1. Whether Kamala Harris was a “progressive prosecutor” strikes me as asking the wrong question. The issue is until a couple of years ago — and still today almost everywhere — even the most “progressive” prosecutors did/do utterly unconscionable things routinely, every day.

2. That is to say, the criminal justice reform movement means to highlight that to be a prosecutor in the present era is to wildly mistreat many of the cultures most vulnerable people in the name of safety. It is a job only a morally stunted person could do.

3. Admittedly it has been a confusing era in which to do that job. The culture constantly told you that acting monstrously was for a good reason and towards bad non-people. It helped your career and sense of self to cage the homeless man, the schizophrenic, the addicted person.

4. Of course even a mild curiosity about what you were doing — what *are those cages like? how *long is 120 months exactly? why *did the defendant behave that way — should have set off alarm bells in a well-developed conscience.

5. But most humans accommodate their social situations, internalize the drab inhumanity of bureaucracies, assume that things that are commonplace are also justifiable and good. Their consciences and ability to empathize are stunted.

6. Of course some did more than that. Some gloried in the dehumanization of others. Some hitched their careers to it. Some sought and obtained the social benefit of being towards single moms with truant kids, or young black youth who followed their older brother and sold drugs.

7. Some smoked pot in college and then prosecuted 1000s for it. Some fought tooth and nail against prisoners who had strong evidence of their innocence. Some looked the other way at dirty cops. Some defended prosecutorial misconduct and police shootings.

8. Some gleefully benefited from that when that was the kind of thing made one one of the cool kids. One of the rising stars.

9. There are endless receipts of all that stuff and so much more. But that’s not the real issue. The issue is that mass incarceration’s *best actors have been destroying lives, wildly magnifying harm for decades. Even a mildly curious not-morally-stunted person would know that.

10. The culture ought to ask itself why it is constantly lifting up such morally derelict people. What kind of illness do we have that destroying the lives of vulnerable people makes you a great leader, destined to fail upwards?