Kamala Harris Once Sought to Reform Mass Incarceration. Does That Matter to Prison Families?

Barbara Allan was 30 years old when her estranged husband Gene murdered his own father in her old home on Long Island. It was 1966 and Allan had just fled her abusive marriage with her two young daughters. If she hadn’t, she may well have been the one to end up shot dead on their kitchen floor.

Despite his abuse, Allan spent years visiting Gene behind bars, first at the Nassau County Jail and then at prisons in upstate New York. She found that the system that was supposed to keep people like her safe instead felt intimidating, dehumanizing, and counterproductive. She felt like she’d been punished with a kind of invisible sentence that ran parallel to his, only she did her time outside prison walls. In the 1970s, Allan co-founded the support group Prison Families Anonymous for relatives and loved ones of incarcerated people. Over the next few decades, she watched the expanding prison system catch more and more people into its grip. “Every time I thought about stepping back a bit, another tentacle drew me in,” she later wrote in a memoir. Now 88, she describes a sense of sadness at the entrenched machinery of mass incarceration “where punishment, revenge, and a lack of humanity is the norm.”

I first met Allan in 2015 at a conference connecting families of the incarcerated, in Dallas, Texas. At the time, I was reporting on then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s promises to roll back the era of mass incarceration, a vow that was met with skepticism by many attendees. Bill Clinton, after all, was responsible for some of the worst “tough on crime” laws of the 1990s, from the 1994 crime bill to the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Hillary Clinton herself had fed the myth of the juvenile “superpredator.” For many incarcerated people and their loved ones, the Democrats’ newfound embrace of criminal justice reform was highly suspect.

If there was a Democratic candidate who could have reached such an audience years later, it might have been Kamala Harris. Elected senator on the same night that Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential race, she went on to sponsor legislation to make the criminal justice system a little more equitable and humane. Although misgivings about her career as a prosecutor would derail her campaign during the 2020 presidential primary, her rise to the 2024 ticket was a chance to reintroduce herself to American voters, including the millions of people impacted by mass incarceration.

Instead, Harris has remained silent. In the years since her first run for president, the political mood has shifted back against criminal justice reform. The progressive gains on policing and bail policies following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 have given way to a new wave of “tough on crime” politics. Donald Trump, who signed the bipartisan First Step Act, has doubled down on his racist fearmongering about crime.

For anyone who pays attention to electoral politics, Harris’s abandonment of prison reform should come as no surprise. Nevertheless, Allan is firmly in Harris’s camp when it comes to the 2024 election. She summed up her feelings by sharing an exchange she had with a man at a diner in New York, who asked if she planned to vote for Trump. “I’d rather vote for my cocker spaniel,” she replied.

Allan mostly avoids talking politics with her fellow activists. Doing so would only interfere with her primary mission, which is to support prison families regardless of their political views. But she admitted that she does not have much patience for those who criticize Harris’s career as a prosecutor. “She has always talked about reentry and giving people an opportunity when they come out.” Besides, Allan sees Trump as a danger to future generations: “I’m old but I have grandchildren.”

For Allan, the reversal of Roe v. Wade was especially devastating. The lack of abortion access was inextricable to her own story. At a speech delivered in New York a few years ago, she revealed that Gene’s mother died as a result of a self-inflicted abortion when he was only 3 years old. The tragedy left him to be raised by his abusive father, who later became his victim. “I often think, if my mother-in-law had lived, what a different life he would’ve had,” she said.

A tent set up to resemble a solitary confinement cell outside the Connecting 4 Justice International conference in Ashland, Ohio, on September 19, 2024. Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Mutual Indifference

I reconnected with Allan last month, at the Connecting 4 Justice International conference in Ashland, Ohio. The three-day event was a revamped version of the 2015 convening and the first to be held in person since the start of the pandemic. On the campus of Ashland University, a square canvas tent stood at the entrance of the conference, painted to look like a solitary confinement cell. At the registration table, attendees were invited to individualize their lanyards with ribbons reading “Troublemaker” and “Plays Well With others.” (Allan chose one that read “Been There, Done That.”)

