I’m not really sure what you mean by the difference here between “understandable” and “OK.” Expecting people who grow up in poverty to make better long-term decisions is like expecting alcoholics to just stop drinking, or hoarders to just throw things out, or people with depression to just smile more and be happy. Well, for most of human history that’s exactly how we handled those things, but as we’ve gained understanding of the actual changes in the brain we’ve started taking different approaches. Yes, on an individual level it’s still very difficult living with an alcoholic or a hoarder or an overeater, because you see bad decision after bad decision and you wonder why you should go on being supportive. But when you step back and look at it with an analytical eye, that’s when you see just how hard it is for people to change their behavior.
Studies have shown, and I suspect we’ll continue to learn more about, the effect of poverty on the developing brain. Kids learn different skills when they’re pre-occupied with stress, where dinner will come from, what the corner boys will do next time they try to walk to school, what happens if daddy comes around again and he’s angry. Unfortunately, those skills don’t translate well to successful adult life. Yes, some kids will overcome this disadvantage, just like some alcoholics will stop drinking and go on to be successful, but the odds just aren’t good.
I think we can all feel compassion for kids who grow up in bad circumstances, but we tend to lose that compassion when they’re adults, because at that point we expect them to know better. But why would they suddenly know better? Especially if their brains are fundamentally different as a result of their environment?
I don’t know about the rest of it but requiring the poor to get ID’s is not about responsibility. These poor people don’t have cars so they have no need for a driver’s license so we are making them go through an extra step to vote. I don’t know about library fines, I used to pay late penalties when I was a kid and we were poor enough to get free lunch at school. 50 cents a day seems kind of steep and IIRC, the library forgave fines after a period of time (at least where I lived) if the books were returned.
A lot of people clutch their pearls whenever we impose any burdens on the poor but there are some things that are just civic responsibilities and returning your library books so that others can borrow them seems like one of those responsibilities. Getting a driver’s license for the sole purpose of exercising a constitutional right seems like less of a civic duty and more like mustache twirling evil (or partisanship, and both sides have been guilty of voter suppression over the years).
I’m not saying that their actions don’t make sense, but that they agreed to those conditions in the first place. Nobody else made them come sign up for a library card, nobody else made them allow that girl to check out four books, nobody else made her and her parents all fail to return the books on time, and nobody else made them fail to pay the fines they agreed to pay when they started this whole adventure.
It sucks, but from where I’m sitting, it seems to be much more of an issue of irresponsible parenting than anything poverty related. In other words, if you’re poor, and you know you or your child may have issues bringing the books back on time, and if that happens, you may have a problem paying the fines, then you don’t check the books out in the first place, or you check fewer ones out. That’s the responsible thing to do. Checking them out willy-nilly, then not returning them, and not paying the fines is hideously irresponsible, poor or not. If the ability to return them or pay the fines is an issue up front, it’s only more irresponsible.
The issue with the libraries wasn’t one of the libraries actually doing what they said they’d do (i.e. the fines and banning), but rather of people failing to actually be responsible and do what they’re expected to do.
You’d think a good parent would actually sit down with the girl and explain that if you don’t return the books on time, and don’t pay the fines, you get banned. Actions, consequences, and all that stuff you’re supposed to teach your children. Anything else is really just deflecting the issue off of who’s actually responsible in this situation.
That’s what I’m getting at with the thread- every time something like this comes up, people make a million excuses, as if being poor grants absolution for being irresponsible, or somehow being accountable for the consequences of your own actions. I realize it sucks to be poor, and it makes things harder, but it doesn’t somehow make people less responsible, IMO. Sometimes you have to do the things that suck, or make choices that you don’t like, because they’re the right thing to do, not because they’re the easy or convenient thing to do. But nobody seems to expect that out of the poor.
