One of the first things Tarra Simmons tells voters when asking for their support isn’t the prestigious fellowships she’s won or the legislation she’s helped write. It’s about the years she spent behind bars.
It’s a story Simmons, a candidate for state representative in Kitsap County, Washington, has shared at countless campaign events, which these days are entirely online: How she lost her car, her house, her nursing license, her voting rights. How after coming home in 2013, most of her minimum-wage paychecks from Burger King were taken to pay the $7,600 she owed in court fees. How she managed to climb out of that life, get a law degree and begin a civil rights nonprofit. And how all of it made her realize that only those who have lived through the system can fully understand how to fix it.
“I went to prison. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I understand how people end up there,” Simmons said at a May campaign fundraiser via Zoom, her digital background set to a generic corporate lobby. “Our criminal justice system is just a Band-Aid; I want to prevent [incarceration] from happening to begin with.”
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Simmons is one of a new crop of political candidates in 2020 for whom being formerly incarcerated isn’t a disqualifier or a political liability. It’s an identity—one they say is vital to represent in state capitals and the hallways of Congress, as lawmakers try to overhaul a system that spends billions to lock up mostly Black and brown people.
The ongoing protests against racism and police violence, sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, have highlighted the distance between two Americas: one that has lived under the pressure, surveillance and control of the justice system, and one that has not. It’s unacceptable, candidates say, for only people who have never been on the other side of law enforcement to write the laws that affect those who have.
Simmons, who identifies as White and Hispanic, speaks often of the disproportionate impact the criminal justice system has on people of color. “I am a mother of two Black sons and have been working on racial equity for nearly two decades,” Simmons wrote in a recent campaign email, “and I will be the first formerly incarcerated individual in our state legislature if we succeed in this election.” She has called for demilitarizing the police and reinvesting police funding into community programs.
Kevin Harris is running for state representative in Detroit, Michigan, where he recently served as the departing representative’s legislative director. He came home from a 14-year sentence in 2006 and soon got involved in community organizing. He was 18 when he went to prison. “It was the height of the crack epidemic. I had a little bit of a political awakening in understanding how the Department of Corrections treated people,” he said. “It’s not a coincidence that so many people from the Black community have criminal records. We’ve been targeted—we’ve always been targeted.”
Source: These Political Candidates Are Embracing Their Criminal Records
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