Keeda Haynes is running for Tennessee's 5th Congressional District seat and plans to bring her background as both a public offender and someone who was formerly incarcerated right along with her.

In January 2020, Haynes officially launched her campaign with a platform that advocates for repealing mandatory sentence laws and battling racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.

In an interview with Blavity, Haynes said she saw firsthand how mandatory sentences were applied to incarcerated people and said such sentences served no purpose other than to decimate Black and brown low-income communities.

"We see the numbers. I was looking at people. I saw their flesh and how this really impacted them," Haynes said while discussing how she saw families being torn apart.

Due to mandatory sentencing laws, Haynes was given seven years in prison, which she later successfully appealed.

After serving a four-year sentence at Alderson Federal Prison Camp for a marijuana crime she says she didn't commit, Haynes enrolled in law school and was sworn in as an attorney in December 2012. Although Haynes said she had a strong support system, that didn't stop her from facing reentry barriers that she said have impacted so many others.

The political candidate said tackling reentry barriers and hearing people's struggles to "live as a second-class citizen" after having their constitutional rights revoked impacted her campaign and platform.

"I believe once you walk out those prison doors that in most situations you should have the same opportunities — and I don't think we are there yet," Haynes said.

Upon completing law school, Haynes said she had to go through hoops that people without felonies on their records never would see. After passing the bar, she said she still didn't know if she would receive her license to practice.

"I had to clear another hurdle – the character and fitness examination by the Tennessee Board of Law Examiners," Haynes shared on her campaign site. "I heard over and over from lawyers and legal professionals that I was unlikely to pass."

As for where the community could start in assisting to eliminate reentry barriers and stigmas surrounding formerly incarcerated people, Haynes encourages people to stop using language that is dehumanizing.

"Start there and start calling people who have been incarcerated just that. We are daughters. We are mothers. We are sisters and we deserve to be called and treated as that," she said.

During the interview with Blavity, Haynes also explained the problem with barring formerly incarcerated people from voting.

"Locking out a whole population of people and preventing them from being represented in the government, which we should be, is not what a democracy is about," she said.

As Haynes eyes a seat in Congress, conversations to defund the police remain persistent during protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The former public defender said the allocation of money shows what a community values and prioritizes.

She said the budgets for police departments show "we are not prioritizing people." Instead, Haynes suggests reallocating funds and investing in education and affordable housing, both of which have been underfunded.

Haynes also believes there should be a system focused on the rehabilitation of people who have committed petty, nonviolent offenses rather than punishment.

"These are people that don't need to be locked up. We need to be going toward rehabilitation and what does that look like instead of going straight toward punishment," she said, adding that people who were incarcerated for marijuana charges should have their convictions expunged.

Haynes is one of the 122 Black and multiracial women who have filed to run for Congress in the 2020 election cycle, as Blavity previously reported.

According to HuffPost, she faces a nearly two-decade Democratic incumbent in the primary election on August 6. If elected in November, Haynes will become the first Black woman elected to Congress from the state of Tennessee.

“I am running because looking around I can see that people that look like me, that have the same issues I have, we were not being represented in this district,” Haynes told HuffPost.

primary-election

Get relevant content delivered to you once a week