Democratic presidential candidate hopeful Kamala Harris is now distancing herself from a California policy she once championed that prosecuted parents whose children missed too many days of school.
In an interview with the liberal podcast “Pod Save America” released Wednesday, Harris said as president she would not support a law such as that in California that penalized parents for truancy.
The California senator has faced criticism for the policy on the presidential campaign trail. Some see it as contrary to her support for criminal justice reform and goal of reducing mass incarceration.
The policy Harris crafted as a San Francisco district attorney threatened parents with a misdemeanor for truancy, penalized by “a fine of up to $2,500 or up to a year in jail.”
She liked the policy so much back then that when she became attorney general in 2011, she took the policy statewide. In her 2019 book The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, Harris said that “instituting a statewide policy on truancy was part of the reason I’d run for the office in the first place.”
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Harris continues to tout her changes to the truancy program on her campaign website, which says that she “fought to reduce elementary school truancy so that every child can exercise his or her right to an education.”
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
Harris said that while no parents were imprisoned on her watch due to the truancy measure, she regrets that the policy led to some parents in other jurisdictions being imprisoned.
“My regret is that I have now heard stories where, in some jurisdictions, DAs have criminalized the parents,” Harris said. “And 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.”
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She boiled the prosecutions down to “unintended consequences” and billed the program as an effort to keep young people from being incarcerated later in life.
“I realized that the system was failing these kids, not putting the services in place to keep them in school, to make it easier for their parents to do what those parents naturally wanted to do around parenting their children. And so I put a spotlight on it,” she said.
Harris adopted a different tone about the policy when she was a district attorney and California attorney general.
“I believe a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime. So I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy,” Harris said in a 2010 speech.
“My office prosecutes parents in a specialized truancy court we created that combines close court monitoring with tailored family services. To date, I have prosecuted 20 parents of young children for truancy,” Harris wrote in a 2009 op-ed. “Our groundbreaking strategy has worked.”
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