On Aug 8, 2005, at 4:43 PM, Ronn!Blankenship wrote:
Okay, so we send daddy to jail for committing a crime, and put him up
at
the taxpayers' expense. Then mommy and the kids, who are presumably
innocent of any crime, go on welfare, because they no longer have a
paycheck coming in because daddy is in jail and mommy has no marketable
skills and has several young kids at home. When daddy finally gets
out,
he can't get a job because no one wants to hire an ex-con. And even if
mommy (after the kids are in school) or daddy can eventually get a
minimum-wage job, it's not enough to live on, particularly when there
are day-care expenses for the kids when they are not in school and
there
is no parent at home because they are working. So we end up with the
whole family on the public dole for the foreseeable future. How do you
suggest that we (1) punish the guilty appropriately and (2) keep the
innocent members of the criminal's family from paying the price and/or
ending up on welfare?
We can't, as far as I can tell.
People who do outrageous things cause outrageous consequences. People
get killed. Lives are thrown into turmoil. Some things, we can
ameliorate. Others, we cannot.
I feel for the mommy and kids when daddy breaks the law and ends up in
jail for it. That's one of the reasons I believe that we need to
continue to *have* a strong social safety net. It's not mommy's or the
kids' fault that daddy is in jail. They become further victims of his
crime. If we can, I believe that we should offer them some support
until they can support themselves.
I do not feel the same way for daddy. We are not God, so we cannot be
perfectly forgiving. While my heart goes out to a person who is so
desperate or foolish that he commits this or that outrage, I don't know
what we can or should work too hard to soften the consequences of his
actions. As much as I want there to be a social safety net to keep
mommy and kids from falling too hard as a result of his actions, I
want a solid wall to keep his actions from falling too hard on the
rest of us, too.
Dave
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