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

Recently resurfaced videos of Harris defending her decision to lock up parents over truancy are disturbing

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.

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from US news | The Guardian http://bit.ly/2Sg6LRu