If you want to know which groups of people public officials like and which groups they dislike, look at who they want to put in jail and who they think deserve leniency. By this standard, Vice President Kamala Harris loves illegal immigrants, drug users, and rioters in urban and campus protests, but hates parents.
Harris’ advocacy to keep illegal immigrants, drug users, and rioters out of jail has been widely discussed. Her efforts to imprison parents are less well known.
When Harris was a local prosecutor in San Francisco, running to be California’s attorney general, her top education priority was to crack down on truancy. She championed a state law that criminalized the parents of truants and subjected them to hefty fines and up to one year in prison. As Harris later described her approach, “I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy.”
At her inauguration as attorney general, Harris emphasized her determination to enforce the new law and imprison parents of truant children: “We are putting parents on notice. If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”
Jailing the parents of truants is bad policy and a significant departure from how we otherwise handle parents struggling to raise their children well. For example, we don’t threaten the parents of children who enter the foster-care system with jail time for failing in their responsibilities. Instead, we try to help them recover from their difficulties so that families can be reunited and function more effectively.
If, however, we criminalize parents, we risk making horrible mistakes that cause kids to be even worse off. Shortly after the law that Harris championed was enacted, one such horrible mistake occurred. The Orange County Sheriff’s office arrested Los Angeles-area mom Cheree Peoples, parading her handcuffed in her pajamas in front of press photographers they had arranged to capture the moment.
Meant to be a public display of Harris’ get-tough-on-truancy approach, this event was in reality an absurd humiliation of an African-American mom struggling to care for her child, who was chronically suffering from sickle-cell anemia. Yes, her daughter had missed a significant amount of school, but that was only because she was in the hospital or at home with pain that prevented her from regular attendance.
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The school was aware of the child’s health condition, and was negotiating a plan to provide accommodations so the student could be educated in the hospital and at home. But because that plan had not yet been arranged, she was technically truant, and Peoples faced jail time because of the policy Harris advocated.
Even after the facts of the situation were revealed, prosecutors continued to pursue this struggling mother, exacerbating her difficulties. As one reporter who covered the story told NPR:
Cheree Peoples wound up fighting these charges in court for a really long time…. [T]here was pressure on her to plead guilty to this. And she wouldn’t do it. She felt like this was really unfair…. While she was fighting this in court, she was also caring for her daughter. She struggles with employment because her daughter’s illness really takes a lot of care and management. It can be all-encompassing in their lives sometimes. This was a really tough time for her.
When this horrific story came to light during Harris’ campaign in 2020, the then-senator claimed that criminalizing parents was “never the intention.” As is her custom, Harris denied having advocated for the very thing that she had explicitly championed. “Clearly, the state law intended for some parents to be jailed for their children’s chronic truancy, despite Harris’ claim that jailing parents was an ‘unintended consequence’ of the law,” explained FactCheck.org. “She may regret the law, but she can’t redefine it.”
A few months after trying to evade responsibility for criminalizing parents of truant children in California, Harris committed to bringing that kind of policy to the federal government to be enforced by the U.S. Department of Education. In a September 2019 interview, Harris was asked if she would “extend the [anti-truancy] program on a federal level, or try to figure out ways to address truancy on a federal level,” and whether she thought “the Department of Education is more suited to handle truancy issues.” Harris answered unequivocally: “Yeah, I do.”
It is impossible to know whether Vice President Harris would actually use the U.S. Department of Education to criminalize parents of truant children nationwide or if she might later say that this was never her intention.
But one thing is clear. Kamala Harris is more sympathetic to various categories of criminals than she is to struggling parents.
Jay P. Greene is a Senior Research Fellow and Jason Bedrick is a Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.
The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.