Moderator: Ann Cammett Panelists:Joan C. Williams: Caring in SecretBeth Burkstrand-Reid: Masculin... more Moderator: Ann Cammett Panelists:Joan C. Williams: Caring in SecretBeth Burkstrand-Reid: Masculinities and Mr. MomLeticia M. Saucedo: Border-Crossing Stories and Masculinities.
Contemporary child support law in the United States is not a single system designed for the mater... more Contemporary child support law in the United States is not a single system designed for the material improvement of children’s lives. Rather, child support jurisprudence has devolved into multiple legal systems, each designed for entirely different social policy purposes. The traditional family law system, as a means of allocating resources for children after parental separation, may work well for the affluent who retain economic autonomy, but not so well for poor families who rely on government financial support and who must subject themselves to state intervention and regulation. More egregiously, incarcerated parents as a group are legally governed by what I call the “Shadow Law of Child Support”—which has emerged alongside punitive welfare reform and mass criminalization. As a matter of law and policy, incarcerated parents are routinely subjected to a suffocating matrix of punitive federal and state laws, criminal enforcement, criminal-system financial obligations, and civil collateral consequences that together serve to transfer unmanageable debt to parents, paradoxically rendering them less able to provide consistent support. This Article seeks to make visible the structural paradigm that governs the child support law and subordinates parents involved with the criminal system. Incarcerated parents are disproportionately Black and already lag far behind others in key economic indicators, including the racial wealth gap. I argue that child support policy for these families is driven by the racialized carceral logic of mass criminalization—which seeks to punish parents for criminal system involvement rather than focus on the goal of securing ongoing financial and familial well-being for their children.
Building on the findings of the New Jersey Reentry Roundtable and a growing concern around the st... more Building on the findings of the New Jersey Reentry Roundtable and a growing concern around the state about how to improve outcomes for the more than 70,000 individuals expected to return home from prison over the next five years, the roundtable examined the complex role that families – broadly defined – play in the lives of prisoners during incarceration and
The proliferation of university courses about domestic violence includes clinical courses in law ... more The proliferation of university courses about domestic violence includes clinical courses in law schools in which students represent victims in their legal cases. This essay advocates for a broader approach to teaching about the problem. Using examples from their clinic cases, the authors show how teachers can overcome pedagogical challenges and render domestic and other forms of gendered violence, including state and community violence, more visible to students by intentionally raising and placing it within larger frameworks of structural inequality. In this way, students learn to identify and address gendered violence even when it is not the presenting problem.
Moderator: Ann Cammett Panelists:Joan C. Williams: Caring in SecretBeth Burkstrand-Reid: Masculin... more Moderator: Ann Cammett Panelists:Joan C. Williams: Caring in SecretBeth Burkstrand-Reid: Masculinities and Mr. MomLeticia M. Saucedo: Border-Crossing Stories and Masculinities.
Contemporary child support law in the United States is not a single system designed for the mater... more Contemporary child support law in the United States is not a single system designed for the material improvement of children’s lives. Rather, child support jurisprudence has devolved into multiple legal systems, each designed for entirely different social policy purposes. The traditional family law system, as a means of allocating resources for children after parental separation, may work well for the affluent who retain economic autonomy, but not so well for poor families who rely on government financial support and who must subject themselves to state intervention and regulation. More egregiously, incarcerated parents as a group are legally governed by what I call the “Shadow Law of Child Support”—which has emerged alongside punitive welfare reform and mass criminalization. As a matter of law and policy, incarcerated parents are routinely subjected to a suffocating matrix of punitive federal and state laws, criminal enforcement, criminal-system financial obligations, and civil collateral consequences that together serve to transfer unmanageable debt to parents, paradoxically rendering them less able to provide consistent support. This Article seeks to make visible the structural paradigm that governs the child support law and subordinates parents involved with the criminal system. Incarcerated parents are disproportionately Black and already lag far behind others in key economic indicators, including the racial wealth gap. I argue that child support policy for these families is driven by the racialized carceral logic of mass criminalization—which seeks to punish parents for criminal system involvement rather than focus on the goal of securing ongoing financial and familial well-being for their children.
Building on the findings of the New Jersey Reentry Roundtable and a growing concern around the st... more Building on the findings of the New Jersey Reentry Roundtable and a growing concern around the state about how to improve outcomes for the more than 70,000 individuals expected to return home from prison over the next five years, the roundtable examined the complex role that families – broadly defined – play in the lives of prisoners during incarceration and
The proliferation of university courses about domestic violence includes clinical courses in law ... more The proliferation of university courses about domestic violence includes clinical courses in law schools in which students represent victims in their legal cases. This essay advocates for a broader approach to teaching about the problem. Using examples from their clinic cases, the authors show how teachers can overcome pedagogical challenges and render domestic and other forms of gendered violence, including state and community violence, more visible to students by intentionally raising and placing it within larger frameworks of structural inequality. In this way, students learn to identify and address gendered violence even when it is not the presenting problem.
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This Article seeks to make visible the structural paradigm that governs the child support law and subordinates parents involved with the criminal system. Incarcerated parents are disproportionately Black and already lag far behind others in key economic indicators, including the racial wealth gap. I argue that child support policy for these families is driven by the racialized carceral logic of mass criminalization—which seeks to punish parents for criminal system involvement rather than focus on the goal of securing ongoing financial and familial well-being for their children.
This Article seeks to make visible the structural paradigm that governs the child support law and subordinates parents involved with the criminal system. Incarcerated parents are disproportionately Black and already lag far behind others in key economic indicators, including the racial wealth gap. I argue that child support policy for these families is driven by the racialized carceral logic of mass criminalization—which seeks to punish parents for criminal system involvement rather than focus on the goal of securing ongoing financial and familial well-being for their children.