Weak spots in the criminal justice system

Here I am, looking at a list of ten felony charges against the parents of the kids we are raising, spread over four different cases. And that's only counting the ones filed with the district attorney. There are other open cases with several local justice courts. How do things get crazy like this?

We place a lot of trust in our courts that they will be able to effectively dispense justice. Normally everything works well. For the most part, the guilty are punished according to the legal guidelines, and the innocent are protected. The right to a speedy trial is met.

The troublesome part is when the assumptions made by the legal system are not met. For instance, there's an assumption that people place a high value on having a valid driver's license. For some people, the thought of losing their license is incentive enough to stay away from situations where they may lose that license. Unfortunately, there are others who don't really care. They'll drive whether they have a license or not. Who cares if the car is insured? Certainly not the one who drives without a license.

How about having a stable physical address? Most people have an apartment or home. The probation and warrant systems become very ineffective if someone happens to be homeless, or bounces from hotel to hotel at night.

Phone numbers are the same way. I've had the same phone number for over ten years, and that includes moving once. In our case with the parents of the children we are raising, I've seen about a dozen phone numbers over just one year while trying to keep a path of communication open. The phones always seem to get broken, stolen, lost, turned off for lack of payment, or the number gets to be known by the wrong people and abandoned.

Then there are court-imposed fines and fees. To someone living on the fringe with no home, no job, an occasional phone, and the lifestyle that goes with those limitations, fines and fees just don't mean anything. Sure, they're waiting, building up, and may get sent to collections or turn back into warrants in the future, but it's hard to remember them, let alone care about them. The only real attention-getter is actual jail time, and non-violent offenders are regularly released due to overcrowding. That means the best wake-up call available can't be used most of the time for those who fit the profile I've described.

In most cases, the system is designed around the idea that people are generally under control and occasionally make mistakes. Most people are easy to get in touch with. Most people have jobs, places to live, and a telephone. When none of those apply, it's easy to see holes in the system that cause amazing delays, and court cases can stall for months at a time. If the wayward soul continues to rack up new cases while the old ones are delayed, it can turn into a nightmare just to track them all, let alone attend and resolve things.

Now, life can be pretty unpleasant for those who are hard to track. It's not the kind of lifestyle that most would choose. It's almost always the last remaining choice when nothing else works.

Most of the time, things seem to get back in sync fairly well when the person who has been flying under the radar is arrested. Some jurisdictions are able to pick up on that and get their court dates and prosecutions back on track. Unfortunately, not all of them are tied in to each other that well, and they may not even know the person they want is already in someone else's jail.

I'm sure things are leaps and bounds better than they used to be due to increased use of technology. Online databases of court dates, jail rosters, and all those things are a powerful resource. It's just discouraging that things could be so much more uniform and fair if it were not for budget constraints and variability in rules and procedures from one jurisdiction to another.

My biggest advice would be to work to get issues resolved while everyone involved is still stable enough to be employed, and can keep both the rent and phone bill paid. If things are already worse than that, the best you can do is to make sure the various jurisdictions know when an arrest happens so they can get cases all back on track. The right to a speedy trial should apply to more than just the accused. No matter the resolution of those cases, having them closed will be a benefit to everyone involved, particularly the innocent children.

Planning for the Future

About a year ago I told my sister-in-law and her husband that I'd talk to them about how they were doing at the end of the year. These are the parents of the four children of which we have legal custody. That means it's about meeting time. My goal in doing that was to add a little bit of evaluating and reporting to their lives outside of court. Maybe they would change their behavior knowing that they would be responsible to talk about it later. They had asked at Christmas time if we could delay for a month and talk things over at the end of January, so I agreed to their request.

The reason for the review is that we'd seen them struggle over the previous 18 months or so that we'd had their children living with us. They'd split up, gotten back together, been deep into the drug scene, been homeless, wrecked the vehicle they'd neglected to insure, and who knows what else. I wasn't documenting things as well back then.

I'd hoped to give them another reason to do better, but the truth is that nothing significant seems to have changed this past year. Maybe they're keeping some big success story back so they can spring it on me and say "See? I won the lottery," or something like that, but I doubt it. The mom has shown some effort starting rehab again this month, but she's done that before too.

So how do you go about planning for the future when you have no idea what's coming down the road next? The only way we've found that works is to assume that the parents will take care of themselves for good or ill, and plan as if we will have custody of the children until they are adults.

Given this viewpoint, what happens if we're wrong and the parents straighten out, solving all their legal, moral and financial issues, and become paragons of virtue and pillars of society? Everyone is happy, we have a big family reunion, fill out any necessary paperwork, and Bam. Happy families for everyone.

So, what happens if we're right and progress is insufficient? The parents keep on doing whatever it is that they do, and we keep on planning for school activities, summer vacations, piano lessons, church, and all the other things that make up our normal lives. No waiting, no hanging out in the breeze until something happens. No second guessing. Life is consistent, and often very good to us.

I'm sure you've heard the expression "Pray as if everything depends on God, and work as if everything depends on you." We've taken that to heart, and plan our lives with our expanded collection of children as if this is normal life, and by doing so it really becomes normal life. Oh, and we won't stop praying for their parents either.

Document Everything

The parents of the child you care for will have troubled lives. That is a given, because you wouldn't have to care for the child otherwise. Identifying exactly how troubled is really quite impossible without spending every moment with them, which is completely impractical. Still, it is critical to have as much of a record as you can manage detailing how things are going.

We've come up with a novel way of tracking how the parents of our kids-in-care are doing. Whenever either my wife's sister or her husband have a court date, I put it onto a calendar. Whenever they make a phone call, that also goes onto the calendar along with a description of the call. When one of them is arrested or released due to either bail or overcrowding, that goes on just like everything else.

Any medium will do. You can use a pad of paper, an email program with calendaring, or any of the many web calendaring tools like those at Google or Yahoo. The method isn't nearly as important as the content. My personal preference at the moment is Google, because it allows me to easily share the calendar with other family members who share our interest.

In our case, the troubles are not just social, but legal as well. What if I want to count how many days they were in jail last year? Break out the calendar. How many times did they call in January? Look it up. What if I can't remember the ID number for that Identity Theft case? Look that up too.

That leads to another area of information that is really useful. Some jails have online access to bookings, releases and occupancy. Check your county lockup to see if they do. If they have one, that web interface can give you a lot of information so you know what's going on in their life. Many courts also publish calendars online, and you can sometimes even look up warrant information. My wife and I have collected a great set of links for the Salt Lake City area. Here's a sampling:

Salt Lake County Jail
Utah District Court Calendars
Davis County Sheriff
Salt Lake County District Attorney Active Cases

A lot of cities do not have electronic interfaces to their court calendars, warrants, or citations. That means it will take plain old phone calling to look things up with those smaller jurisdictions. Most jurisdictions are perfectly willing to share information if you can document that you have a reason to be interested, or if you already have case numbers.

The more information you have on what they're doing, where they're living, when they call, where they are working and everything else, the better armed you will be to either support their claim of being recovered and reformed, or to support protecting their children from them, depending on the path they take.