NYT Opinion: Kamala Harris Was Not a 'Progressive Prosecutor'

[bigtree]

17. that's patently untrue

Last edited Mon Jul 29, 2019, 12:17 AM - Edit history (1)

... The goal was not to threaten all truant kids’ parents with prosecution; Katy Miller, who helped implement the program as a prosecutor under Harris, said that it’s meant to use a step-by-step process of escalating intervention and consequences to push parents to get their kids to school.

And the cases that get to prosecution are extreme — typically parents whose kids have missed more than 30, 60, or 80 days out of a 180-day school year. Miller had one case in court in which a child missed 178 days.

When a student is regularly truant, the school district first gets involved by sending out letters to parents telling them that their child is missing class. Then, the school can call parents into a meeting with school staff and sometimes support service providers to figure out what’s going on. The next step is a meeting with the school attendance review board — where various government agencies and social services, as well as school staff, can be present — to figure out what might be contributing to the truancy. That meeting typically concludes with a contract that dictates who’s going to do what to make sure a kid can get to school.

If all of that fails, the school can refer the case to the prosecutor’s office, which can threaten prosecution if there’s no progress on attendance. The thinking, Miller said, is that by then a parent has already been offered help but clearly needs an extra push to take it and improve a child’s attendance. And if a parent agrees to take steps to improve a child’s attendance, the charges are dropped.

“The way this model has always very intentionally been designed in every aspect of it has been to not get to conviction and incarceration,” she told me. “It has been to use a problem-solving court model to get people to access the services that they need to overcome whatever barriers they have in their life that are keeping them from getting their young child to school.”

At most, 20 parents have been prosecuted in a typical year, Miller said, and none have been jailed. The charge used by the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office doesn’t even carry the potential for jail time; instead, it’s a lower-level infraction that can at worst result in a fine. (The fine is typically $100 per child in San Francisco, but fines can go up to thousands of dollars under state law.)

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/2/7/18202084/kamala-harris-truancy-prosecutor-president-2020