It is, one lawyer said, "the Jerry Springer docket," the endless parade of family catastrophes -- marriage dissolutions, restraining orders, elder abuse, custody hearings -- that Springer would milk for brawls and ratings with the misfits willing to trade their dignity for that televised moment on stage.I think this sentence explains a lot:
The guys battling restraining orders without a lawyer, their kids in tow because they can't afford day care, boxed in by a legal system that is ruled by the sort of discipline no one ever modeled for them.He gets a description of people who show up here from an attorney:
"They're disproportionately poor," Diamond said. "They don't have a good sense of what parenting ought to look like because their own situation growing up was lousy. They're not fully in control of their emotions, and they lack communication skills: They're not able to identify a problem and discuss it without those emotions taking over."And most of the time they're young. Doesn't every 19-year-old have those issues? They aren't ready to have children."
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