“Every day in the courtroom, I stood proudly before a judge and said five words: ‘Kamala Harris, for the People.’ And to be clear—and to be clear, my entire career, I’ve only had one client: the people."

That’s what Kamala Harris told thousands of screaming, deluded Democrats at the Democratic National Convention when she accepted their nomination to run for president.

Harris was promoting her 27-year career as a prosecuting district attorney and then attorney general in California, before she was elected to the Senate and then picked as Joe Biden’s vice president. 

She was half right. During her years as a prosecutor, she had only one client. But that one client wasn’t “the People.” 

Her one client was the people-destroying system of exploitation and oppression—capitalism-imperialism—which she energetically, ruthlessly, and yes joyfully served for over three decades. 

27 Years as a Mass Incarcerator Targeting Black and Brown People

Harris began her career in 1990 as an assistant district attorney in Alameda County in the San Francisco Bay Area. She became San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2010, and then was elected to be California’s attorney general—its top law enforcement official—from 2011 through 2017. 

Harris and her supporters claim she was a “progressive prosecutor.” But as the revolutionary leader and author of the new communism Bob Avakian exposes in his social media dispatch Revolution Number 71: 

And, as Harris never tires of telling you, she was a prosecutor in California for years—but what she doesn’t brag about so much now, when she is trying to get you caught up in her campaign for President, is that in her role as prosecutor she was a mass incarcerator, especially of Black people and Latinos.

The system in this country was founded on genocide and slavery, and white supremacy has been part of its DNA ever since. Kamala Harris became a prosecutor during a period when the workings of the global capitalist-imperialist system compelled many factories and other businesses to move out of urban areas or outside of the U.S. entirely. This left millions of Black and other oppressed peoples, especially the youth, without jobs, hopes, or futures. The system responded with a wave of police murder, terror, and mass incarceration in order to suppress and contain this bitterly oppressed, volatile section of people.

Kamala Harris was a cog in this system’s machinery of repression who energetically helped enforce it, including through California’s notorious “three strikes law”¹ and “Terry stops” (California’s version of “stop and frisk”), as well as the nationwide “war on drugs.”²

These racist programs disproportionately targeted Black and Brown people, and during the 1980s and 1990s, they led to a sharp rise in the prison population. During Harris’s years as a prosecutor, California’s prison population skyrocketed from 87,000 in 1990 to 173,000 in 2006! When Harris left office in 2017, the California prison population was still 128,000, one of the highest in the U.S.]³  

Black people make up 6 percent of California’s population, but 29 percent of its prison population! Latinos are 39 percent of the population, but 43 percent of those imprisoned.⁴  Literally hundreds of thousands had been imprisoned and millions of lives had been shattered as a result. 

Harris Opposed Court Ordered Prison Reforms

Harris fought tooth and nail against any weakening of the scale and brutality of California’s “criminal justice” system and its massive network of brutal, inhuman prisons. For instance, in 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population by releasing 5,000 non-violent inmates. To give a sense of the conditions that led to this ruling, in one prison, 54 prisoners shared a single toilet. Inmates were dying every five or six days from lack of medical care. Suicidal inmates were locked in telephone-booth sized cages for 24 hours at a time. 

How did Kamala “for the people” Harris respond to this ruling? For nearly four years, Harris and Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown refused to carry out the court’s decision—arguing, among other things, that paroling more prisoners would “negatively affect the prison’s labor programs, including one that allowed certain inmates to fight California’s wildfires for about $2 a day.” One law professor called it “reminiscent of the Southern governors of the 1950s declaring their defiance of federal court desegregation orders.”⁵

Harris Upheld Solitary Confinement and Fought Against Releasing Those Wrongly Imprisoned  

While Harris was California attorney general, prisoners brought a lawsuit against the widespread use of solitary confinement in the state’s prisons. Under Harris' leadership, the California Department of Justice opposed the lawsuit, even arguing at one point that “there is no ‘solitary confinement’ in California prisons.” A settlement of the case brought by prisoners led to reforms, but only years later after thousands of prisoners had suffered terribly. “They are broken people—psychologically, physically damaged,” one lawyer for the prisoners summed up.⁶ 

In case after case, Harris also fought against releasing prisoners who had been wrongly convicted.⁷

Protecting the System’s Murderous Enforcers—the Police

As Bob Avakian has said:

The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness. (BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian, 1:24)

Throughout her career, Kamala Harris has actively fought to back up, protect and enable the police in carrying out this role.

California "has one of the highest rates of police shootings" of any state in the country—and some of the strictest laws protecting cops from being held accountable in court. According to the ACLU, there were almost 1,200 police-involved killings in California from 2005 to 2016. Out of all of those 1,200 incidents, in only 2 cases were charges brought against the police.

Harris was San Francisco’s DA and then the California attorney general during these years, and she did nothing to change this outrageous situation. Instead she fought to protect murdering, brutalizing police.

In San Francisco, police killed 18 people while Harris was attorney general. But Harris refused to investigate any of these cases. The December 2015 murder of 26-year-old Mario Woods was caught on cellphone video. It showed him “disturbed, strung out on methamphetamines and armed with a steak knife. Five officers fired 46 rounds, hitting him with 21.” There were mass protests, and calls for Attorney General Harris to investigate, yet she refused. 

She even refused to support a 2015 bill that would have required the state attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate police use of deadly force. She said it wasn’t her job to investigate police killings.⁸

Harris Called for Prosecuting Parents of Children Late for School

At the Democratic National Convention, Harris proclaimed, “As a young courtroom prosecutor in Oakland, I stood up for women and children…” 

Stood up for women and children?? 

Harris wouldn’t prosecute murdering police, but she did aggressively prosecute parents, who were often impoverished, of kids who were “truant”—i.e., late for school or out for unexcused absences. In 2008, she even set up a hotline for people who wanted to call in and snitch if they saw kids ditching school. 

In 2011, when she was campaigning to become California’s attorney general, she sponsored a state-wide law punishing parents or guardians of truant children with a $2,500 fine or a year in jail! She claimed this was all about increasing school enrollment, but her law was just another front in this system’s crusades against oppressed peoples. It hit low-income families who were already struggling to survive the hardest. Some parents of children with chronic illnesses were prosecuted and jailed.⁹ 

Biden-Harris: Four Years of Police Terror, Murder, and Mass Incarceration

In 2019, when Harris was running in the Democratic Party presidential primaries, she campaigned on her “sweeping” plan for an "overhaul of the criminal justice system." 

She criticized “stop-and-frisk” and vowed to end mass incarceration, reduce the prison population, and make major changes in policing. 

But during the four years of Biden-Harris, did cops stop murdering people? Was mass incarceration ended? No! Police killed 1,180 people in 2021 and 1,255 in 2022. And they killed 1,353 in 2023—more than any year in the past decade! This went on as Biden declared, “Fund the police, fund the police, fund the police,” during his 2022 State of the Union speech.

And what about the prison population? As of 2022, there were still over 1.2 million people locked up—about the same number as the last year Trump was in power.

The Lesson? Wake Up! Quit Getting Played!

What does Harris’ sordid, truly criminal record tell you? Let’s return to Bob Avakian’s social media dispatch Revolution Number 71: 

Wake up! Just like Obama, Kamala Harris is not part of any real solution—she is a big part of the problem.

And what is the problem?

It’s this system—this system of capitalism-imperialism—which Harris serves. Which all these politicians have to serve if they want to get in office and stay in office, especially any “high office” like President.

It’s this system that is the fundamental cause of all the hell that people are put through, not just in this country but all over the world.

It’s this system that needs to be swept away—overthrown through an actual revolution—and replaced by a much better system.