![]() ![]() She admits that when she proposed jailing parents, members of her staff thought it was a terrible idea. What’s striking about Harris’s talk is that she doesn’t seem at all aware of the socioeconomic implications of her policy. But it’s not even clear that it succeeds even by its own standard, with research suggesting that “although truancy proceedings can increase a child’s school attendance in the short term, answering to a judge for school absence does not help students graduate from high school or avoid crime”. Even if it succeeds in reducing truancy rates, it inflicts yet more burdens on the most vulnerable people in society. It targets the poorest and most desperate parents, and it doesn’t actually address the root causes. Given the social reality, the idea of fining or jailing parents over student absences is both cruel and unwise. A humane progressive looks at the problem and asks: why do absences actually occur? Truancy occurs disproportionately among children whose parents are poor and less-educated, and among children who don’t feel safe at school, who have to work or support their families, who have mental and physical health issues, and who are in unstable living situations. Harris looked at the problem of perpetual truancy and believed she ought to start locking up parents. Like the old slogan “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” when all you have is the ability to bring criminal charges, everything looks like a crime. Here we see the limits of the “prosecutorial mindset”. In separate footage, Harris mocks those on the left who say things like “build schools, not jails” and “put more money into education, not prisons”, suggesting they are naive sloganeers who do not understand crime prevention. She smiles as she recalls how she instructed her subordinates to “look really mean” so that the mother would take the threat of jail seriously. Harris cheerfully recounts the story of sending an attorney from her office to intimidate a homeless single mother whose children were missing school. ![]() GKkDpayxuv- Walker Bragman January 28, 2019 Kamala Harris at an event hosted by the Commonwealth Club in 2010, explaining her decision as San Francisco DA to get tough on truancy.Ĭritics of truancy crackdowns say such efforts unfairly target poor parents and children without actually helping students. ![]()
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