Module #9 Spotlight on Sociology and supplemental topics

This section in each model is a way to emphasize key ideas (often sociologically-related) that enrich and expand the material in the textbook and the Chapter Notes. The instructor will expand the topics occasionally to include specific contemporary and relevant information and insights.

Chapter 7 in the textbook discusses material related to LGBTQ relationships including sexual orientation, heterosexism, same-sex marriage and parenting issues

This Spotlight draws attention to the following topics of slavery, slave families and its impact on current African American families, incarceration, single parenthood and destruction of families of color, and the foster care industrial complex

Most Americans say the legacy of slavery still affects black people in the U.S. today

BYJULIANA MENASCE HOROWITZ

A U.S. House of Representatives committee plans to hold a hearing this week on the topic of reparations for slavery, the first hearing on the topic in more than a decade. The legacy of slavery still resonates for many Americans, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year, with 63% believing it affects the position of black people in American society today either a great deal or a fair amount.

Black adults are particularly likely to say slavery continues to have an impact: More than eight-in-ten say this is the case, including 59% who say the legacy of slavery affects the situation of black people a great deal. By comparison, 26% of whites, 29% of Hispanics and 33% of Asians say slavery affects the position of black people in American society today a great deal, though majorities of each group say it does so at least a fair amount.

The survey also found that more than four-in-ten U.S. adults (45%) think the country hasn’t gone far enough in giving black people equal rights with whites, while 15% say it’s gone too far and 39% say it’s been about right. About eight-in-ten black adults (78%) say the country hasn’t made enough progress in this area, compared with 37% of whites and 48% of Hispanics. (Because this question was asked of a random half of the sample, the views of Asians can’t be analyzed separately; for more information, see “A note about the Asian sample.”)

In addition to their bleak views about the country’s racial progress, black adults are also skeptical about the prospects for racial equality in the future. Among black Americans who say the country hasn’t gone far enough in giving black people equal rights with whites, 64% say it’s not too or not at all likely that the country will ever achieve racial equality. Whites who say the country still has work to do in this area are more optimistic: 80% say it’s very or somewhat likely that black people in our country will eventually have equal rights. Hispanics’ views are more mixed.

Democrats and those who lean to the Democratic Party (80%) are far more likely than Republicans and GOP leaners (43%) to say the legacy of slavery still affects the situation of black people in American society today. And while most Democrats (66%) say the country hasn’t gone far enough in giving black people equal rights with whites, just 18% of Republicans agree. About three-in-ten Republicans (28%) say the country has gone too far on this issue, while 53% say it’s been about right. These differences are virtually unchanged when looking only at white Democrats and Republicans.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/most-americans-say-the-legacy-of-slavery-still-affects-black-people-in-the-u-s-today/

How Slavery Affected
African American Families

Heather Andrea Williams
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
National Humanities Center Fellow
©National Humanities Center

In some ways enslaved African American families very much resembled other families who lived in other times and places and under vastly different circumstances. Some husbands and wives loved each other; some did not get along. Children sometimes abided by parent’s rules; other times they followed their own minds. Most parents loved their children and wanted to protect them. In some critical ways, though, the slavery that marked everything about their lives made these families very different. Belonging to another human being brought unique constrictions, disruptions, frustrations, and pain.

Slavery not only inhibited family formation but made stable, secure family life difficult if not impossible.Enslaved people could not legally marry in any American colony or state. Colonial and state laws considered them property and commodities, not legal persons who could enter into contracts, and marriage was, and is, very much a legal contract. This means that until 1865 when slavery ended in this country, the vast majority of African Americans could not legally marry. In northern states such as New York, Pennsylvania, or Massachusetts, where slavery had ended by 1830, free African Americans could marry, but in the slave states of the South, many enslaved people entered into relationships that they treated like marriage; they considered themselves husbands and wives even though they knew that their unions were not protected by state laws.

A father might have one owner, his "wife" and children another.Some enslaved people lived in nuclear families with a mother, father, and children. In these cases each family member belonged to the same owner. Others lived in near-nuclear families in which the father had a different owner than the mother and children. Both slaves and slaveowners referred to these relationships between men and women as “abroad marriages.” A father might live several miles away on a distant plantation and walk, usually on Wednesday nights and Saturday evenings to see his family as his obligation to provide labor for an owner took precedence over his personal needs.

