Advisers warned Kamala Harris over political perils of truancy prosecutions

“A lot of people told me not to take on this issue,” she writes. “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.”

Her staff appears to have been onto something. Democratic rivals are now picking apart her record as a line prosecutor in Alameda County, San Francisco district attorney, and state attorney general. And for criminal justice reform activists, the truancy issue is part of the “She’s a cop” critique they claim places her well to the right of the Democratic primary electorate.

“I want to bring the conversation back to the broken criminal justice system that is disproportionately negatively impacting black and brown people all across this country today. Now Sen. Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president. But I’m deeply concerned about this record,” fellow White House hopeful Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard told the senator at last week’s debates in Detroit.

Harris, 54, published Smart on Crime as she aimed to make the leap from local official in the Bay Area to statewide candidate. She faced a competitive Democratic primary for attorney general and sought to portray herself as a law-and-order prosecutor with liberal leanings.

Harris became the top law enforcement official for the city and county of San Francisco in 2004. After learning that about 5,500 public schoolchildren in the area were habitually absent, she partnered with the San Francisco Unified School District to target parents of kids with extreme truant records, in an effort to break the link between absenteeism and crime.

Harris’ advisers raised concerns the policy would be viewed as disproportionately cracking down on poor and minority families. But “my position is we owe every child an education, and we owe ourselves the additional inoculation against violence and crime that fighting truancy can bring,” she wrote.

San Francisco schools were tasked with leading interventions, with prosecutions being a last resort. No parents were jailed under her watch, but two dozen were prosecuted under the threat of fines.

Harris saw the program as enough of a success that she included a scaled-up model of it in her platform for California attorney general in 2010. After winning the office that November following a tight Democratic primary and general election, she made combating truancy one of her top priorities.

She championed a law enacted in January 2011 that made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents of kindergarten to eighth grade children to have their kids miss more than 10% of school days without a valid excuse.

The measure made parents of chronically truant students punishable by a fine of $2,000 or one year imprisonment, though courts could defer judgment for mediation and a Bureau of Children’s Justice was set up within the state Justice Department to address systemic causes of absenteeism. Regardless, parents were jailed — though not in San Francisco — for failure to ensure their kids showed up at school, including one mother in Kings County who was sentenced to 180 days behind bars.

But that kind of tough-on-crime approach looks different in a national campaign. The rhetoric Harris uses has softened as she seeks to woo African American and white, liberal Democrats for whom criminal justice is a major worry.

In her January 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, she described herself as a “progressive prosecutor,” reiterating how her advisers “worried that tackling truancy would not be a popular issue.”

“Even today, others don’t appreciate the intention behind my approach; they assume that my motivation was to lock up parents, when of course that was never the goal,” she wrote. “Our effort was designed to connect parents to resources that could help them get their kids back into school, where they belonged. We were trying to support parents, not punish them — and in the vast majority of cases, we succeeded.”

In an April interview, Harris told “Pod Save America” she was sorry that her anti-truancy push resulted in jail time for some parents, adding she “had no control over that” and that she wouldn’t advocate for a federal equivalent of the law.

“I regret that that has happened, and the thought that anything that I did could have led to that, because that certainly was not the intention — never was the intention,” she said.

But in her 2009 book, co-written with Joan O’C. Hamilton, Harris was less apologetic as “a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.”

“After hundreds of mostly productive mediation sessions and lots of media coverage, so far we’ve had to bring charges against fewer than a dozen parents who simply would not work with the school to make sure their child had consistent attendance,” she wrote. “But we’re making it clear that, after offering lots of support, there will be accountability when parents continue to break the law.”

Harris expressed similar sentiments in a 2010 speech to San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, and her 2011 inauguration address after taking office as attorney general. In a clip of her Commonwealth Club appearance, which went viral after she announced her candidacy, Harris repeated how her “staff went bananas” when she first floated her anti-truancy idea.

“I sent a letter out on my letterhead to every parent in the school district, outlining the connection that was statistically proven between elementary school truancy, high school dropouts, who will become a victim of crime, and who will become a perpetrator of crime,” Harris said. “A friend of mine actually called me and he said, Kamala, ‘I’ve got the letter, [my wife] freaked out, she brought all the kids into the living room, held up the letter, said if you don’t go to school Kamala’s going to put you and me in jail.’ Yes, we achieved the intended effect,” she continued with a laugh.