Kevin Harris: From Incarceration to Community Leadership

Sometimes the streets offer the fastest path to money, but they always exact the steepest price – and for Kevin Harris, that price was 14 years of his life.

When I first connected with Kevin Harris through Tony Gantt (episode 66), I knew I was about to hear something special. But Kevin’s story still caught me off guard. Here’s a man who went from selling crack on Detroit’s East Side to becoming Pastor Harris at Nazarene Missionary Baptist Church – and nearly everything in between.

From Summer Crack Dealer to 14-Year Sentence

Growing up in Detroit during the crack epidemic of the 80s, Kevin watched his neighborhood transform into something unrecognizable. The old world of his childhood disappeared almost overnight. “It was pretty tough. Detroit was, you know, hands down the murder capital of the United States,” Kevin told me. “It would be no surprise to go to a friend’s house and opened the refrigerator. And in the refrigerator is about a bottle of jar of mayonnaise with a butter knife in it with nothing in it. Maybe a piece of bread.”

When your friends start disappearing for weeks and coming back with money, new shoes, and stories about “sitting in spots” for the older dealers, the choice feels obvious. Kevin could make $150 a week at Little Caesars, or he could make thousands in a weekend selling crack. At 18, math like that doesn’t leave room for long-term thinking.

The nightmare hit when he was set up by someone angry about a girlfriend situation. Sitting in the back of a police car, watching officers search the cab where he’d stashed drugs, Kevin held onto hope until the very last moment. Then the officer emerged with the bag, and his mind went blank.

The Village That Rebuilt a Life

Fourteen years is a long time when you’re 18. Kevin thought his life was over, and for a while, it nearly was. His mother was killed while he was inside – he attended her funeral in state blues with an officer escort. The devastation sent him into a five-year spiral of depression and anger.

But his grandmother’s faith, planted during childhood summers in Arkansas, eventually took root. A fellow inmate named JD Potts – “a cool crackhead” who found God behind the walls – invited Kevin to church. “I remember thinking to myself, when I was listening to him, I said to myself, this is what life is supposed to be like,” Kevin recalled. “Freedom or wife living, right, doing good. And here I am sitting up in here with seven more years to go.”

That moment changed everything. Kevin had to walk past his friends carrying a Bible to get to that tree where men studied scripture, but he decided hope was worth more than peer approval.

From Chief of Staff to Pastor Harris

The village that helped Kevin rebuild started with Tracy, his wife today, who refused to wait for him but remained a friend throughout his sentence. Without her, he would have gone to a homeless shelter. Instead, he had a foundation to build on.

Kevin made himself invaluable as a paralegal, working harder than anyone because, as he put it, “I did not want to go back to the streets. It was my chance.” That work ethic led to politics, where he served as chief of staff in the Michigan legislature. Looking out at the Capitol building, Kevin felt like Moses viewing the promised land, knowing his purpose was to come back with a message: “Let my people go.”

That message became Michigan’s expanded expungement laws and criminal justice reforms – changes that have impacted millions of lives. Now Pastor Harris leads both spiritual and social transformation, though it wasn’t easy convincing his congregation that prison reform and Jesus go hand in hand.

Kevin’s biggest takeaway? “You’ve got to find out your purpose… when you find that out, then you can really make hair way of what you’re doing.” He learned that passion sustains you through the years of unpaid foundational work that eventually leads to real change.

From a teenager who thought two weeks was a long time to a man who spent 14 years preparing for his real life’s work – that’s the power of finding your why and never giving up on it.