—Kerry Hill, B1Daily

Kamala Harris has spent much of her national political career presenting herself as a champion of working people and criminal justice reform. But one episode from her tenure as California attorney general remains extraordinarily difficult to reconcile with that image: her own office argued against expanding early-release credits for minimum-security prisoners because California depended on incarcerated people for cheap labor, including its firefighting program.

In 2014, federal judges were pushing California to reduce severe prison overcrowding. Minimum-custody inmates stood to receive enhanced credits that could shorten their sentences. Attorneys working under Harris pushed back. The Los Angeles Times reported that lawyers from Harris’s office argued that these prisoners constituted an important labor pool, performing jobs such as cooking, cleaning and groundskeeping for wages as low as pennies per hour.

Then came the argument that should haunt Harris’s record.

In a September 2014 court filing, her office warned that expanding the credits would “severely impact fire camp participation,” potentially reducing the incarcerated workforce available to battle California’s wildfires. The state also worried that vacancies in other prison jobs could require pulling inmates away from fire camps to fill those positions.

Think about what that means. The government was discussing whether people should receive greater opportunities to shorten their incarceration, and Harris’s Justice Department responded in part by pointing to the labor California might lose.

Harris later said she was shocked when she learned about the argument and was troubled by it. Reporting indicates that the filing carried her name but was signed by a senior attorney in her office, Patrick McKinney.

That distinction matters, but it does not erase political accountability.

Harris was the attorney general. It was her department, her administration and lawyers acting on behalf of the State of California under her leadership. A cabinet executive cannot reasonably take credit for the accomplishments of an office while treating its ugliest legal positions as somebody else’s problem.

There is also something deeply disturbing about incarcerated people being valuable enough to risk their lives fighting wildfires, yet so economically valuable to the state that their labor supply could become part of an argument against expanding sentence-reduction credits.

Harris did not personally stand before the judges and make the infamous argument. That fact should be stated plainly. But leadership means owning what happens under your command, particularly when your own Justice Department puts its position into a federal court filing.

Kamala Harris may have disavowed the argument afterward. She cannot disavow the fact that it happened on her watch.

—Kerry Hill, B1Daily