My Experience of Living in Foster Care and Why I Think Rehabilitation of Parents is Better than Retributive Justice

Most people do not know this about me, but I was in foster care for the second half of my childhood. I aged out and have not been able to establish any contact with my parents after my adult life began. I think that the fact that I do not get to know about my mother is an injustice, I am not an orphan and I do not see why I have to live like one. I think that in my case of injustice, justice was attempted but it was in a retributive fashion and that was not the most suitable for the situation. The situation is complicated, I do not think that there was really an offender and a victim but rather, more like two victims.

I will narrate the setting of my childhood to establish why I feel like we were wronged. When my mother gave birth to me, she was fifteen years old, almost sixteen. She was not a bad girl from what I have gotten to hear about her; she ran hurdles in track and maintained above average grades for the time she was in high school. I had a healthy bond with my mother, she loved me and I loved her. When I was a little girl, I remember thinking that my mother was the most beautiful person in the whole world and nobody was stronger or cooler than my mother. Since I had a healthy bond with her, I would feel stressed and sad when we could not be together for whatever reason and I had a rough time with baby sitters.

My mother was a smoker when I was young and I know that quitting smoking is a huge deal, but my mother did it cold turkey because she loved me. One of my first memories is running up to my mother to hug her after coming back from my grandma’s spoiling session and getting a lit cigarette jammed into my eye; let’s just say that day I learned what real pain was. This was not an act of intentional violence that my mother had against me, it was an accident, at the same time she shouldn’t have been smoking inside the house near me at such a young age and she knew so. After my eyes were rinsed and everything turned out ok I never saw my mother pick up a single cigarette ever again. Things continued this way until I was about seven and she started to become distant and just not the person that I had met as an innocent child. Eventually, I noticed she would have alcohol and I would sometimes not see her for a few days at a time, which would make me sad. Later, as time passed she would go on long, long walks and I would follow her all the way until our feet got blisters, she would talk to herself and she wouldn’t look at me all the while. Things escalated this way until one day she forgot me at a grocery store, and then after that I was not allowed to see her again.

Later, I learned that by her forgetting me at the store she had committed an abandonment crime against me even though I was nine years old and probably would have known how to get home if I hadn’t been scared. I learned, after the fact, that she was abusing drugs when she would not feel like herself anymore, I know that the situation must have been stressful for someone as young as herself but her actions were not ‘normal’. I was never explicitly notified of my mother’s mental health but I am sure that she was suffering at some degree because there was definitely a switch between when she was ok and when she was not. In next few years, I continued to hear about her from my grandparents and uncles that she was repeatedly in and out of jail every little while probably just for minor things that would turn into bigger ones because of her disconnect with reality. By the time that I was twelve I stopped having any connections with my family, they just stopped making an effort in connecting with me and thus I stopped hearing about the fate of my mother.

Retributive justice is a system of justice that is based on the punishment of offenders rather than the rehabilitation. In class we learned that this kind of justice is about giving people what they deserve because they have committed a crime that has given them unfair advantages in life that the offender did not merit. The whole idea is to set the balance straight again. The reason I think that think retributive justice was misused was that my mother did not gain any unfair advantages in her life when she could not be there for me. Instead of just separating us, I think that there should have been some kind of way to help her rehabilitate herself in order to be a better, more capable mother.

I mentioned earlier that there was not a black and white case involving malicious intent. I said this because I am sure that separating me and my mother was a way to benefit me and a punishment of sorts for. I did not feel entirely benefited from the outcome of this situation. Instead, it has made for an awkward upbringing filled with Mothers’ Days where I could not be with my mother and this unnecessary pity from the world upon knowing that I do not get to be with my parents. I have just always felt the need to remind myself that I am not an orphan, my mother is probably alive and out there but I do not get to know that because I have no way to find her.

In recent times, I have come to find that I am not the only person who disagrees with the way faults in parenting have been mended by the law. A young woman I know from work who is originally from Iowa has a similar if not identical story to tell. In the state of Iowa, my coworker was separated from her mother at an older age. My coworkers’ mother was a drunk and was a poor person that could not support her family and that’s why they were separated. Fortunately for my coworker, her mother had family support to better herself up and the mother and daughter were able to be reunited before my coworker had the chance to age out of the system. This outcome makes me happy because I am sure it is the one that is desired by the law, I am just upset that there is not any guidance for rehabilitation for the “offending parents.”

In conclusion I would like to say that ultimately I think rehabilitation is definitely better than retributive justice. I think that it is an injustice to punish parents for having weak moments in their lives because after all, people are just people, and parents are not born just to live their lives out for another human, be it their child or not.

Not everything about the foster care life is negative. Most of the people that I have met in college have some kind of financial support from their parents, I don’t get that type of support. Even though I don’t have parents that provide me with financial support, I do because I am independent get government assistance for my schooling. I get enough financial aid to cover my tuition and after that it also helps me pay for my books, which are quite expensive. I know that this is a privilege because I’ll probably graduate without any debt and I am an average student. I haven’t done anything to merit my free ride outside of just being poor and not having any parental income to count against me.

A while back, there was a big deal about the Affordable Care Act. I understood that healthcare is a pricey thing. A thing that I noticed about my fellow peers at that time was that no one was particularly worried because they already had health insurance through their parents, who could afford it and pay for their children to go to school. I was in a way also privileged in this department because I have always had full scope Medi-Cal government health insurance. What this means is I can go to the doctor and have any health procedure done at no cost for me.

I know that I am at privilege with my schooling and my health care plan because I take it for granted. I notice everyday other people stressing over how much debt they are in or how they can’t get some dental work done because it is too expensive and I see the suffering that I just don’t have in my life in comparison with them. The online dictionary defines privilege as a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people. I get my schooling and health advantages, I know from being part of a particular group in society. I think that my benefits in life and my privilege are an example of effects of distributive justice in society.

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