Our latest episode of Code Switch, we took a look at vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s record as a prosecutor, and how she used her power as San Francisco’s district attorney and later, as California’s attorney general to shape the criminal justice system.
And of that record, one of the initiatives that has drawn the most attention is the truancy program that she pushed for in the state legislature. Passed in 2011, the law allowed district attorneys to charge parents with a misdemeanor if their children missed 10 percent of the school year without a valid reason.
In 2019, HuffPost reporter Molly Redden wrote about the families affected by this truancy program, including a Black mother named Cheree Peoples, who was arrested in April of 2013. She came on the show to help explain why this program, which initially launched without much criticism, ended up becoming so controversial, and why it disproportionately affected families of color. Here’s the extended cut of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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