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https://interactives.dallasnews.com/2017/overlooked/
its a long read so I won't post the whole thing. Don't read the comment section.
At age 12, Kylia Booker knew enough to keep her head down and her mouth shut.
Braid your sisters’ pigtails. Get them on the school bus. Walk half a mile to the convenience store to buy groceries with the food-stamp card.
Don’t let anyone know you and the babies are home alone ’cause Mama is in jail again.
For nearly a month, Kylia and her two young sisters lived alone in a rented house in Arlington. No one involved in jailing their mother — not the police, not the courts, not the sheriff’s department — ever checked on them.
It was not the first, the last, or even the most dangerous time that the Booker sisters were overlooked by adults who put their mother in jail.
“We were really thrown to the wolves, if you think about it,” says Kylia, now 21. When her mother got arrested, she says, “it was always worse for us.”
No one in the criminal justice system is responsible for the safety of children whose mothers go to jail, an investigation by The Dallas Morning News has found. Not in North Texas, and not in most communities across the country.
While the moms may have committed crimes, the kids are innocent. Most were born and raised in tough circumstances they didn’t choose. When their mothers get locked up, the children often suffer.
No agency tracks or monitors the children of people who are arrested, not even of women who are solo caretakers. So no one knows how many kids are home alone because of a parent’s arrest. No one knows how many go to foster care. Or get handed off to inappropriate guardians. Or end up on the streets.
Since 2014, the U.S. Justice Department has recommended that police and jailers take steps to ensure that kids are kept safe after a parent is taken into custody, even if the children aren’t present during the arrest.
But in and around Dallas, few police departments have adopted policies on how to handle the children of arrestees, they told us in response to a survey. Nationally, a few police departments have, experts say — but most address only kids present when the handcuffs come out.
The problem is growing. One 2005 study estimated that almost 250,000 children nationally had single mothers in jail.
Since then, the number of women in jails jumped by more than 15 percent, to 109,100 in 2014, according to the Justice Department.
In Texas, the number of women in jail has soared by almost 44 percent since 2011, to 5,670 at the end of last year, according to state data. Women now account for about 14 percent of the overall jail population.
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TBH the fact that you're even a mod here fits squarely within Jag's narrative of OK-sanctioned aggression, bullying, and toxicity. *shrug*
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