Should parents of recent juvenile felons be publicly exposed?
Objective: Create consequences for poor parenting.
@Cosmichomicide
Then, wouldn't that be part of the story? The failure of society to assist parents that have done all they can but it wasn't enough.
We just had a 17 y/o shoot a 49rs football player in our downtown.
What is the problem that caused this shooting?
Maybe the child thought it was OK to use a gun to commit the crime?
Should society hold parents accountable?
We currently don't.
We have in cases of mass shootings where the parents were clearly complicit in the supply or training of the weapons used, like the Crumbleys.
My concern is that there are so many things that are felonies in so many states this becomes another way to target non-majority populations and point a finger rather than solution the root cause.
Adam Lanza killed Nancy first. It's not the 80/20 solution it appears.
Deterrence vs Retribution
Would parents act any differently if they were held accountable?
Would society act differently if they saw parents struggle and still fail with dire consequences?
There are terrible parents. We have entire systems devoted to them.
Most parents do their level best. And I say that as a kid whose mom told me to be home before the streetlights came on and had me setting up the ashtrays for bridge club after I let myself in after school.
My brother is a Trumper and we grew up in the bluest of blue families. As in, I have the dress my mom wore to Kennedy's inaugural ball blue family.
There's just no even application of this, satisfying as it seems.
We never properly addressed the issue.
Retribution for failed parenting WILL fall disproportionately on lower financial classes.
This will not move society one bit, but will reinforce the idea that the poor are dangerous to society.
@Cosmichomicide
Second and third order consequences.
Is there a solution to mitigate that effect?
Education, employment, youth programs, family support services, alternative sentencing - lots of things have better outcomes for offenders, families, and communities than juvenile incarceration.
The assumption is that "bad" parenting is the cause and fixing parents through shunning and Scarlet Ps will improve society more than childcare, healthcare, education, housing, and food.
It's the cheaper illusion of "doing something" by pointing society's finger at a convenient scapegoat.
Second example: Annette has two kids. Her husband died leaving medical debt and the loss of his income put the family living in the car while she works two jobs. One of the kids gets arrested for dealing felony weight. They told mom the extra money came from odd jobs.
Public shaming results in mom losing her jobs, the second child is put in the system.
Society "did something" and can congratulate itself on action, but the root causes remain. 🤷🏻♀️
https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/effective-alternatives-to-youth-incarceration/
You asked if the circumstances would be part of the story and that would draw attention to society's failures, presumably so we would identify them and fix them.
OK, we already know that food, shelter, education, and healthcare reduce crime and improve outcomes for children. Let's fix those.
Retribution is cheaper and serves up a dopamine hit of moral superiority while giving society the satisfaction of assigning accountability and closing the books. It doesn't move the needle.
@jurban That's a hard question to answer. I don't have enough data to confidently give an answer either way, really.
What I will say is that modern societal and household dynamics appear to minimize the role of parents in their children's lives (whether by design or by happenstance I cannot say);
Most parents spend very little time with their children (in many cases almost none), especially compared to what was typical historically, greatly diminishing the likely degree of culpability.
@IrelandTorin
Interesting.
My experience is the exact opposite. My friends are helicopters and my parents (and most of my childhood friends) were AWOL.
I was assuming that we needed more parental involvement in underprivileged children's lives. The lack thereof is a potential reason why we're seeing kids shoot football players in downtown San Francisco.
@jurban There is a difference between being a helicopter parent and spending time with your kids.
The former implies overprotection and an excessive degree of control - which is not healthy.
The latter does not - & actually, I think if parents spent more time *with* their children, mentally present/focusing on interacting with them *as people* instead of fixating on control, societal expectations (eg: obsessing over extracurricular activities like sports), etc... the situation would be better.
@jurban I should note that I primarily mean *earlier* in life, during the most crucial formative years.
I do not believe it is healthy to be pawning off two, three, or four-year-olds on daycare workers who have zero vested interest in their long-term well-being and who are torn between trying to supervise 22 kids at once.
That is a symptom of horrifically broken societal structures, expectations, and attitudes around employment, parenting, and lifestyle (among other things).
@IrelandTorin
All good.
But the original question was more simplistic.
Are parents culpable, at all, for their kids' actions? Yes, the Crumblys are in jail, but that had a legal trail via the gun purchase. What about just doing a shitty job as a parent and the kid shoots a football player in broad daylight in downtown San Francisco?
Meanwhile, I'm signing off for the night. Will re-engage tomorrow!
G'night!
@jurban I will answer your question with further questions:
Are the parents of bad parents culpable for their kids' bad parenting?
Is society culpable for shaping people in such a way that they become bad parents?
Are the oil companies that for decades added tetraethyllead to gasoline, verifiably leading to massively increased rates of cognitive deficits, mental illness, paranoia, psychosis, aggression, and violent crime among the human population culpable for the resultant behaviour?
@jurban If you try to trace causal threads & assign culpability based on all the factors which led to the outcome, first you'll start grappling with the human mind's limitations (its fundamental inability to grasp causality's full complexity outside infinitesimal scopes)...
If you power through anyway, as you trace the threads of causality you will find nearly *everything* shares in the blame all the way back to the Big Bang.
Blame doesn't make much sense, objectively. It's so narrow-minded.
@jurban The question we should be asking is not whether they are culpable / responsible (because at the end of the day that question is essentially meaningless), but whether your proposed course of action would reduce the incidence of the undesirable outcomes under consideration without introducing equally bad side effects.
My suspicion is that it would not... thankfully the latter question is testable, so at societal scale there'd be no need to theorize; an A/B study could be done instead.
@jurban We as a species and as a society have a long track record of attributing grossly excessive significance to individuals' direct roles in both positive and negative events/outcomes, while simultaneously completely (or near-completely) ignoring collective, systemic, coincidental, indirect, & natural factors - even where the evidence suggests one of the latter may have actually been the sole determinant.
We heap blame and commendations on people even when they had little-to-no real impact.
@IrelandTorin
I agree, but I can only do so for anecdotal scenarios.
If we were considering influencing the culture, I think we can agree that "good" parenting (if we could define that well enough to agree!) would have a mitigating effect on juvenile crime trends.
Outside influence are part of the equation. Just how heavily weighted is uncertain.
@jurban I think it goes far further than just culture: I firmly believe the *entire framework* of the modern world's approach to life needs a redo.
That encompasses everything from working schedules to urban planning, parental expectations to economic policy, education paradigm to transportation, household structure to political system, & everything in between.
Seems to me we're doing life all wrong: we ignore 80,000 years of history where it can teach us, yet refuse to change awful practices.
@jurban
Scenario: Bob and Elsie have three kids. One of them becomes addicted to opiates following a severe sports injury. Despite intervention, they spiral and are eventually arrested and convicted for [pick a felony].
Forget Bob and Elsie. Consider the impact on the other two kids.
Is this only for the "bad" parents? And who determines "badness"?
Wouldn't it be better to put supports in place beforehand, rather than punch down when the bottom is reached?