The conference was small, with just several dozen people in the main ballroom at one time. A lot of attendees tuned in remotely, bringing the total number to about 200 people, according to organizer Kayla Victor, whose mother, Carolyn Esparza, founded the conference. The original vision was of a gathering that would bring prison families together with their broader community, to help raise awareness among Americans of how many of their friends, neighbors, and co-workers have been impacted by mass incarceration. But this has proven challenging. “You can’t make people care, is one thing I’ve learned,” Victor said. This is especially true of people in elected office. When I met Esparza in 2015, she was blunt: “I don’t trust any politician. Any.”

Her attitude was shared by most people I spoke to at the conference. While there were plenty who leaned toward Harris over Trump, they mostly regarded her as the lesser of two evils — and almost no one seemed aware of her previous efforts around criminal justice reform. As in 2015, the upcoming election was nowhere on the conference agenda, and most attendees were not particularly eager to discuss what the candidates might mean for prison families. “They probably don’t care enough to even think about that,” one woman said, joking, “I might write in myself.”

Yet Ashland itself was a good reminder of how much one presidential administration can do to change the lives of people in prison — for better or worse. The small Christian school, located roughly halfway between Columbus and Cleveland, has become one of the leading purveyors of education for incarcerated people, thanks to the restoration of Pell Grants for prison schooling. Two decades after the crime bill stripped funds for prison education, the Obama administration began the Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative. The Trump administration expanded access to Pell Grants and President Joe Biden has sought to increase funding. According to the Marshall Project, as of late 2020, “the university’s correctional education program was able to spread to more than 100 prisons and jails in 13 states, from Louisiana to Minnesota.”

Some have raised criticism over Ashland’s model of prison education, which takes place entirely online through tablets provided by prison telecom giant JPay. But for those on the inside, the programming can offer a critical lifeline. Mario Redding came to the conference with his wife Destinee, just three months after being released from 17 years in prison. He was proud to have graduated from Ashland’s college program. “I left with a bachelor’s and a 3.7 GPA,” he said.

Redding grew up in Cleveland and went to jail in 2007. He was just beginning his sentence when Barack Obama was elected. As a young Black man, seeing the first Black president in the White House packed a lot of symbolic power. It didn’t convince him that he could be president but that “I can do great things. And I gotta do it in my own unique way.”

Redding dedicated himself to books, everything from Frederick Douglass to Trump’s “The Art of the Deal,” which he read twice. In a capitalist society, he said, one has to understand how money and power operate. Although he understood why many people dismissed Trump as a racist, Redding considered him something of an “evil genius”; there were plenty of people in his neighborhood who were attracted to the image of the successful businessman. While Harris’s appeal as a Black woman was considerable, her candidacy was hurt by her past as a prosecutor and association with Biden, whose tenure as U.S. senator helped drive mass incarceration. “Joe Biden literally wrote the 1994 Crime Bill,” said Redding.

A formerly incarcerated presenter, David Nalls, said he was open to the possibility that Harris might change the criminal justice system for the better. “As a prosecutor, she had a duty,” he said. “She chose to stay on that side of the fence and to try to clean things up in the community.” Conference speaker Kyle Hedquist, who was serving life in Oregon until his sentence was commuted in 2022, saw reason for optimism in the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who restored voting rights to more than 55,000 formerly incarcerated people, “which is not an easy thing to accomplish,” Hedquist said.

All of these men said that there were other issues besides criminal justice that were important to the election. Redding was especially passionate about education, which he sees as the key to securing the future of the next generation. “I went to suburban schools and I went to hood schools as a child and I clearly see the difference,” he said. If there was one issue for the candidates to address that would make him take notice, it would be that. But he had yet to hear much about education at all.