This use of unpaid labor to produce wealth lay at the heart of slavery in America. Enslaved people usually worked from early in the morning until late at night. Women often returned to work shortly after giving birth, sometimes running from the fields during the day to feed their infants. On large plantations or farms, it was common for children to come under the care of one enslaved woman who was designated to feed and watch over them during the day while their parents worked. By the time most enslaved children reached the age of seven or eight they were also assigned tasks including taking care of owner’s young children, fanning flies from the owner’s table, running errands, taking lunch to owners’ children at school, and eventually, working in the tobacco, cotton, corn, or rice fields along with adults.

On large plantations, slave cabins and the yards of the slave quarters served as the center of interactions among enslaved family members. Here were spaces primarily occupied by African Americans, somewhat removed from the labor of slavery or the scrutiny of owners, overseers, and patrollers. Many former slaves described their mothers cooking meals in the fireplace and sewing or quilting late into the night. Fathers fished and hunted, sometimes with their sons, to provide food to supplement the rations handed out by owners. Enslaved people held parties and prayer meetings in these cabins or far out in the woods beyond the hearing of whites. In the space of the slave quarters, parents passed on lessons of loyalty; messages about how to treat people; and stories of family genealogy. It was in the quarters that children watched adults create potions for healing, or select plants to produce dye for clothing. It was here too, that adults whispered and cried about their impending sale by owners.

Family separation through sale was a constant threat.Enslaved people lived with the perpetual possibility of separation through the sale of one or more family members. Slaveowners’ wealth lay largely in the people they owned, therefore, they frequently sold and or purchased people as finances warranted. A multitude of scenarios brought about sale. An enslaved person could be sold as part of an estate when his owner died, or because the owner needed to liquidate assets to pay off debts, or because the owner thought the enslaved person was a troublemaker. A father might be sold away by his owner while the mother and children remained behind, or the mother and children might be sold. Enslaved families were also divided for inheritance when an owner died, or because the owners’ adult children moved away to create new lives, taking some of the enslaved people with them. These decisions were, of course, beyond the control of the people whose lives they affected most. Sometimes an enslaved man or woman pleaded with an owner to purchase his or her spouse to avoid separation. The intervention was not always successful. Historian Michael Tadman has estimated that approximately one third of enslaved children in the upper South states of Maryland and Virginia experienced family separation in one of three possible scenarios: sale away from parents; sale with mother away from father; or sale of mother or father away from child. The fear of separation haunted adults who knew how likely it was to happen. Young children, innocently unaware of the possibilities, learned quickly of the pain that such separations could cost.

Many owners encouraged marriage to protect their investment in their slaves.Paradoxically, despite the likelihood of breaking up families, family formation actually helped owners to keep slavery in place. Owners debated among themselves the benefits of enslaved people forming families. Many of them reasoned that having families made it much less likely that a man or woman would run away, thus depriving the owner of valuable property. Many owners encouraged marriage, devised the practice of “jumping the broom” as a ritual that enslaved people could engage in, and sometimes gave small gifts for the wedding. Some owners honored the choices enslaved people made about whom their partners would be; other owners assigned partners, forcing people into relationships they would not have chosen for themselves.

Abolitionists attacked slavery by pointing to the harm it inflicted upon families.Just as owners used the formation of family ties to their own advantage, abolitionists used the specter of separation to argue against the institution of slavery. Frederick Douglass, who was enslaved in Maryland before he escaped to Massachusetts and became an abolitionist stridently working to end slavery, began the narrative of his life by examining

the effect of slavery on his own family. He never knew his father, he said, although he “heard it whispered” that it was his owner. Further, he lived with his grandmother, while his mother lived and worked miles away, walking to see him late at night. In his narrative, aimed at an abolitionist audience, Douglass suggested that slaveowners purposefully separated children from their parents in order to blunt the development of affection between them. Similarly, white northern novelist and abolitionist, Harriet Beecher Stowe used the sale and separation of families as a sharp critique of slavery in her famous novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Abolitionists such as Douglass and Stowe argued that slavery was immoral on many grounds, and the destruction of families was one of them.

Following the Civil War, when slavery finally ended in America after nearly two hundred and fifty years, former slaves took measures to formalize their family relations, to find family members, and to put their families back together. During slavery, many people formed new families after separation, but many of them also held on to memories of the loved ones they had lost through sale. Starting in 1866, hundreds of people placed advertisements in newspapers searching for family members. They also sent letters to the Freedmen’s Bureau to enlist the government’s assistance in finding relatives. Parents returned to the places from which they had been sold to take their children from former owners who wanted to hold on to them to put them to work. And, thousands of African American men and women formalized marriages now that it was possible to do so. Some married the person with whom they had lived during slavery, while others legalized new relationships.

