Democratic presidential contender Kamala Harris is running on a progressive platform. The California senator has complained that “too many black and brown Americans are locked up.” But that rhetoric stands in sharp contrast with her past.
Harris took a tougher stance when she served as a San Francisco prosecutor and then as California’s attorney general. During her tenure in San Francisco, Harris made cracking down on truancy a priority — despite being warned against it.
“A lot of people told me not to take on this issue,” she wrote in her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer.” “They said the problem was too big to address and that there were no political benefits to wading into these waters. Frankly, my staff winced at my plan.”
When kids skip school, parents can go to jail
Absent students weren’t the only ones who faced consequences.
Harris aggressively prosecuted the parents of habitually absent students while she served as San Francisco District Attorney. Though none were locked up, according to the Los Angeles Times, they were threatened with fines.
She took the same approach state-wide when she was elected as California’s attorney general in 2010, and supported legislation to hit parents with criminal misdemeanor charges when an elementary school student missed more than ten percent of the academic year.
Passed in 2011, the bill made parents liable for a fine of up to $2 thousand dollars or one year in jail. The next year, a Kings County mother was sentenced to 180 days in jail for violating it. Harris’ advisers were worried that it would disproportionately punish minorities, but she insisted on pushing for “accountability when parents continue to break the law.”
Harris claims she never wanted parents jailed
Yet earlier this year while pandering to progressive voters on the campaign trail, Harris expressed regret that such incarcerations happened and claimed it was an “unintended consequence” — a “misleading” claim, according to FactCheck.org.
“My regret is that I have now heard stories where, in some jurisdictions, DAs have criminalized the parents. And I regret that that has happened,” she said. “And the thought that anything that I did could have led to that, because that certainly was not the intention — never was the intention. Never was the intention.”
Sen. @KamalaHarris on the truancy law she championed as Attorney General that punishes parents if their kids miss too much school.
Full interview airs tonight: https://t.co/UJ9G9AzXdD pic.twitter.com/EOtCiKHXm7
— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) April 17, 2019
Former Assemblyman Tom Ammiano was an opponent of the law, and he wasn’t impressed with Harris’ comments, stating, “That is a cop-out. You can’t say, ‘I didn’t really mean for this to happen.’ Then what did you mean?”
During a speech in 2010, Harris justified her anti-truancy policy by declaring, “I would not be standing here if it were not for the education that I received.” Back then, she insisted that school attendance was worth threatening parents with jail time.
Today, the political climate has shifted, and so have her principles.
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