this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Being born to a criminal?? In a jail no less?
Generational trauma is hard to escape.
In a different timeline, she grew up to be Bane
"A criminal". Society decides who is a criminal, and decides to let a baby be born in a prison.
You didn't even ask why the woman was in prison in the first place before deciding she was the problem, so you're believing society's branding of her as a criminal. Gee, I wonder if attitudes like that make it harder on someone who was born in prison?
I am making the assumption that she wasn't wrongfully imprisoned, yes. The only context I have to go on is that she's never spoken to her daughter.
Why are you assuming she wasn't a criminal? Are white women statistically likely to be sent to jail for minor crimes?
So the fact that the US has the largest prison system in history, with nearly 1% of its entire population imprisoned, and nearly 25% of the entire world's prison population, doesn't make you think that maybe society has some role in deciding how many people get sent to prison? Do you think that the US is just somehow filled with an especially "criminal" class of person?
And going to prison does enormous harm to individuals. You don't know what that woman's life might've been like without prison, without the poverty that prison causes, or without the poverty-to-prison pipeline, without having her daughter forcibly taken away from her.
And of course she's a criminal, but that's a legal status. There isn't some separate lower class of human being that is a "criminal". You seem to be talking as if she is a "criminal" in some other sense of the word.
You're out here wishfully thinking and making a ton of assumptions based on nothing and I'm saying she was born with half the support structure therefore had more hurdles to jump. Why are we talking about the mother's crime again?
Ironically this is exactly what I said would happen in my first post - someone jumping through hoops to spin this as dystopian
I'm going to be honest with you, I have no idea what you're even trying to say here. Like... just find the quotes or something and copy them here. This is so vague I just don't even know what you're referring to.
...
How on earth do you spin that as not dystopian? You have to ignore it, right? Because that's what you've done.
I'm not gonna bother quoting you because it's pretty easy to follow. You were going on about how society deemed her mother a criminal which sure sounds like you're assuming what she did wasn't worthy of getting sent to jail and I'm asking....why are we talking about the mother? The story is about the daughter.
The hoops you're jumping through is going from a story about a girl overcoming obstacles to talking about how being in jail is bad. It simply does not matter for this story. We're not talking about the morals of incarceration.
Are you incapable of being happy about something because something else is bad? If I told you I found a $20 on the ground, would you remind me that capitalism is destroying the world? Such a downer.
I want you to pay attention to the community this is under. "Aboringdystopia".
Dystopia involves society wide problems. The problems with incarceration are why it was posted here.
You claimed it wasn't dystopic, but apparently you don't want to talk about any of the society wide issues that this story highlights. The thing is, if you want to discuss whether this story exposes dystopian aspects of society, you have to talk about those issues. You can't just talk about "mother bad; daughter good", because that isn't the issue being discussed.
I haven't said this woman was good or bad, that was you. You assumed her incarceration wasn't "wrongful", by which I assume you mean it was lawful. The further assumption underneath that is that if it were lawful, it must be justified. You further assumed that because the state has branded her a criminal, that she deserved to be forced to give birth in prison and then give up her baby, or at least that it's not worth considering, even though you know next to nothing about her, and even though it shouldn't matter, because nobody should be forced to give birth in prison and to give up their baby.
And when I tried to point out these assumptions that you were making, you admit that you then assumed I was saying the mother was somehow innocent.
If you assume that the carceral system is right to judge and treat people the way it does, then of course your conclusions won't challenge it.
The fact you are so willing to excuse crimes against humanity just because the most heinous carceral system in history told you the person they were being done to deserved it does not say good things about you, and I suspect that's why you're trying to change the subject.
Perpetrators play a not-insignificant role in deciding who is a criminal.
You've just admitted that there are other factors. Do you think the prison industrial complex plays an insignificant role?
Your claim does not arise from my comment. From my comment, you can only infer the perpetrator's responsibility.
Ah, so the context in which your comment occurs is completely irrelevant, just like the context in which a woman was forced to give birth in a prison and then to give up said baby is also, apparently, irrelevant.
Tell me, was there any reason you felt the need to spout this random fact, or did it occur to you to write those words in that order under my comment entirely ex-nihilo?
The context is certainly relevant. Your comment dehumanizes and objectifies her. You insinuate that events were imposed upon her.
My comment recognizes her own role. She was able to affect her own destiny, by making decisions and taking actions affecting herself and those around her.
You would deprive her of the effectiveness of her acts, rendering them meaningless. You would strip her of her agency.
I would say that the people who imprisoned her and forced her to give birth inside a prison and to give up her baby were the ones stripping her of her agency in a much more material manner. It's not wrong to say what's happening.
It's incredible how far you'll go to dance around the issue and not address the fact that the society we live in absolutely creates the situation described above, where it is inevitable that some percentage of people will wind up there.
You're just not interested in acknowledging that that is a problem at all, are you?
Nah, they are only taking her freedom. You are the one stripping her of her agency. You're taking away even the possibility of consequences. You're treating her as an infant, or as the legally insane, incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, and thus necessitating protection from ever having to decide between the two.
Until you address the actual circumstances of her incarceration, we can make no determination as to whether she is a victim. Until we can evaluate her role, we cannot determine whether she is perpetrator of crime or victim of injustice.
Pregnancy is not exculpatory evidence.