Readers of this site probably won't be surprised to learn that I'm generally in favor of Larry Shirley's suggestion that parents of criminal children should be sterilized.
Charleston City Councilman Larry Shirley says the robbery of a downtown video store - allegedly by a band of kids, including one too young to be charged - is a sure sign society has gone awry, and it's time to start a "dialogue."And one of the things he says needs to be talked about is whether bad parents should be sterilized.
"What we've got is a failure in society, whether it's in Mount Pleasant with yuppie parents or whether it's on the East Side with poor crackhead parents," Shirley said Friday. "We pick up stray animals and spay them. These mothers need to be spayed if they can't take care of theirs. ... Once they have a child and it's running the streets, to let them continue to have children is totally unacceptable." Deadbeat dads might ought to be sterilized as well, he said. ...
If a child is too young to do time for a crime, his folks ought to do it, Shirley said.
I think that last sentence serves as a fine justification for forced sterilization. Children aren't uncontrollable forces of nature -- and when they're too young to be responsible for their own actions their parents should be held accountable unless there's compelling reason why not. In addition to potentially throwing the parents in jail, sterilization seems like a great preventative measure since bad parents now aren't likely to be any better after serving their sentences.
I don't see any reason why imprisonment would be acceptable but sterilization wouldn't be. Some states allow/require chemical castration of sex offenders, and sterilization isn't much different. Leftists will argue that sterilization is a unique infringement on a person's possession of their own body, which is true, but it's disingenuous for them to promote the liberal welfare state that enables these bad parents without also giving the expansive government the ability to mitigate the negative effects of that liberalism.
No, sterilization is not a good idea. Removing the child and forcing child support payments from the parents might work but human beings are not just smarter dogs who can just as morally be spayed and neutered. There is a difference of category which makes this idea, at best, a badly thought through temper tantrum.
MW said: "I don't see any reason why imprisonment would be acceptable but sterilization wouldn't be. Some states allow/require chemical castration of sex offenders, and sterilization isn't much different."
Imprisonment is often not a permanent thing (depending on the severity of the crime, of course).. whereas sterilization is always permanent. Imprisonment is based on the idea that people can "straighten up and fly right". Sterilization isn't something (yet) that you can enforce and then let up on like imprisonment is.
In short, sterilization is an overreaction. Little good comes from overreacting to a situation.. especially at the government level.
This discussion has two parts that are pretty much independent. I think separating them may make things more clear.
One part is "Your kid did something bad. Society should now punish you somehow (jail, fine, etc), so that you regret having allowed this to happen and don't let it happen again, and also so that other parents are discouraged from allowing their kids to do something bad". In other words, punishment for being a bad parent. Well, if a child commits a crime, then the parent should be liable, I don't think you'll get much disagreement there. I initially liked the idea of the parent doing jail time when the kid commits a serious crime, but... what if the parent could actually help the kid? (In which case the situation only gets worse if the parent is in jail). Or what if the kid is insane, and the parent has done all that could be reasonably expcted of him/her to minimize the dangers posed by the kid to other people? Or what if the crime was the very first noticeable sign that something is wrong with the kid? (Something you cannot be certain was caused by bad parenting). A more general question would be: When can the government determine you are a bad parent? Is it when your child commits a crime? Is it when they can prove you spend next to no time with your child? Is it when you fail to protect your child from what the government considers to be adult ideas/images/language/habits? Is it when your child claims to hate you? What I'm trying to get to is, while I would love to see bad parents called on their bad parenting (and there are a lot of bad parents out there, and they're probably the cause of most of society's problems), almost any conceivable method of identifying bad parenting would return a lot of false positives, when your child's behavior (or your own) looks bad but is not caused by (or does not consist of) bad parenting. And if I say "I want to raise my children to believe in X and Y and Z", when is it okay for the government to say "That's wrong"? if I want to raise them to use violence (and other illegal means) to solve most problems, then this is clearly wrong, but anything else is a grey area.
The second part is "sterilization is an acceptable punishment for criminals". I'm not sure about that one. While I don't like the thought of the government being able to say who can have kids and who can't, I also don't like the thought of any idiot being able to make him/herself responsible for bringing up a young person. Still, it seems to me that passing on our genes should be a right, not be a privilege, since it is what we have evolved to want to do more badly than anything (except breathing, eating, staying hydrated, etc). But when you are seriously criminal, your rights can get taken away, so I suppose there's nothing fundamentally wrong with sterilization as punishment. I mean, some states KILL some criminals, and no one can claim sterilization is worse than that.
Bernardo: I suppose I opened up the consideration of the "bad parent" term, and I agree it's very ambiguous. However, first off, lots of crimes are ambiguous and it takes pages and pages of legal code to specify when, e.g., a killing a lawful and when it is not. So yes, it wouldn't necessarily be easy to precisely define "bad parenting".
Secondly, though, I should have used different language because I don't think "bad parenting" accurately describes what I want to punish. Lots of parents let their kids eat candy and get fat, and we don't want to put them in jail I don't think. That's "bad parenting", but not in the way I care about. I simply want to punish parents whose children commit crimes.
If a child could be convicted of a crime if not for his age, his parent should serve an equivalent sentence. Jailing a parent who has several other kids who aren't criminals wouldn't be a great idea, but that's not a problem for me since I'm not a huge fan of prisons anyway and favor alternative punishments. We can't always answer why a crime was committed, but if we impose a sort of strict liability on parenting then it doesn't matter. Parents need the power to control their children, and if they don't use it then they suffer the consequences.