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1609-1865/essays/aafamilies.htm

For 50 years, mass incarceration has hurt American families. Here’s how to change it

By Hedwig Lee

For nearly 50 years, the incarceration rate in the U.S. has grown at an exponential rate. Today, the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. Incarceration is especially common in poor communities of color where nearly 70% of Black men who did not finish high school and are approaching midlife will be in prison at some point in their lives.

A review including new data analysis, published Oct. 14 in Science, by experts at Washington University in St. Louis and Duke University exposes the harm mass incarceration has on families and advocates for family-friendly criminal justice interventions.

“While mass incarceration has made family member incarceration common, low-income families of color are disproportionately impacted, especially the women who are often the ones bearing the responsibility of taking care of family members on both the inside and the outside,” said Hedwig Lee, study co-author and professor of sociology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. Lee also is director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, & Equity at WashU.

“We cannot afford another 50 years of mass incarceration tearing apart families and communities. It is time to do something revolutionary and invest in data that allows us to fully understand the effects of mass incarceration on families and implement both criminal justice and broader social policies and practices that prevent future damage.”

Collateral damage of criminal justice system

Extensive research exists detailing the effects of incarceration on convicted individuals, yet less is known about the toll mass incarceration has on families and communities. For this review, Lee and co-author Christopher Wildeman, professor of sociology at Duke University, shifted the focus to the families of incarcerated men, who make up the majority of imprisoned people in the U.S.

Family member incarceration has become exceedingly common among American families. Nearly half of all young adults, age 18-49, have an immediate family member — defined as a parent, child, sibling, current romantic partner or anyone who the respondent ever had a child with — who has been imprisoned. Family member incarceration is even more pervasive for African American families, impacting far more than 60% of adults under the age of 50.

The indirect consequences of mass incarceration, experienced by family members, are likely more sizeable than those for the men who experience incarceration, according to Wildeman.

“Family members of the incarcerated have rarely — if ever — been involved in the crimes that their incarcerated family members have committed and, as a result are the collateral damage of the criminal justice system in a very real and tangible way,” he said.

Because mass incarceration disproportionately impacts African American families, it also exacerbates existing inequalities. In their review, Lee and Wildeman found that family member incarceration has negative effects on family well-being above and beyond existing disadvantages prior to incarceration. These effects include:

Incarceration affects family structure. Incarcerated men marry at extremely low rates and divorce — and union dissolution more broadly — is more common among current and formerly incarcerated men.
Incarceration affects the overall quality of life for families. Incarcerated fathers are less involved in their family before, during and after incarceration. Mothers are also more likely to engage in harsh parenting and experience depression when fathers are incarcerated.
The loss of income caused by incarceration exacerbates economic hardship for families. Because men often struggle to find employment post-incarceration, these economic hardships can be long-lasting.

For children, the negative effects of parental incarceration are better understood. These children are more likely to struggle with behavioral and mental health problems. They’re also less prepared to enter school than their peers, have disengaged parents and carry a stigma of parental incarceration.

“Children whose parents will eventually experience incarceration already disproportionately faced challenges even prior to experiencing that event. But for many children, the incarceration of a parent sets off a downward spiral in which negative responses from teachers, correctional officials and even peers due to the stigma of parental incarceration interacts with negative behavioral responses to the trauma of that event to lead children down a difficult path that has dire consequences for their transition to adulthood,” Wildeman said.

Incarceration also impacts the women who are left behind to manage the fallout. According to Lee and Wildeman’s review, a son’s incarceration could increase the parenting burdens place on grandparents. “Mothers who had a child, almost always a son, incarcerated struggle mightily when it comes to a range of indicators of health, including but not limited to self-rated health, depression and health limitations,” they write.

“Taken together, family incarceration may send generational ripples that impact the health of the entire family,” Lee said.

How to break the cycle

Incarceration is a breaking point for families. But Lee and Wildeman’s review highlights how poorly, on average, families were fairing even before experiencing parental incarceration.

“Addressing these needs through better social services is a clear way to break the cycle and simultaneously improve the health and well-being of the entire family.”

Hedwig Lee

Research from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study show drug abuse and domestic violence often precedes incarceration, as does smoking or using drugs and alcohol during pregnancy. Families in which one or both parents are unmarried, and/or the biological father does not live with his children, are also more likely to experience future incarceration. Prior incarcerations also are a strong indicator of future incarceration.

“These families are often in dire need long before incarceration. These needs may include severe forms of material deprivation — getting evicted, being unable to pay for utilities and not having enough money for food consistently — which are amplified by the fact that rates of addiction disorders and other mental health conditions are highly prevalent in these populations,” Lee said.

