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Creating Criminals: Race, Stereotypes, and Collateral Damage

The state finds many ways of making criminals out of its citizens. Sure, there are people who commit heinous crimes that imperil the safety of others. However, as it turns out, most of America’s incarcerated population are nonviolent offenders. They are like Shanesha Taylor. The painful costs of motherhood became strikingly clear during the spring and summer months of 2014, when Ms. Taylor, a single, homeless mother, was arrested for leaving her two children in a parked car while at a job interview for a Scottsdale, Arizona, insurance agency. Shanesha did not think she had many options. She was homeless. Where and how would she find childcare? In Arizona, one organization estimates that for one child, childcare can cost around $6,000 per year. How could she afford it? However, Shanesha wanted to uplift her family. She was desperate for options. That new job would have provided more opportunities for her children. Advocates pointed out that she had left the car fan on, windows cracked open, and that it was seventy-one degrees outside – even though they acknowledged that leaving children alone in cars can be dangerous. Taylor was promptly arrested after completing the interview. A Washington Post reporter remarked that her “mugshot image was a painfully heartbreaking one: a mother, struggling not to cry, tears running down her cheeks.” The image is indelibly etched in my memory. Shanesha Taylor’s mugshot spread across the United States, like water rolling downhill, becomingmorning and nightly news. What mother leaves her kids in a car? Likely to some, the shaming she endured was deserved. Strangely, people take pleasure in such things with the rise of websites devoted only tomugshots. Yet, Imust admit, the image of Shanesha Taylor caused a different response in me. In her mugshot, I witnessed the pain of a parent caught in a legal and socioeconomic quagmire, a cruel double bind. Was she to take the children into the interview?Was she to cancel the interview because she had no childcare? Without the interview, she was unlikely to be considered for the job (let alone receive a job offer) and would remain unemployed. If she remained unemployed, homelessness would also persist for Shanesha and her children. Being caught in the criminal justice system brings about other pressures, problems, and pains for incarcerated parents (and those under court supervision),