Thread by @WalkerBragman

Kamala Harris at an event hosted by the Commonwealth Club in 2010, explaining her decision as San Francisco DA to get tough on truancy.

Critics of truancy crackdowns say such efforts unfairly target poor parents and children without actually helping students.

Running for Attorney General, Harris pushed an anti-truancy bill which Governor Schwarzenegger signed into law in 2010 to allow truancy to become a crime all its own. Before the bill, truancy had to be prosecuted as child endangerment.

Under the bill, truant is defined as more than 3 unexcused absences in a school year. Parents of students who miss more than 10 percent of their classes would be offered state help and then if absences continued, would be subject to a $2000 fine or yearlong jail sentence.

It is worth noting that SFGate credits DA Harris' anti-truancy push in San Francisco with a reduction in truancy rates by 23 percent between 2008 and 2009. However, SFGate did note that the trend went back 3 years at least. Harris' push came in '07. m.sfgate.com/news/article/P…

Unsurprisingly, statistics from California from '16-'17 indicate that truancy's a problem disproportionately affecting communities of color, foster youth, homeless youth, students with disabilities. Tough on truancy adheres to the idea that those groups just need more motivation.

Kamala Harris continued on to describe how she'd brought charges against a single homeless mother of 3 who was working 2 jobs because her children were truant...and this was a success story.

Harris doesn’t say it clearly, but her career indicates a belief in Broken Windows-style retributive justice. Outside her involvement in a national foreclosure settlement, her office really targeted low level offenses—truancy, minor drug sales, graffiti, vandalism, auto burglary.

Harris' beliefs in retributive justice are deeply held. Here's a video of Harris from 2013 at the Chicago Ideas Week mocking criminal justice reformers as unrealistic and ideological.

Harris follows up with a story criticizing the "knee-jerk response" to criminal justice by Democrats.

In this 2009 interview, Harris explains the truancy initiative. The anchors seem uncomfortably skeptical after she explains the process: infraction at first for parents with the option of assistance or prosecution. Then increasing punishments for repeat truancy and likely jail.

Apparently, the speech from the beginning of this thread wasn't a one-off. It was a stump speech for her 2010 Attorney General campaign. This video is from a campaign event on November 2009.

It's practically a clone, right down to the story of the single, homeless mother of 3 working 2 jobs, charged for the truancy of her children, who took the help offered by Harris' office and as a result, wasn't prosecuted.

This was Harris' truancy policy as Attorney General in 2013, following the legislation she pushed which Governor Schwarzenegger signed in 2010: oag.ca.gov/sites/all/file…

Thanks to @Vj248J for finding this!

@Vj248J Kamala Harris was giving this same pitch about how prosecuting parents for truancy was smart/necessary as recently as 2014 at Vanity Fair's New Establishment Summit. Kirsten Gillibrand was there too. She praised it as an example of the focus women bring to leadership.

@Vj248J It's notable that gone from her story, however, is the bit about actually bringing charges against a homeless mother of 3 working 2 jobs.

@Vj248J Harris' campaign responded to these videos, telling HuffPost, "She believed a critical way to keep kids out of jail when they’re older is to keep them in school when they’re young,” huffingtonpost.com/entry/kamala-h…

@Vj248J But intentions aside, Jezebel reports Harris' office brought charges against 20 parents in truancy cases in '09. In '12, due to the anti-truancy law Harris pushed, one woman was sentenced to 180 days in jail bc her two kids missed over 100 days of school. theslot.jezebel.com/this-is-what-t…

@Vj248J Harris was still touting her efforts on truancy in 2017.