Kamala Harris Didn’t Send 1500 People To Jail For Pot — It Was More Than That

Democratic Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard was among the first to land a solid blow on presidential primary rival Sen. Kamala Harris (CA), but she may not have taken her attack far enough.

“She put over 1500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” Gabbard said of Harris’s time as a prosecutor and District Attorney of San Francisco.

But as Joe Garofoli of the San Francisco Chronicle discovered as he fact-checked Gabbard’s claim, the number of people Harris sent to jail for marijuana violations was actually closer to 2000.

Garofoli noted that an initial report published by the Washington Free Beacon had put the number at 1560, but that a spokesman for California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had told him the actual number was 1974.

The [Free Beacon] article cited statistics from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that said “at least 1,560 people were sent to state prisons for marijuana-related offenses between 2011 and 2016” during the time Harris was the state AG. On Thursday, a department spokesman told The Chronicle that 1,974 people were admitted for hashish and marijuana convictions during that period.