Trump Claims Harris Jailed ‘Thousands And Thousands Of Black People’ Over Marijuana, But Her Actual Record As A Prosecutor Is More Nuanced

Former President Donald Trump is going after Vice President Kamala Harris over her prosecutorial record on marijuana, claiming that she put “thousands and thousands of Black people in jail” for cannabis offenses—but the full record of her time in office is more nuanced.

Trump’s line of attack, while misleading, is nonetheless notable in the sense that the 2024 Republican presidential nominee is implying that he disagrees with criminalizing people over marijuana and is moving to leverage the idea that Harris played a role in racially disproportionate mass incarceration.

“She was a bad prosecutor. She was a prosecutor of Black people,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle that aired on Monday. “She put thousands and thousands of Black people in jail over marijuana. But when it came to big crime—murders and everything else—she was weak.”

The narrative that Harris aggressively prosecuted people over cannabis during her seven years as San Francisco district attorney and later California attorney general has followed her since she last ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020. Now that President Joe Biden has exited the race, and Harris has become the presumptive nominee, it’s resurfacing. Trump’s spin on it is particularly exaggerated, though.

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How many people were actually convicted and jailed over marijuana under Harris’s prosecutorial leadership?

While Trump claimed there were “thousands and thousands” of examples of Harris putting people in jail over marijuana, typically the criticism has been based on an allegation that the San Francisco District Attorney’s office under her leadership incarcerated more than 1,500 people on cannabis-related convictions.

But that lower figure is still misleading. Data from the office that was featured in an investigative report from the Bay Area News Group showed that there were 1,956 convictions for misdemeanor and felony marijuana offenses from 2004 and 2010 when Harris led the office. But the number of people who were actually sent to state prison was 45. That said, it’s unclear how many people were sent to county jail, so the total figure may be higher.

“Our policy was that no one with a marijuana conviction for mere possession could do any [jail time] at all,” Paul Henderson, who headed up narcotics prosecutions under Harris, told Bay Area News Group.

During Harris’s time as attorney general of California from 2011 to 2017, meanwhile, The Washington Free Beacon reported that, statewide, there were at least 1,560 people who were sent to state prison over marijuana, primarily for sale or possession with intent to sale convictions.

While Harris would’ve played a more remote role in those prosecutions compared to her time as district attorney, that record has also lended to criticism, including from then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), who drew attention to that record on the debate stage while competing for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

Of course, Harris’s prosecutorial record is just one part of her history on cannabis policy issues. During her time as San Francisco DA, she voiced support for medical marijuana, but she opposed adult-use legalization. And when she was campaigning to become California’s attorney general, she proactively campaigned against a 2010 legalization ballot measure. Harris was later openly dismissive of the reform, at one point laughing off a reporter’s question about the potential policy change.

Much has changed since then. She sponsored a comprehensive federal legalization bill in the Senate, and she’s called for ending prohibition altogether as recently as this March, at a roundtable event with pardon recipients where she also called on the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to quickly reschedule cannabis, as the Justice Department has since formally proposed.

If elected, Harris would become the first president who openly supports marijuana legalization. And the list of potential running mates that she’s reportedly considering also includes a majority who share that position, as well as some who have signed legalization into law in their state.

That Trump opted to take a swing at Harris’s prosecutorial record on marijuana in particular offers a potentially meaningful insight into how he might navigate broader cannabis policy issues as a candidate and, potentially, as president again. The GOP nominee has his own mixed record on marijuana, but this cycle he’s leaned into punitive anti-drug rhetoric, so this represents something of a departure.

As president, Trump largely stayed true to his position that marijuana laws should be handled at the state-level, with no major crackdown on cannabis programs as some feared after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Obama era federal enforcement guidance. In fact, Trump criticized the top DOJ official and suggested the move should be reversed.

While he was largely silent on the issue of legalization, he did tentatively endorse a bipartisan bill to codify federal policy respecting states’ rights to legalize.

That said, on several occasions he released signing statements on spending legislation stipulating that he reserved the right to ignore a long-standing rider that prohibits the Justice Department from using its funds to interfere with state-legal medical marijuana programs.

Before Biden bowed out of the race, his campaign made much of the president’s mass cannabis pardons and rescheduling push, drawing a contrast with the Trump administration’s record. The Harris campaign so far has not spoken to that particular issue, and the presumptive nominee has yet to publicly discuss marijuana policy issues since her own campaign launched.

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