As district attorney of San Francisco, Kamala Harris looked at the criminal justice system like a pyramid, with the worst crimes occupying the tip. The largest mass of the pyramid, Harris wrote in her 2009 book, is the “truly staggering” number of nonviolent offenders.

“The problem is that we have been using only the tools best suited to combating the offenders at the top of the pyramid, and we have been using them on the entire crime pyramid,” she wrote in “Smart on Crime.”

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Robert Weisberg, faculty co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, said the state AG’s power over criminal issues is limited because county prosecutors mostly operate on their own. Criminal appeals are generally handled by deputy attorneys general, he said.

“She has seen her role as synthesizing ideas that have emerged as consensus beliefs and tried to embed them into public discourse in a way that might promote action by the agencies that have more direct power than she does,” Weisberg said.

“It’s just been the nature of criminal justice lately that the attorney general, by its office, has not been the center of attention,” he added.