To me the big difference is whether one thinks that public policy should be more focused on making sure that folks should be punished for poor decisions, or making sure that outcomes are better, and how much emphasis on each. I’m not at all concerned with ensuring people are punished for poor decisions, except when that encourages better outcomes. If there’s a case where some particular policy punishes people who make poor decisions, but this policy doesn’t lead to better outcomes, then I’ll probably oppose that policy.
My point on the voter ID thing wasn’t so much a matter of responsibility, but of priority. You can function passably without an ID- I don’t really get how, but apparently you can.
But if you want to vote, you have to have an ID. If voting’s important, you’ll figure out a way.
It’s a matter of expectations, and the poverty apologists I’m talking about in the thread seem to be absolutely unwilling to expect the poor to actually DO anything other than eat, work and make babies. I tend to think that people will live up, or down to expectations, and putting no expectations on them and greasing the skids for everything else is not an effective way of reducing poverty.
You don’t have to get it. The fact is that around 10% of the eligible voting public doesn’t have a valid state issued ID. They seem to function just fine.
You could say the same thing about a poll tax or any other ridiculous barrier someone wants to set up. The point is that there is no demonstrable need for a voter ID law, and enacting such a law will effectively disenfranchise many voters for no reason.
Can you point to a specific person or mindset you are talking about, because most “apologists” I know of are reacting to the fact that many of the polices which rest on holding “poor people accountable” have worse outcomes for everyone, and aren’t significant motivators for most poor people.
And it’s not just poor people for whom these types of policies largely don’t work. Look at the drug war, the Iraq war, the Cuban embargo, etc. Yes, expectations matter. But, they cannot work alone to resolve really complicated problems, they they are typically too abstract to be effectively instituted via public policy alone.
Ultimately, this is what it comes down to. You seem to think it’s acceptable that an 8 year old is banned from the library or that people choose not to use the library because they are too poor to pay fees they may incur. You think this is ok because they bear the responsibility for not returning the books. Others don’t. I, for one, see something like the library as a public resource to be used by anyone who wants to regardless of their income.
That, is the philosophical reason. The other reason is that I can place myself in their shoes. I’m sure that as a kid I returned books late or lost others. My parents simply paid the fine and I got to keep using the library. So it’s not fair. I did the same thing as a poor kid, but I didn’t face any real consequences because my parents weren’t poor.
Not to speak for bump, but I suspect he’d say “then they shouldn’t incur the fees in the first place and it wouldn’t be an issue whether or not they can afford them.”
I suspect there may be a disconnect between those of us who think of library late fees as punitive (“Don’t return books late; if you do, this is the penalty”) and those who think of them as simply added expenses (“You can keep the books longer if you want; you just have to pay extra”).
No little kid (or older kid) would sign up for a library card if they understood they’d have to pay a $100 penalty for making a mistake that all childeren are prone to making (with or without “good” parenting).
I don’t think we want to deter poor kids from checking books out of the library, because they need the library a million times more than middle-class and rich kids do.
It’s also responsible to not live in a bad neighborhood where your kids have to dodge winos and gang-bangers to get to school. And yet milions of people live and raise families in bad neighborhoods. Is this a moral failure? Or is it that poor people really don’t have a choice about the safety of their neighborhood, because not having money means you can’t afford to be responsible?
If you’re working two jobs and raising a family on a limited income, chances are your list of responsibilities is a full one. You have to already operate with military precision because you’re always on a clock. Wake up at 5:00 so you can get the kids washed, dressed, and fed before 6:30, so you can get them on their 6:45 bus, so you can catch the 7:00 bus, so you can get to your job by 7:45 in time to punch-in at 8:00. All day, when you’re not thinking about whatever it is you’re working on, you’re focused on the bills that need to be paid, the family mess that needs to be sorted out, the health problems that need to be band-aided over, the parent-teacher conference you need to miracuously squeeze in. Guess what? Returning a worn copy of “Chicken Little” isn’t likely to be in that list of responsibilites. It’s going to be on the back-burner…along with a shitload of other things.
