This story in The Los Angelos Post Caught my eye this morning. It prompted me to reflect on some issues raised by this concerning new prosecutorial trend.
The trend of holding parents liable for youths’ criminal actions is bad from a youth rights perspective. It furthers the notion that young people are incompetent non-persons under the law lacking sufficient agency to make their own decisions and to understand laws and morality. It also incentivizes parents to be even more controlling of young people than they already are, since their criminal actions can now be found to be the parents’ responsibility.
And of course this is bad for parents - the government should have absolutely no right to hold you accountable for someone else’s conduct, regardless of your relationship to them. Unless a parent is involved in a crime as a coconspirator or in some other way traditionally associated with charging someone in relation to someone else’s criminal act (obstruction, aiding, abetting, etc.) it’s absolute madness to charge someone for someone else’s criminal activity.
If a parent is abusive or seriously neglectful of a child in a way which could arguably contribute to a young person’s committing harmful criminal actions, then charge the parent for abuse or neglect and prosecute the hell out of them. But this conduct offers in occurs in contexts where youth commit no crimes and it should be prosecuted in those situations too. This is ultimately a separate issue.
And even though I’m a proud card-carrying member of the Blame Parents First crowd a lot of the time, I don’t believe that one can necessarily infer with surety that when a young person commits harmful criminal acts that the parents are necessarily to blame to any significant degree. Imagine doing your best (as you understand it) to be a decent parent and then learning that your child has committed a heinous crime. On top of the grief, loss, pain, confusion, guilt, shame, humiliation, anxiety, stress, and shock you’re already feeling, you now find out that you’re facing criminal charges for an act you had no knowledge of, no meaningful complicity in, and no desire to see occur. Who would wish that on anyone? When you’re the parent of a mass shooter, the combination of societal, financial, legal, and other repercussions that go along with the role means you’ve almost certainly been punished enough for one lifetime for a crime you didn’t commit.
Furthermore, there is another aspect to this that we should think about in more depth that I haven’t seen explored before. Our law allows for a spousal privilege in criminal court - you can’t be forced to testify against your spouse and your spouse can’t be forced to testify against you. No such corresponding parent-child privilege exists under American law.
There are good reasons that our law can compel youth to testify against their parents - otherwise, the most heinous child sexual, physical, emotional, and other sorts of abuse would be very difficult to prosecute and parental abuse runs rampant in the context of family secrecy.
But I would argue that there are good reasons that perhaps the law should prevent parents from being forced to testify against their children. (There are also good objections to this, but they are mostly the same as the objections that would apply to spousal privilege with the exception that while one may only have one legal spouse, one can theoretically have an infinite number of children). Making it illegal to compel parental testimony against children could have many upsides such as strengthening the parent-child bond by codifying into law the notion that parents’ first obligations are towards their children - not to the state, not to their spouses, not to a wider community - but to their children. It would encourage young people to be more open about coming to their parents when they feel that they may be in legal trouble. (One can imagine many cases where a child may not necessarily even know which side of the law certain conduct falls under and would like a trusted parent’s guidance in such situations.) And by exempting parents from being compelled to testify against their children while still allowing for children to be compelled to testify against their parents, it would enshrine into law an important notion - that parents have certain unilateral obligations to protect their children that children don’t have towards their parents in quite the same way. When you take on the enormous responsibility of being a parent, take on a lot of nonreciprocal responsibilities that are unique in comparison to any other human relationship. And if parents have a duty to protect their children from other people (strangers, peers, family members, teachers, community members, medical professionals, or any other entity or individual which may seek to harm them) or problematic forces or situations (violence, objectification, bad schools, cults, physical danger, unsafe products, substandard daycares or babysitting services, unhealthy lifestyle choices, dangerous jobs, exploitation, etc.) that may harm them, then certainly parents have a duty to protect their children from the awesome, life and death power of the state. That’s not the current state of our law but there are good arguments I think as to why it should be.
All of that being said, let me move on to my point. A young person who has committed a heinous crime - provided he survives the act - needs his parents more than ever. He may be an unsympathetic figure whom the rest of us want nothing to do with, but that’s all the more reason he needs his parents in his corner. And charging parents in this situation creates a conflict of interests between parents and children, encouraging parents to turn on their children and children to turn on their parents when they need to be coming together as a family in unity.
Furthermore, while this is currently only being done primarily to parents whose children have committed truly heinous acts almost everyone finds utterly indefensible, this could set a precedent for youth who get involved in the criminal justice system in other ways, criminalizing parents whose children are accused of everything from shoplifting to sexting to drug possession to statutory “rape” to vandalism. In her career as a prosecutor, Kamala Harris even sought to take this approach to truancy, prosecuting parents when their children missed too much school. None of this is far-fetched. Prosecutors want to turn parents into police and our society is far too willing to support them in this endeavor. But this is not good for parents, it’s not good for youth, and it’s not for parent-child relationships.
And while so far parents have been charged in cases that appear mostly open and shut from the “whodunnit?” perspective, parents could also be charged in the future in cases where the evidence against the accused is much less substantive and the accused youth may himself actually be innocent of any wrongdoing, further compounding the injustice.
Ultimately, people of all ages are individuals. However much we may need each other and constitutes ourselves within the context of a social fabric, each individual is endowed with their own mind, their own body, their own conscience, and their own autonomy. Growing up in a small town where everyone knew everyone and it was common to know several generations of the same family very well, I saw just how different people could be even if they shared the same blood and lived in the same household. Contrary to what people like to say where I’m from, there is no such thing as a “good family” or a “bad family” (although there can certainly be families that are more or less functional as a unit). Ultimately, families are constituted by individuals. As in any group of people, the character, values, choices, and behavior of the individuals within the group will differ. Young people deserve the dignity of responsibility for their own choices (particularly when those choices are not those that any authoritative adult around them is actively aiding, abetting, or likely to endorse). Parents deserve the right not to be convicted for literal guilt by association. Anyone who has a child takes a risk that their child could grow into someone who does terrible things and makes terrible choices. And we all run the risk, no matter how ethical we try to be, of getting swept up in some shape, form, or fashion in our nation’s burgeoning prison-industrial complex.
Charging parents for crimes committed by their minor children in this way is a hugely consequential development and not one there has been almost any serious public discussion or debate about. It should alarm all of us for a host of reasons and stands to set precedents that could affect all of us in major ways, both foreseeable and unforeseen. The time to sound think more deeply and speak more clearly about this is now.
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