Paul Bass Photo
Toni Harp (at right) at an October campaign event.
Toni Harp has heard it before — which is why she was glad to hear it.
“It” is a prescription for reforming American criminal justice system. The prescription includes funding prison reentry efforts, pursuing “restorative justice” for people getting into trouble, targeting programs to young people of color.
Mike Bloomberg released a $22.5 billion version of that plan Tuesday as part of his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. The plan aims to reduce the country’s prison population by 50 percent by the year 2030 and youth incarceration by 50 percent within four and a half years. (Click here to read more about the plan.)
Harp, one of Bloomberg’s most prominent Connecticut boosters, said she recognized elements of the plan from work her administration did while she served as New Haven’s mayor from 2014 – 2019.
“He recognizes this is a real problem,” Harp said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “We are 5 percent of the world’s population and yet we have 25 percent of the incarceration.”
For instance, she cited Bloomberg’s promise to spend $100 million on the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative to offer pathways out of trouble for young people of color. Her administration started a similar program in Youth Stat, which won national recognition for identifying students in trouble and then enlisting teachers, social workers, cops, and parole officers in helping them turn around.
“We’ve seen in our city how Youth Stat has saved lives,” Harp said. “This is a commitment we’ve never seen before for this population.”
New Haven’s could use the money promised in Bloomberg’s plan to boost that effort as well as the city’s prison re-entry efforts, another bullet point in the Bloomberg plan, Harp said.
Bloomberg called for starting “family justice” centers for victims of domestic violence. New Haven did that this past year. (Read about that here.) And he called for boosting “restorative justice” programs that find alternative consequences to suspension or incarceration for young people’s wrongdoing. New Haven has been making strides in that area, too, in recent years.
Harp also praised planks in the Bloomberg plan calling for an end to cash bail and spending $2.5 billion over ten years on public defenders for the indigent.
“The whole idea that if you’re poor in America you’re going to have a different interaction with the criminal justice than you would if you were rich” is wrong, Harp said. “Bloomberg gets it.”
Harp, New Haven’s first female mayor and second African-American mayor, made the comments during a topsy-turvy week on race for Bloomberg’s surging campaign. On the one hand, critics of racist policing and financial discrimination have attacked the former New York City mayor for supporting a massive “stop-and-frisk” campaign targeting people of color, and for blaming the 2008 financial crisis on loans to low-income homebuyers of color. On the other hand, a cascade of African-American officials like Harp across the country have lined up to support his campaign at events like “Mike for Black America.”