Time & Punishment

Abstract

Every three minutes state agents remove a child from their home. Once a family is separated, impacted parents are up against a quickly approaching deadline–permanent legal separation looms at the end. In fact, impacted parents navigate three interrelated temporal dimensions: the race to permanent legal separation through the termination of parental rights, the time-consuming process of having to prove that they are fit parents, and the possibility that tomorrow, the state’s concerns will drastically change. The family regulation system–the system that has the power to separate families in this way–has been the subject of sustained critique by both academics and directly impacted families. One major critique is that instead of helping children and their parents, the system further marginalizes them. This Article introduces an underexplored layer of marginalization in the family regulation system: time.

This Article argues that the construction of time in the system is not merely a benign or neutral force but instead profoundly shapes the family regulation process. Neutral conceptions of time fail to account for the ways temporal marginalization fixes parents in time, devalues time as a resource, reproduces social stratification, and privileges the state while disadvantaging families already at the margins. This Article builds on an emerging literature that critically examines time in legal systems. Drawing on multidisciplinary frameworks that conceptualize the relationship between time and power, this Article provides an aerial view of both the abstract problem of regulating parent-child relationships through a temporal frame, as well as the concrete legal timelines, procedures, and court processes that combine to exacerbate an already conflictual relationship between the state and marginalized families.

“Time and Punishment” is the first Article to bring the rich conversation on time and power to the family regulation context. It makes two central contributions. One, it identifies and discusses three temporal dimensions in the system, their combined impacts, and the legal frameworks that underlie them. Second, it brings two sets of literatures into conversation: family regulation scholarship and multidisciplinary research on time, power, and marginalization. In this way, it offers an epistemic intervention that complicates managerial conceptions of time and offers insights that are fruitful beyond the family regulation context. Ultimately, this Article concludes that taking account of time as experienced by impacted families is one step towards fully understanding and responding to temporal marginalization.

Keywords: Family Regulation System, Managerial Justice, Critical Legal Thought, Feminist Legal Theory, Family Separation, Child Removal, Legal Separation, Temporal Marginalization