The Washington Post: How Republicans such as Holly Harris are fighting for criminal justice reform
“What’s happening is, the low-level nonviolent offenders are coming out worse off than they were when they came in,” said Harris in the latest episode of “Cape Up.” She has been very active in trying to change state laws and federal laws that have exacerbated the problems they were hoped to correct. And she wasn’t shy about pointing a finger at politicians clinging to an outdated view of crime-fighting.
“There is a certain faction that still believes that we should just lock them up and throw away the key. And what’s so interesting to me, and we’re seeing this at the federal level too, with opponents of the federal legislation, they keep citing to these terrible anecdotes of these individuals who have gotten out of prison and done something terrible. And they’re indicting themselves because, of course, these things are happening under the current regime,” Harris explained. “We’ve changed our cellphones, we’ve updated our technology, we’ve updated our hairstyles, thank God. But what we’re not gonna update our sentencing laws that we now know make us less safe? … Every single American family has had some sort of interaction with the justice system, and most of them believe that it needs significant transformational change.”