Unfortunately America often uses the criminal justice system as a replacement for social policy, with disastrous results.
Jonathan Chait made a great find on Wednesday when he highlight the case of a Debra Harrell, who was recently arrested for allowing her nine year old daughter to play in the park while she went to work at her job at a local McDonalds.
To be sure this isn’t exactly responsible parenting, but it also was clearly not the actions of a well off middle class professional too lazy to hire a sitter. In fact it appears Harrell’s only other child care option was having her daughter come to work with her and sit in a booth all day long. While news reports portrayed Harrell’s actions as being those of a monster risking her daughter’s life and limb due to laziness, Chait astutely points out that this case was the natural byproduct of American social policy:
The story is a convergence of helicopter parenting with America’s primitive family policy. Our welfare policy is designed to make everybody, even single mothers, work full-time jobs. The social safety net makes it difficult for low-wage single mothers to obtain adequate child care.
The response to this argument, made by some vox pop interviews in the news segment, is that Harrell, “should have found someone.” But who’s to say that she necessarily had anyone? I know nothing about her personal situation but it’s very possible that she was a single mother with no close by relatives, or no relatives at all. In addition she could have been a socially isolated person with no idea that nonprofits or religious groups might be available to help her out.
The end result is that she could have simply made a calculus that sounds bad to middle class white people, but is the least bad option from her perspective. Leaving the kid home could have been more dangerous than that park for example, or having the kid hang out at her job could have gotten her fired. Thus she arrives at a solution that isn’t ideal, but is born out of necessity.
American society, lacking a basic social policy for people Debra Harrell, thus turns to the criminal justice system instead. And so rather than dealing with this woman’s problems with say a referral by a social services agency we have a mother in jail, who’ll almost certainly lose her job, may get a criminal record making find another job difficult (if not impossible), and a daughter without a mom.
There’s a tendency in the media, especially local media, to always portray problems as resulting from bad people doing bad things. But sometimes it’s more complicated than that. Sometimes we design systems that are set up to produce bad results, and when they inevitably occur we then go on the hunt to find the “bad guy” responsible. Even if it’s a mother with no other options, and even if it just makes things worse.
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It weird how we tell society to stay out of a woman’s choices (abortion or not to have one) then blame society when a person can’t handle the consequences of their choices.
What I don’t understand is why she didn’t take advantage of child care subsidies?
middle class white people might not have made the same life decisions as Ms. Harrell that why they are middle class. that what I meant.
One time, a great college professor, while in an argument with one of my classmates who said they were “entitled to their own opinion”, asserted that people are “actually entitled to a well-informed and properly stated opinion; otherwise they’re just our own everyday biases and prejudices that nobody has the time to listen to.” To make a long story short, the class clapped on behalf of the professor and that student promptly dropped out, but it was a major watershed moment in my still ongoing student career in higher education. Your comment is a great example of purposeful know-nothing ignorance… Read more »
Besides the fact that there are more whites on welfare then other races, State subsidized child care , subsidized housing, subsidized healthcare has already been here for quite some time, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. As an AA who is well educated, I would venture to say that you led a middle class existence and made decisions similar to those that d.smith was referring to.Having worked with countless troubled minority teen boys, “core values” appear to be somewhat distorted. Behavior “X” is okay because of “XYZ” regardless of the fact that behavior “X” is nonetheless… Read more »
How about not having a child when you neither have social or economic support to be a proper parent. Also why do you mention middle class white people as if they don’t have any problems financial or other. There are plenty single struggling white parents in this country. While I am sympathetic to this woman and her situation, why do progressives always have to guilt trip white people as if their lives are a walk in the park. Middle class white people might have the same life decisions as Ms. Harrell that why they are middle class.
Well if you click on the link Jonathan Chait (a perhaps upper middle class person, certainly no aristocrat) let his children go to the neighborhood park (unsupervised!) in DC when he was behind on a deadline once. The point is he wasn’t sent to the hoscow because of it.
My point isn’t that middle class white people are bad or should feel guilty, it’s that different groups of people in our society often get treated (in the media, in our criminal justice system etc.) in very different ways.
You clearly didn’t wither read the article or are deliberately zeroing in on the obvious racial disparities that led to the circumstances here. Instead of complaining about these so-called progressives guilt-tripping supposedly well-meaning white people, how about oitrage at the fact the U.S. is the only developed democracy lacking state-sponsored child care, unionization, wages equal to inflation and adequate health care but especially for women of all ages and socioeconomic upbringings. You get the feeling from your snide comments, the people who contacted the police, and the police incompetent to give her a criminal record for something that is perfectly… Read more »