss of civil liberties and the beginning of mass surveillance.

At the time, then, taking action like jailing mothers for their children’s truancy – school dropouts were often scapegoated as budding delinquents and criminals, with education being the only exit ramp from a depraved life – or prosecuting sex workers in a misguided attempt to protect women from trafficking were seen by the public as being reasonable approaches to crime prevention.

But that era has ended, and not with the perfectly safe society envisioned by the politicians that advocated for a tough approach on law and order. Instead, we got private companies profiting wildly from our prison system, as prisoners and their families are charged exorbitantly for reading books, calling loved ones, or even visitation. Companies who use underpaid prisoner labor face boycotts and backlashes. Controversies about the militarization of our cities’ police forces continue to grow. And polls suggest a growing number of voters care deeply about making real changes to this system.

With a growing prison abolition movement on the left, with some of its ideas and figures gaining mainstream attention, Harris’s record looks more punitive than protective, and she had not adequately addressed things like the times when her office fought to keep people behind bars even when their convictions were overturned or lab work was revealed to be inaccurate. Every few months there seems to be a new documentary series on an innocent man imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit showing up on Netflix. Her record seems to hold as many landmines as goldmines.

It didn’t help that Harris’s campaign had so many former Hillary Clinton staffers or that she sought the support of so many of Clinton’s donors. Nor did she seem to learn from Clinton’s mistakes. The re-emergence of Clinton’s description of juvenile offenders as “super-predators” from her time as first lady and her refusal to sincerely apologize for it was a major misstep in the campaign, with many speculating that her pro-law and order record was ultimately related to the low turnout of black voters. Harris has similarly struggled to explain her past, or describe how her future approach might be different. This made her efforts to align herself with the demands of activists, by coming out in support of the decriminalization of sex work and other hot button issues, read more as opportunistic than sincere.

Other candidates are faring better with the changing times. Elizabeth Warren has spoken of treating gun violence not solely as a policing issue but “as a public health issue”, a line that came straight out of the far left and has been used with increasing frequency among politicians, journalists and policymakers. Julián Castro has linked the violent and lethal acts of police with the larger issue of crime and violence in America, something that would have seemed unthinkable in the law and order days of a mere decade ago. None of the candidates have been declaring a need for more cops on the street, which used to be a standard line during debates in the last few decades.

Of course, not every Democrat has embraced the shift in thinking and feeling around issues of criminal justice. Joe Biden is still using his work in getting the Violence Against Women Act passed as a sign of his tremendous feminist spirit, despite the fact that the VAWA is increasingly understood as being ineffectual at best and damaging at worst at addressing the problem of domestic and sexual violence. Pete Buttigieg is polling at 0% with black voters, possibly related to his blundering attempts to address the police violence scandals in South Bend. But neither candidate’s campaign has been so dependent on their approach to justice, and each has other strengths they can point to.

Those remaining in the race should learn from Harris’s failure, and come up with plans to dismantle the prison industrial complex the Reagans, Bushes and Clintons worked so hard to build up. The tough on crime era is over, although society will be dealing with its aftermath for years to come.