“Addressing these needs through better social services is a clear way to break the cycle and simultaneously improve the health and well-being of the entire family.”

What would family-friendly criminal justice interventions look like?

According to Lee and Wildeman, at minimum, family-friendly criminal justice interventions would have three features:

Focus more on diversion in combination with high-quality services. For example, rather than arresting a person for drug possession, he or she would receive lower-level sanction — like a ticket or community service — combined with drug rehabilitation and/or mental health services to address underlying issues. “Such policies have the benefit of not putting families in a situation where the choices are essentially either incarceration or chaos,” the authors write.
Broaden the scope of services for families when prison or jail incarceration is necessary. Current family policies are narrow and focus on how to facilitate visitation and provide mentors for children. However, the review shows that incarceration causes significant harm to families. Social services — such as free universal childcare and extensive economic support — are one way to mitigate those negative effects. Families are especially fragile during the time immediately before and after release, yet little work is currently done to intervene on behalf of families during this time.
Consider alternatives to incarceration and eliminate mandatory sentencing laws. In addition to partnering with researchers to determine which types of changes — diversion, in-facility programs, post-incarceration programs — best offset the cost on incarceration for individuals, families and communities, alternative sentencing practices are needed for nonviolent and violent offenses. “There is, to be as blunt as possible, no way to drastically shrink the imprisonment rate without cutting sentences for individuals convicted of violent crimes and convicted multiple times,” the authors write.

“Although we believe that the consequences of mass incarceration for families are now becoming clear,” added Wildeman, “the reality is that the data we have available to understand how, when and why family member incarceration matters is woefully inadequate to the task, making future data collections that prioritize this incredibly prevalent stressor absolutely vital.”

https://source.wustl.edu/2021/10/for-50-years-mass-incarceration-has-hurt-american-families-heres-how-to-change-it/

THE PROFITS OF FAMILY POLICING AND PUNISHMENT

JANE M. SPINAK

Jane M. Spinak is the Edward Ross Aranow Clinical Professor Emerita of Law at Columbia Law School and author of The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families.

Anti-carceral grassroots activists and partnering scholars have embraced the concept and practice of non-reformist reforms to signal a clear rejection of reforms aimed at merely improving the current structures of carceral institutions and systems. Non-reformist reforms, on the contrary, are intended to shrink and eventually abolish those systems and create instead an anti-racist, anti-classist, and overall humane approach to the goals of safety, liberty, equality and well-being. Of the many challenges to achieving non-reformist reforms, perhaps one of the most stubborn is the deep integration of government funding practices with government policy purposes. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the realm of family policing and regulation – what is euphemistically called child protection or child welfare.

Over the past 50 years, federal, state, and local government funding mandates have achieved the opposite of what they were purported to achieve: child safety, permanency, and well-being. Instead, as Dorothy Roberts has repeatedly argued, “If you came with no preconceptions about the purpose of the child welfare system, you would have to conclude that it is an institution designed to monitor, regulate, and punish poor Black families.”

This institutional design, while building on a longer history of penalizing poor and marginalized families through state intervention, was supersized through a series of federal mandates beginning in the 1960’s to create abuse and neglect hotlines, expand the definition of neglect and abuse to encompass most of the indicia of poverty, limit the efforts and time necessary to assist families in remaining together or being reunified, and financially reward states for terminating parental rights and achieving adoptions. All of the funding for these mandates diminished instead of accomplished safety, permanency, and well-being.

Roberts calls the monetary aspect of this system the “Foster Industrial Complex,” identifying the ways that states and localities have drawn down billions of dollars of federal funds to investigate, surveille, prosecute, and separate families through child protective services agencies (CPS). Federal Title IV-E foster care funds, for example, are uncapped, while Title IV-B funds for preventive services that help keep children at home are capped and represent a miniscule part of the federal CPS pie. This, in essence, rewards CPS and sub-contracting non-profit agencies for separating families rather than preventing child removal. Even the most recent federal foray into a more preventive stance – the Families First Preventive Services Act – which permits states to use some of the Title IV-E foster care funding to prevent separation, is restricted to “children at imminent risk of entering foster care.” Children in that category then are already being investigated or surveilled by CPS, and their parents’ use of those services will be closely monitored with the threat of child removal hanging over their heads. In short, this form of prevention is still deeply imbedded in a system that financially rewards intervention. What families need to avoid the specter of CPS is voluntary, well-resourced, community-developed and -based assistance that is frequently material but also can help them address treatment or other basic social needs.

