Prosecuting Parents Enables Systemic Racism
I get why people are frustrated with school shootings. But convicting the parents of a school shooter of homicide would cross a Rubicon
Of all the positions that the left might adopt, I must admit that I am surprised (though I probably shouldn’t be) by the fervency of the online left’s support for prosecuting the Crumbleys, the gun nuts who seemed to have failed Parenting 101 in encouraging their kid’s anti-social obsession with assault weaponry, leading to yet another school shooting.
I share everyone’s frustration with school shootings. The fact that we have gotten used to them- gotten used to a handful of innocent children being gunned down every few months- is one of the most powerful indictments of modern America. It’s also terrible that we seem to have lost the capacity to even conceive of better gun policies: if the framers were to be brought back to life, they would be horrified that the Second Amendment, which they felt to be a crucially important protection that would ensure that an armed populace would be available to be called into civil service, is now used to effectively protect anti-social mass murderers as well as those who fantasize about committing that sort of terrorism.
But the left seems to have lost the thread on the criminal justice system. Just a year after people were on the streets saying that All Cops Are Bastards and that the criminal justice system is infused with systemic racism, some of the same people are making bloodthirsty calls to prosecute bad parenting as manslaughter. So it probably behooves someone to point out that this is a really bad idea. And indeed, it’s a bad idea for reasons that the left, which defends the tenets of Critical Race Theory, ought to be able to appreciate. So let’s stop and think about what CRT says about the justice system and how it applies to the prosecution of parents for terrible parenting.
We have a mass incarceration problem in this country. And the brunt of that mass incarceration falls on Black people. I suspect my readers already understand this, but it’s worth repeating. The criminal justice system imprisons a far greater percentage of Black people than it does white people. Conservatives respond to this by pointing out that crime rates among Black people are higher, but to me, that argument has always been a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the police and DA’s spend a disproportionate amount of time attempting to detect crime in Black neighborhoods, you are going to see more Black people arrested and charged for crimes. It may just mean that people get away with more things in white America.
Which, of course, they do. Our criminal justice system makes choices. I used to live in Hollywood, for many years. While I lived there- and I suspect this is still true- literally any person in the entertainment industry who wanted to obtain cocaine could do so. Cocaine was dealt on and near movie studio lots, and was available at the parties thrown and attended by prominent celebrities, and you could tell it was widely available merely from the number of businesses offering drug rehabilitation that sprung up on the west side of Los Angeles and the number of people in the entertainment industry who patronized them.
Here’s the thing: if I knew about this, I am sure the LAPD knew all about it too. And the LA Sheriff (who polices West Hollywood), and the Santa Monica, Culver City, and Beverly Hills PD’s as well. And yet I don’t remember a single raid on a Hollywood Hills party. Not one. Everyone was getting cocaine, it was an open secret, and LAPD did nothing about it. Why? Well, pretty simply, because policing the narcotics laws against rich white people is a pain in the butt. First, they have political connections; the LAPD captain who orders such a raid is probably going to get some calls the next morning from powerful people telling her to knock it off. And second, they get good lawyers and fight the charges. They raise arguments that the search warrant was invalid and the search was overbroad. They force you to take cases to trial, where a sympathetic jury swayed by expensive lawyers might let the defendant off the hook anyway. And even if you have them dead to rights, they use their influence to push the system to cut deals with them: in the 1990’s, it became a recurring joke that Robert Downey, Jr. was caught over and over again with drugs and never did serious prison time.
Meanwhile, you get none of that resistance when you go down to South Central LA and enforce the drug laws against poor crack addicts and their dealers. Convictions are easier, searches don’t get effectively challenged, and people get sent to prison by unsympathetic juries. So that, of course, is where resources are concentrated.
The point of all of this is, this is a story of systemic racism if there ever was one. The criminal justice system is built on incentives that are based on the desire to put criminals away and win cases, and the way you do that is by enforcing the law disproportionately against poor people, and in LA that often means Black people. Any CRT scholar could tell you this.
But with parenting, we go beyond that general point and can make a more specific one: the American legal system has a decades long history of declaring Black parents unfit. Child Protective Services is more likely to visit your home if you are a Black parent, and are also more likely to find Black parents unfit. Black parents are more likely to have their kids taken away and placed in foster care. Black parents are more likely to have their parental rights terminated.
And Black parents are also far more likely to face the criminal justice system for their parenting decisions. Black parents are more likely to be charged with child abuse. And innovative prosecutors in the 1980’s created a trendy new type of prosecution: charges against pregnant Black crack addicts for endangering their children. These prosecutions still go on.
Now, given all that, do you trust this justice system to administer a new crime of “negligent parenting leading to homicide” fairly? I sure don’t. Whatever new ground is broken to send the Crumbley’s to prison will then be picked up and used to prosecute Black parents. You can almost see it on the horizon: a harried Black single mother whose kid becomes a gang member, brings guns back to the house, and discusses gang violence in front of her, and then goes out and murders a member of a rival gang. That’s going to be prosecuted as homicide, if the courts uphold a conviction of the Crumbleys. You can bet on it.
And there’s a broader point about this. I don’t agree with a lot of the rhetoric of police protests: I don’t think all cops are bastards (although police culture protects and encourages a certain bastard contingent), and I think defunding the police would be a disaster. But one thing the protesters are absolutely right about is that the criminal justice system is no friend of left or liberal causes. It is structurally impossible for a tool of the state, empowered to deprive ordinary citizens of their liberty, and tied to structures of wealth and power (such as the availability of expensive private lawyers and political connections) can ever be such a thing. This doesn’t mean that there can never be some reform on the edges: it’s a good thing, for instance, that domestic violence and sexual assault are taken more seriously by the system than they used to be. But it does mean that every expansion of the system is going to fall harder on marginalized communities, just like the Critical Race Theorists tell us it will. (Even domestic violence and sexual assault laws are disproportionately enforced against Black people.)
And that, I think, militates against innovative theories of prosecutions, especially when it comes to parents. The public is already highly judgmental of parents. Heck, the public is highly judgmental even of white parents! And Black parents get judged even more harshly. Further, the notion that parents are responsible for whatever bad things their children get involved in is widely held. This, combined with the fact that many Black people still grow up in neighborhoods with a lot of gang violence, and the fact that Black people are so much easier to prosecute because they have fewer resources to fight the state, and you have a recipe for the expansion of systemic racism. The left is supposed to know better.
Prosecuting Parents Enables Systemic Racism
The main thrust of your argument is that the law shouldn't be expanded to cover situations like this shooting because of disparate impact across races. Seems like the same argument could be applied to laws against theft, rape, murder, the list goes on.
I think a better analysis would compare alleged costs vs. alleged benefits of the change. You touch on it a bit where you seem to accept the tradeoffs in expanding domestic violence and sexual assault. But any strong argument here would have to flesh out both sides of the tradeoff and compare them. As it is, you're just making a fully general argument against criminal laws.