cont. If not for her own mother stepping in, Child Protective Services would have taken her children — not because she was unfit to love them, but because the system removed her body from their lives and called it “procedure.”
Incarceration does not end at the cell door. It ripples outward:
Children lose parents
Families absorb trauma
Grandparents are forced into emergency guardianship
Generational stability is fractured
This is punishment by proximity — inflicted on the innocent.
Why This Matters
What Ralina’s work — and lived testimony — makes clear is this:
A system that can track money but not human confinement
A system that demands proof from the accused for its own failures
A system that resolves contradictions through coercion rather than correction
…is not malfunctioning.
It is functioning as designed.
Closing
Justice cannot exist where truth is optional, memory is fragmented, and compliance is mistaken for accountability.