I think that, in a country that is becoming more and more fascist by the day, it’s more alarming than people would be willing to admit that Harris built her prosecutorial career around targeting truants and non-violent drug users.
Her prosecutorial career is a microcosm of the fundamental problems in the US criminal justice system, which observably and disproportionately oppresses the poor and makes vast concessions for the wealthy. Her presidency, should it happen, will not change that.
I’ve been reading her book, the truancy thing is interesting. She had data that showed that kids that weren’t showing up at school, particularly young ones, didn’t learn how to read sufficiently well, and then fell behind in school and struggled to catch up, they then ended up struggling later in life, and often ending up either as victims or perpetrators of crime.
So, she used the California DA’s office to enforce truancy laws across California, encouraged reaching out to fix the problems at home if at all possible, and also encouraged reaching out to folks that had been written off as “not caring” (she cites an example of a father that hadn’t been paying child support but upon learning that his daughter wasn’t going to school, started taking his daughter to school every morning, and volunteering in her classroom).
Of course this is all by her account, but that sounds overall quite positive to me.
I think that, in a country that is becoming more and more fascist by the day, it’s more alarming than people would be willing to admit that Harris built her prosecutorial career around targeting truants and non-violent drug users.
Her prosecutorial career is a microcosm of the fundamental problems in the US criminal justice system, which observably and disproportionately oppresses the poor and makes vast concessions for the wealthy. Her presidency, should it happen, will not change that.
I’ve been reading her book, the truancy thing is interesting. She had data that showed that kids that weren’t showing up at school, particularly young ones, didn’t learn how to read sufficiently well, and then fell behind in school and struggled to catch up, they then ended up struggling later in life, and often ending up either as victims or perpetrators of crime.
So, she used the California DA’s office to enforce truancy laws across California, encouraged reaching out to fix the problems at home if at all possible, and also encouraged reaching out to folks that had been written off as “not caring” (she cites an example of a father that hadn’t been paying child support but upon learning that his daughter wasn’t going to school, started taking his daughter to school every morning, and volunteering in her classroom).
Of course this is all by her account, but that sounds overall quite positive to me.