Amy Scheiner currently works four jobs as an administrative assistant, teacher, and tutor to pay for those submission fees. She has also recently discovered her great-grandfather's stamp collection and hopes to sell them to make a dent in her student loans.

My mother had the same job as Kamala Harris. Here is the one thing I wish people would know.

 
Outside my mother’s office in downtown Trenton, the old carpets forever smelling of mold and acrid fumigation, hung a sign on her door: “A hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove... but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.”

From the late ‘90s until the mid-aughts, my mother was chief prosecutor of the Sex Crimes and Child Abuse unit—the first woman to hold this position in my county. While she had a law degree and was a practicing attorney, she also worked in law enforcement, a field fueled with controversy and divisiveness. I grew up believing my mom was a hero, a protector of children and women. But like vice president and presidential nominee Kamala Harris, my mother faced criticism for her role as prosecutor.

On the other side of the country, Kamala Harris was building her reputation handling cases of sex trafficking, child abuse, and other violent crimes. As California’s first Black and South Asian female attorney general, she took on for-profit colleges, helped families avoid foreclosure, and fought for criminal justice reform. In a recent Politico article, Eric He describes Prosecutor Harris as having a “combination of compassion for the young victims and toughness inside the courtroom that was necessary to get convictions in notoriously difficult cases.”

Prerequisites for any prosecutor: compassionate and tough. Someone who could make a child sitting in a one-way-mirror-questioning room feel at ease and face a defendant convicted of unspeakable assaults.

Growing up, my mother would visit crime scenes in the middle of the night, receive threats from defendants, lose cases by hung juries, and still make it home by six to make dinner. She was under constant pressure to be a justice-serving, tireless prosecutor, and a devoting, gentle mother. An impossible expectation.

Kamala Harris has been called everything from “soft as Charmin”  to a “top cop.” The scrutiny Harris faced as a prosecutor and my mother’s overwhelming dedication to her career and family brings to mind the adage about women: You can’t win.

As the chief prosecutor's daughter, I did not have an easy childhood. I grew up in constant anxiety that something would happen to my mom, and in turn, she raised me under fearful vigilance. Her career undoubtedly impacted her outlook on life.

As the criticisms persist, it’s important to remember that when the criminal law determines a binary outcome of “guilty" or “not guilty,” the prosecutor must operate within those boundaries. Harris explains in an interview in Las Vegas, “The prosecutor approach is really about just deconstructing an issue… It’s presenting and reminding folks about the empirical evidence that shows us exactly how we arrived at this point.” Her job is to do just that: recount the story of a crime. And while the law is meant to be interpreted unambiguously, people are not.

In her book Smart on Crime, Kamala Harris provides insight into children victimized by sex trafficking: “They often grow up to be angry, violent offenders and desperate substance abusers themselves.” My mother also acknowledged that many of these offenders were victims themselves, something that is undeniably a part of the cycle of trauma—just as incarceration and recidivism rates are. However, as it is unrealistic to expect my mother to be a law enforcer, attorney, wife, and mother all at once, we cannot expect Kamala Harris to change a broken system alone. Both my mother and Harris recognized crime as a more insidious problem, one that, as Harris states, “demands a more complex response than the serious and simple argument one makes prosecuting an individual criminal case.”

Recognizing the need for action, Kamala Harris created the Back on Track program in 2005, a “reentry initiative aimed at reducing recidivism among low-level drug-trafficking defendants... which provides education and comprehensive services to non-violent offenders.” When she wasn’t in the prosecutor’s office, my mother volunteered on the board of Womanspace and Cherish the Children Foundation, two organizations dedicated to helping victims and people in need. Both Kamala and my mother valued service to the community. Both women aimed to provide justice to the victim.

I went to court to watch my mom’s last case before she retired—before she died. She had promised the victim that if they caught the offender, she would prosecute. After nearly a decade of searching, they found him. Watching my mother in court, I felt an overwhelming sense of pride, admiration, and love for her decades-long career of helping others in yes, a broken system that is in need of criminal justice system reform.

Sex crimes and child abuse are the most heart-wrenching cases. My mother acknowledged the complexity behind the crime, but her aim was to provide justice to the victim. Working more than 40 hours a week and acknowledging the criminal justice system in this country wasn’t always fair, she couldn’t change the system by herself.

The ongoing scrutiny of Harris’ prosecutorial background—one of the most emotional and psychologically tolling jobs—must be met with understanding. When the prosecutor has seen cases that represent the worst humanity has to offer, they will do as their job dictates they do: find justice for the victim. While recent publications tear apart Harris’ prosecutorial history, it’s important to remember that these critics have never had to ask a child to describe how his uncle touched him or a woman to recount how many people gang-raped her. They have never needed to enter a case knowing that the burden of proof is on the thirteen-year-old to retell her assault with precise accuracy the eighth, ninth, and tenth time while the opposition questions what she was wearing.

Kamala Harris’s prosecutorial record reveals her tireless dedication to victims and pursuit of justice in a complicated system. And only a special sort of person could do this job. A person with compassion and integrity, with a drive for justice, and hope for change. A person who can lead us into a better future.

Amy Scheiner's writing has been featured in Slate, HuffPost, The Southampton Review, and Longreads, among others. She is the co-editor of Moonlighting by Lit Pub and has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.

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