Help people or lock them up? Ky Attorney General race offers clear choice. | Opinion

For the past two years, State Rep. Pam Stevenson, D-Louisville, has been a dynamic presence in the General Assembly, fighting to protect women and children with a preacher’s fervor and a lawyer’s smarts.

A retired U.S. Air Force colonel and a military attorney, Stevenson retired from the military in 2011 and founded a nonprofit law firm in southern Indiana to help senior citizens, veterans and families.

A career based on problem-solving and logistics in military hot spots around the world and helping people makes her the obvious choice for Attorney General over her Republican challenger, the former president Donald Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman.

The Attorney General’s office is seen as a steeping stone for higher office — as shown with both former AG and current Gov. Andy Beshear and his opponent, AG Daniel Cameron — and has become too politicized. It’s become more about joining national movements to further abortion bans or dictate hiring practices.

Stevenson wants to move beyond that. Her plan is to work on the issues that actually affect Kentuckians, such as the ever-present opioid crisis, consumer protection and criminal justice reform in areas such as juvenile justice.

That’s how she developed a plan to work on the state’s opioid crisis aggressively and compassionately — to secure more funding for law enforcement and for drug addiction treatment programs.

Coleman declined to meet with the Herald-Leader Editorial Board to explain his positions. We are glad to see he has rethought his opposition to abortion exceptions after talking to the experts — namely, women — about it.

However, from what we can judge from the rest of his campaign, he is pulling out tired tropes about being tough on crime that are neither original nor creative enough to deal with Kentucky’s continuing problems with the opioid crisis and overwhelming incarceration issues.

When reporters asked about Kentucky’s high incarceration rate, one of the worst in the country, Coleman reiterated the need to put more people in prison, rather than looking to underlying, creative solutions to an enormous problem that affects all facets of the commonwealth.

This tough-on-crime approach is also confusing, given that Coleman is touting his appointment by a man currently facing 91 indictments in four states. Coleman has also made much of Stevenson’s lack of a Kentucky law license before she started the campaign. That was slipshod, for sure, but doesn’t take away from her decades of experience as an attorney.

Stevenson told the Herald-Leader that her campaign had become a listening tour about the problems that affect Kentuckians on the ground.

In an interview, Stevenson said politicians have got to get back to the basics.

“The commercial that he (Cameron) has, saying, ‘I’ve sued Governor Beshear 27 times’?” she said. “Well, we still have children who are hungry and not being fed at school.”

Tough on crime is simple and easy, but Kentucky’s problems require much more complicated, compassionate answers. Pam Stevenson is the right choice for Kentucky’s next Attorney General.

This story was originally published October 26, 2023 at 12:58 PM.