Now, we can Monday-morning quarterback the situation to death. A person shouldn’t have kids if they have to work two menial jobs to support them. They shouldn’t allow their kids to check out library books if they cant be arsed to return them on time. They shouldn’t be so dependent on public transportation; maybe if they had their own car, their lives wouldn’t be so regimented. But this is all meaningless blah blah blah. All people should do a lot of things that they don’t do. At some point, you just have to realize that people are not that different from cats. You can shout at them, spray water at them, and put them in a shock collars to corral them. But you will never make them operate according to what makes sense to you.
If people are routinely breaking a policy, it would benefit the policy-makers to try to figure out if the policy itself is reasonable for the population it serves. My local library has a 2-week check-out period. With my busy schedule, I always find it hard to return books on time. But I never accumulated fines from the libraries I’ve used that had 30-day periods.
Matybe the little girl’s parents are the worst people on the planet. So why should she be punished by having her privileges revoked? Does doing this make her a better person? Or does it only ensure she will grow up to be just as horrible as parents are?
When correcctive measures end up having a more negative impact on the community than whatever the measures were supposed to fix were having, then it behooves us to look at the problem in a different way. And yes, sometimes that involves moving away from a moralistic black-and-white view of human behavior and actually point the finger at external factors. If people are having a hard time returning books to the library and they are predominately poor, could it be that they have a reason (aka “excuse”) for this other than sheer laziness? Could the library consult other institutions serving similar populations to find out if there are things it could be doing better? Could public transportatation short-comings have a part to play? If libary drop-boxes were spread out over town, would this improve return rates? You can wait for individuals to “fix” their behavior while simultaneously making it easier for individuals to comply.
No reason that you agree with, perhaps. But certainly there is a reason: to assuage public confidence in the results of elections, especially ultra-close elections.
I agree with that rationale. And, indeed, the majority of the public supports Voter ID laws.
It’s fine for you to be unpersuaded by the rationale. But it’s not fine for you to declare that no reason exists when a reason does exist.
Because if you’re not an addict, quitting recreational drugs is an easy first pick as a way to help ends meet.
A library cannot function as a public resource unless people either return the books they borrow or give the library enough money that they can afford to replace the books they did not return. The eight year old isn’t banned because she’s poor, she’s banned because letting people deplete the library’s stock of books by taking them and not giving them back hurts its ability to be a library.
How strongly do you support a public education campaign to inform people about the actual incidents of voter fraud that would be prevented by voter ID laws? Surely such a campaign would be far more effective at achieving your goal, with far fewer costs to individuals, than voter ID laws would be.
Indeed, by heightening public fear over a virtually nonexistent threat, it seems likely to me that voter ID laws are counterproductive. It’s as if I put up buoys at the beach and labeled them “ANTI-KRAKEN DEVICES”: do you really think it’s going to get people to worry less about kraken attacks?
That’s a problem with any kind of monetary fine: an amount that would be reasonable for an average, middle-class person would be a mild slap on the wrist to the rich and a crushing blow to the poor.
I’m not sure what the solution is. Some other sort of penalty instead of monetary fines? Make it easier for people to return books on time? I like monstro’s idea of drop boxes all over the city, but that costs money; I lived in a city that closed its branch libraries and reduced its library staff due to budget constraints.
Tell me about it, over here in Arizona, the voting for the primaries that was such a mess that the Department of justice is investigating.
And the concern trolls of the Arizona legislature also recently banned allowing people to pickup early voting ballots as a group to deliver them to the early voting places.
Community groups and worker groups were very good at helping many poor people and minorities voting, but the Republican legislature put a brave stop to that, that it made harder to help poor and working people to vote was pure coincidence, I’m sure. [/Sarcasm]
Beer is a standard grocery item. You say it’s a recreational drug? So are tea and coffee, both of which contain caffeine. If someobody needs to trim their grocery bills to make ends meet, it’s up to them, not you, to decide which items to eliminate or reduce. It might be beer, it might be coffee, it might be breakfast cereals or processed meats, or something else.