Kamala Harris laughed about jailing parents over truancy. But it's not funny

For progressives, there are good reasons to be suspicious of the idea that former prosecutors make good politicians. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and its criminal punishment system disproportionately punishes poor people and people of color. Prosecutors have a leading role in sustaining this injustice, in part because they tend to view prisons as solutions to social problems.

That worldview is fully on display in recently unearthed video footage of Kamala Harris, defending her decision to criminally prosecute parents for their children’s truancy. In the video, taken at the Commonwealth Club in 2010 when Harris was district attorney of San Francisco, Harris says that because “a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime”, she decided to treat parents with absentee children as criminals.

Harris cheerfully recounts the story of sending an attorney from her office to intimidate a homeless single mother whose children were missing school. 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. 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.

Here we see the limits of the “prosecutorial mindset”. 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.

Harris looked at the problem of perpetual truancy and believed she ought to start locking up parents. 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.

Given the social reality, the idea of fining or jailing parents over student absences is both cruel and unwise. It targets the poorest and most desperate parents, and it doesn’t actually address the root causes. Even if it succeeds in reducing truancy rates, it inflicts yet more burdens on the most vulnerable people in society. 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”.

What’s striking about Harris’s talk is that she doesn’t seem at all aware of the socioeconomic implications of her policy. She admits that when she proposed jailing parents, members of her staff thought it was a terrible idea. But she laughs about it. In a 2009 op-ed about her efforts, Harris brags about the reductions in truancy rates she achieved through harsher “accountability” practices, but she doesn’t discuss the potential downsides to a child’s development of putting their parents in jail for up to a year, nor does she think much about who the likely targets of her policy would be.

The human consequences here can be truly devastating. In 2014, a mother in Pennsylvania named Eileen DeNino died in jail, having been imprisoned for failing to pay fines for her children’s truancy. According to the lawsuit filed by DeNino’s family, jail staff knew DeNino had uncontrolled high blood pressure but denied her access to medication. The policy that Harris championed can literally kill mothers.

Harris’s record as a prosecutor has already been criticized heavily. As Lara Bazelon wrote in the New York Times, “when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms … Ms Harris opposed them or stayed silent,” and she “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct”.

But the new videos show something even more disturbing: Harris has no awareness of what the criminal justice system truly means in the lives of the poor, and she believes that jail has an important place in education policy.

She speaks proudly of using the “big stick” that prosecutors have, but doesn’t realize that this “big stick” is used to beat people into submission through threatening them with being caged and even killed. It is an inhumane approach to social policy, and it’s not the sort of thinking that any progressive who cares about criminal justice reform should be willing to stomach.

• Nathan Robinson is the editor of Current Affairs