Mario Redding attends the Connecting 4 Justice International conference in Ashland, Ohio, just three months after being released from prison, on Sept. 20, 2024. Photo: Liliana Segura/The Intercept

Lived Experiences

The conference was a mix of plenary sessions and breakout presentations across a range of subjects, from an introduction to restorative justice to a workshop on ESL education for incarcerated people. But much of the discussion came back to the stigma and day-to-day hardships of having a loved one in prison.

One group exercise was aimed at navigating difficult conversations using a series of hypothetical scenarios: a mother afraid to tell her son that his dad is in prison; a woman who is mistreated every time she goes through security. Other scenarios addressed the difficulty of organizing alongside people who have been traumatized by the system they are hoping to change.

Another session included an activity geared at personal finance, with jelly beans and candy corn representing monthly resources. What kinds of sacrifices would people make to put money aside for commissary or phone expenses? Would they forgo a car? New clothes? Internet? Forced to choose, everyone was willing to give up their own comfort for that of their incarcerated loved one.

Amid such discussions, the presidential election seemed to exist in a distant universe. For many prison families, the primary goal is one of daily survival, with little mental or physical energy left for politics. Advocacy is often limited to the circumstances of a loved one’s incarceration, which often means confronting a mix of bureaucracy and casual cruelty. Conference handouts included literature offering tools and tips for approaching prison staff: “Address them by their titles” and “Stay calm.”

For many prison families, the primary goal is one of daily survival, with little mental or physical energy left for politics.

Through this lens, the ambivalence toward the presidential candidates made a lot of sense. It’s not just that mass incarceration has been a bipartisan project. For most impacted communities, it has also long been a constant, regardless of which party controls the White House. As one prison educator told me, presidential policy matters, whether good or bad. But “sometimes the bad just hurts too many people.”

To the extent that people pay attention to politics, one attendee told me, “it’s the state and local government who have more of an effect on our lives, not a president.”

Although federal funding can impact conditions on the ground, the experiences of people living inside prisons and jails are shaped by city, county, or state budgets and the priorities of individual sheriffs, wardens, and departments of correction. When it comes to charging and sentencing, a tremendous amount of power lies in the hands of elected district attorneys and local judges for whom tough-on-crime messaging is viewed as an electoral prerequisite.

Those attendees who were focused on policy were mainly working in their own communities. As a Florida-based advocate for children of incarcerated people told me, “You have to look, not at the individual presidential candidates, but the laws and policies that are in place and try to change that.”

Outside the makeshift cell in front of the conference center, I spoke to Lois Pullano, who became an activist against solitary confinement after her teenage son Kevin was sent to prison in Michigan and held in isolation. Pullano is now executive director of Citizens for Prison Reform and coordinates a campaign called Open MI Door. These days she spends much of her time lobbying to obtain data about the state’s use of solitary confinement.

Pullano knows all too well how often politicians can stand in the way of even the most reasonable reform legislation. In 2023, a promising bill to increase oversight of Michigan prisons became stalled at the office of Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. “What I’m realizing is that it’s very important for me to work both sides of the aisle,” Pullano said.

“This is definitely not a Republican versus Democratic issue,” said James Cox, assistant vice president of correctional education at Ashland. Like virtually everyone I spoke to at the conference, he said he would cooperate with any policymaker who showed concern for incarcerated people. And he echoed what others said: He would love to hear the presidential candidates discuss prisons. But has no expectation that they will.

As the conference came to a close, I spoke to a number of local women with incarcerated loved ones. One, a registered Republican who is undecided about who to vote for, described Ashland as a small town full of Trump supporters who consider themselves Christians. Yet she had felt abandoned by her friends and neighbors when her son went to prison. The conference was a source of support that was hard to find anywhere else. When I asked her which of the candidates might improve the lives of people like her, she said, “I don’t think either one will. I really don’t. I think that us little people really just don’t matter.”

Another woman, married to a man convicted of a sex offense, echoed the sentiment. When local candidates and campaign volunteers show up at her door and she tells them she was interested in sentencing reform, they automatically assume that she wanted harsher punishments for criminals, she said. When she has shared more about her own circumstances, they have said, “Huh, I never thought about that.” Then they walk away. 

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