* KAMALA HARRIS (12): Lateefah Simon had been born in 1977 in San Francisco's Western Addition, a neighborhood in the central city adjoining on Haight-Ashbury. It had once been a center for San Francisco's ethnic Japanese community, but the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII removed them, with a black population taking its place.
While Lateefah had been growing up, Western Addition was suffering from the crack cocaine epidemic, with the associated decline of the neighborhood. She wasn't happy with what she saw and wanted to do something about it, but she was too caught up in the decay: she ended up on probation for shoplifting and dropped out of high school.
Lateefah was working full-time at a Taco Bell when she got a line on an opportunity. There was a social-service organization named the "Center for Young Women's Development" that took young women on the margins, provided them with support, and helped them get jobs. They needed more staff; was Lateefah interested?
She jumped at it. She was still a teenager, with a daughter of her own, but she threw herself into the job, politicking at local government meetings, getting out on the streets to get in touch with girls on the edge, working with them at the center. Kamala thought she was perfect to run BOT -- but when she called up to offer the job, Lateefah wasn't certain the SFDA's office was the place she should be, telling Kamala: "I never wanted to work for the Man."
Kamala laughed and shot back: "Well, don't worry! You won't be working for the Man -- you'll be working for ME!" After laughing hysterically, Lateefah signed up. Although Kamala couldn't have got it from her two notably serious parents, somewhere along the line she picked up a lively and sometimes prankish sense of humor, being quick to laugh enthusiastically.
In any case, with continuous effort BOT was put into motion. A year down the road, the first graduates got their diplomas. It was an appropriately festive occasion, with Kamala describing it:
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Through the main door, a group of eighteen men and women walked down the aisle to take their seats. With a few exceptions, this was the first time in their lives they had ever worn graduation robes. Only a handful of them had ever had an occasion to which they could invite their family ...
In the year since they started the program, each of them had, at a minimum, earned a GED and landed a steady job. They had all done community service -- more than two hundred hours of it. The fathers among them had paid all of their outstanding child support payments. And they were all drug free ...
After two years, only 10 percent of Back on Track graduates had reoffended, as compared with 50 percent for others convicted of similar crimes. ... Our program coat about $5,000 per participant. For comparison, it costs $10,000 to prosecute a felony case and another $40,000 or more to house someone in the county jail.
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BOT graduation ceremonies would generally be officiated by California superior court judges; the state judiciary was inclined to like the program. It even got a nod from the Federal Department of Justice (DOJ), being designated a model program.
* Establishing BOT was something of a high point of Kamala's time as San Francisco District Attorney. Much else happened, of course -- the cases she dealt with as a big-city DA could have been the basis for a long-running hit TV series. She was re-elected to the office in 2007, suggesting that there was no major problem with the way she did the job. Nonetheless, as SFDA Kamala had a limited ability to change the system. In a 2020 interview, Jamilah King -- a reporter for MOTHER JONES who followed Kamala's career -- noted the ambiguity of Kamala's position, saying:
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I think it's incredibly hard to create change from within law enforcement. She was within the confines of a law enforcement system and a criminal justice system that has been very, very slow to change.
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However, as King pointed out, she did what she could:
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I'm from San Francisco. I know folks who've been in the system, and they'll just say flat out: "Look, she's a cop. She put us in jail."
... On the other hand, it's always been really telling for me that there are a lot of organizers and community groups within California and San Francisco's criminal justice reform system that are pretty ride-or-die for her. They don't agree necessarily with all of the decisions she's made, but they recognize that she was one of the few people to even give them a seat at the table.
She's this complicated figure, but I think she's earned the respect of a lot of the people who are doing criminal justice work, who recognize what the confines are. They recognize what's possible, and they also recognize when she's wrong. That's not to say that everybody is in favor of her. But I think there's this long history in San Francisco ... of Black folks in elected office being a little bit more moderate than sort of the white [Liberals] who end up getting the headlines.
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