'Kamala the Kop' says she's cool with weed, but helped imprison more than 1,500 people on pot charges
Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., wants voters to think she’s down with the reefer madness.
But don’t be fooled. The likelihood that this is a genuine ideological evolution on her part is extremely low. Harris' supposed pro-weed pivot is almost certainly a political calculation, especially in light of what we know about her past as a ruthless, anti-pot crusader, including the many hundreds of people who were sent to prison for marijuana-related offenses during her tenure as California's attorney general.
When Harris served as the Golden State's AG “at least 1,560 people were sent to state prisons for marijuana-related offenses between 2011 and 2016,” the
Washington Free Beacon reported, citing data provided by OpenJustice and the California Department of Corrections.
That’s an estimated 1,560 people in the span of just five years. That’s an average rate of 312 people imprisoned for pot-related offenses
per year. Those are figures that would make even former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a noted anti-marijuana crusader, beam with pride.
Additionally, the figure quoted by the Free Beacon “is necessarily an undercount of the total number of people actually prosecuted for marijuana offenses during Harris's term as Attorney General. The sharp decline between 2011 and 2012 is not a reflection of leniency on Harris's part, but because of something called Public Safety Realignment.”
The report explains:
A federal court found in 2011 that California's state-level prisons were dangerously overcrowded, ordering it to reduce populations to more manageable levels. To do so, the state began filtering many lower-level offenders—including drug offenders—into county jails, meaning that they dropped out of state-level totals but were still incarcerated.
Under realignment, "most lower-level offenders with no record of sexual, violent, or serious crimes now serve sentences in county jail or under county probation supervision," the Public Policy Institute of California
noted in 2015.
County-level populations
ticked up following realignment, but no data source breaks those figures down by offense. As such it is not clear how many additional marijuana offenders were prosecuted under Harris and then diverted to county jails. As a result, 1,560 is the lower bound of individuals sent to prison by Harris for marijuana from 2011 to 2016.
Translation: The number of people imprisoned under Harris’ watch for committing pot-related offenses may actually be far greater than 1,560, which is just another reminder that when it comes to Harris, there's no good cop/bad cop. It's all bad cop/bad cop. Now, fast-forward just a couple of years, and the senator is regaling listeners Monday with tales of her past experimentation with pot.