Soft on police

 For our political book club, for the purposes of primary research, we elected to read Kamala Harris' 2009 book on criminal justice reform, Smart on Crime. 

 

We already discussed it at as much length as we could muster, which was not very much, because the book is both short and fairly repetitive. It's basically a series of heavily overlapping essays on why re-entry programs are good and cutting them in the '80s and '90s was a mistake, which, sure, it was. The book is more remarkable for what isn't there than what is; it's definitely a pre-Ferguson book, and issues like stop and frisk and "officer-involved shootings" are discussed briefly as occasional issues within the system that should be scrubbed wherever they pop up. The level of professional-class institutional faith in the system, that good hardworking people are mostly trying to do their jobs more or less correctly, seems pretty cleaned-up-for-TV if you've ever read the DOJ's Ferguson report, or anything about the Chicago Police Department, or any number of other special investigations into police forces around the country that have been popping up in the last several years.

 

"Crime" here is also portrayed to mean almost exclusively street crime -- stuff people get up to when they don't have a proper job to keep them busy and productive. There's very little mention of the most underprosecuted type of crime in the U.S. -- crime that you need access to fancy institutions to commit, like corporate fraud. For a book published in 2009, meaning it was likely being written as the housing crisis was collapsing the world economy in 2008, this seems a significant omission. 

 

In a lot of the chapters the content is basically fine but the omissions and the tone are what made me uncomfortable; there's a lot of rhetorical covering from the right so there's repeated rhetoric along the lines of how bummed law enforcement is that just locking up masses of people and leaving them in prison isn't enough to fix crime, they really wish it was, but unfortunately the science says we gotta actually help people to reduce recidivism -- don't worry, we're not going soft on them or anything!! It's a bit off-putting.

 

An exception to this is the chapter on sex work, where the content is even worse than the rhetorical style. It's just... it's so bad. It's a very bad chapter. Go read a book or article by actual sex workers instead. Anti-trafficking crackdowns without decriminalizing sex work really fuck with people. 

 

Overall I guess I'm glad I read it because it was interesting to compare it to other criminal justice books we've read in book club, namely The New Jim Crow and Locking Up Our Own, but I didn't really enjoy reading it and I don't think I'll be supporting Harris in the primary unless we wind up in The Worst Timeline and the only folks on my ballot on Super Tuesday are her and Joe Biden.