This overview suggests that if we reward prevention by funding non-governmental actors or their non-profit partners, we can decouple CPS from desperately needed services. But the system is even more nefarious. Roberts draws on Daniel Hatcher’s investigation into the ways states and localities partner with private corporations to comb through records to determine if they can capture benefits that would otherwise enure to the child, such as Social Security Survivor Benefits, and use them to pay for foster care or even supplement the general coffers. In other words, a CPS agency may draw down federal funds for foster care while at the same time draw off a child’s benefits to pay for the same service, essentially making a profit on a child’s foster placement. Creating non-reformist reforms therefore requires not just a radical shift in our approach to keeping children safely and happily at home with their families but slaying the well-fed lion, as Roberts characterizes this profit-focused system.

Then there are states, like Tennessee, which intensified the destruction of families by passing a “fetal assault” law designed to criminally charge women for drug use during pregnancy in order for them to receive the drug treatment the state believed they needed. The women charged were overwhelmingly impoverished. Wendy Bach’s Prosecuting Poverty, Criminalizing Care details exquisitely how the (now defunct) fetal assault law not only failed to ensure that prosecuted women received that care, it drew them deeper into the family policing and criminal legal systems, punishing them instead with incarceration, the imposition of ever-bourgeoning fees and fines, and taking their children away. In Tennessee, these fees and fines included “all the costs that have accrued in the cause,” if the defendant was convicted. The defendant may find herself paying for her arrest, her jailing, her prosecution, and her probation. Tennessee also imposes litigation taxes which pay for basic government expenses as well as earmarked programs that range from driver education in schools to salaries for public defenders to judges’ conferences. Instead of providing the treatment the law envisioned, mothers were driven further into poverty while the profit-seeking lion was also being well fed in Tennessee. And well fed throughout the country. As Alexandra Natapoff has established, “the petty-offense process has quietly become a regressive feature of American tax policy. It actively extracts revenue from an ever-widening pool of mostly low-income people in order to fund the operations of private as well as public criminal justice institutions.”

While investigating the mothers who were the victims of the fetal assault law, Bach also expanded her scope to interrogate how impoverished women in Tennessee generally accessed substance use treatment. She soon discovered that treatment was essentially available only with a referral from the family regulation CPS agency or from the criminal court. One treatment provider would tell someone desperate for treatment to go shoplift to get access to treatment; another suggested they “get a little charge” to secure a referral. Her mantra was “Lock ‘em up, clean ‘em up and start over.” How do we even try to unravel these systems that thrive on criminalizing care while using government funding along with pernicious fees and fines to penalize and destroy families in the name of helping them?

One answer is to uncover these practices and then publicize them, as both Roberts and Bach do. Most of the public has no idea about the choices their federal, state, and local governments make around how to fund family regulation systems and know even less about the pernicious practices used to extract further funding out of the families these systems are supposed to be assisting. Publicity and advocacy matter. In April 2023, San Diego County, CA, stopped its practice of collecting Social Security benefits of foster children after taking $3.2 million since 2015. And last month, after sustained advocacy by the People’s Association of Justice Advocates led by Shane Harris, a former foster child, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors unanimously agreed to sponsor a bill stopping the practice throughout the state. At the same time, as Claire Dunning wrote in a recent LPE blog post, we have to confront how the federal government has forsaken its role of providing essential rights and services in general and understand how desperate states and localities, in turn, fail to fully fund their own services and those of their non-profit-contracting partners. It is hard to imagine that these practices didn’t lead directly to charging fees and fines for services that should be provided by government and contracting non-profit entities. There is no viable social contract in such a system.

A second step is to form partnerships with labor unions, legislators, good government groups, foundations, think tanks, and local communities and neighborhoods to figure out how to shift resources and jobs out of compulsory systems and into communities desperate for funding not dependent on surveilling, reporting on, and intervening in families. This requires a commitment to creating jobs not dependent on punitive solutions and retraining workers to support families in their quest to thrive. Workers should not be relegated to employment built on carceral doctrines to pay their bills and care for their own families.

Finally, we must understand the limits of non-reformist reform unless it is built on the ideas and experiences of impacted families, neighborhoods, and communities who have the insights into what are the most effective ways to receive and use whatever resources are being offered. The shift away from trying to fix the family regulation system to dismantling it could never have happened without the advocacy and activism of impacted individuals, communities and their partners, especially during the last decade. Whatever expertise we have as professionals in our disciplines and practices can only be employed in partnership with these activists, and with their insights and experiences shaping that partnership. Only then can non-reformist reforms lead to social justice for all families.

https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-profits-of-family-policing-and-punishment/