• Listen to this segment with Loretta Ross and Michele Goodwin

• Listen to the entire program with Sonali Kolhatkar

A few decades ago, a child playing alone at the park would have raised few eyebrows, but today it can be the cause for criminal action against parents. A woman named Debra Harrell was arrested in South Carolina this week for allowing her 9 year old daughter to play at the park on her own.

With school shutdown for summer break, Harrell had left her daughter at the park with a cell phone because she could not afford to pay for child care on her McDonald’s salary. The girl had previously been staying at the restaurant with her mother playing on a laptop until it got stolen. On her third day at the park someone called the police. Harrell, who is African American was immediately arrested for “unlawful conduct toward a child” and lost custody of her daughter. She is now out on bail and may face jail time.

A few months ago in Arizona, Shanesha Taylor, also an African American mother was arrested for leaving her two young children ages 6 months and 2 years old in her car while she went on a job interview. Taylor was charged with two counts of felony child abuse.

As the rates of poverty among single mothers increases every year even as subsidies for child care are cut, mothers are being increasingly targeted as criminals for parenting their children. The race and income levels of the parents in question seem to determine the harshness of the penalties.

GUEST: Michele Goodwin is the former the Everett Fraser Professor in Law at the University of Minnesota, and currently the chair in law and professor of Medicine at US Irvine, and Loretta Ross, former Coordinator of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective.