New story at Arkansas Times:
Ten days after her youngest son was born in April 2014, Lisa Rushing, a 27-year-old from Paragould, went to jail.
She’d been in trouble for a while: After receiving felony probation for credit card fraud, she’d failed to meet with her probation officer for at least two years, resulting in a warrant for absconding. During the same time, she’d also become addicted to meth, and had signed over guardianship of her two older children, a boy and a girl, to her mother to prevent them from being taken into foster care. There were circumstances behind Rushing’s problems: Her father had been murdered in 2010, and she’d begun drinking heavily and eventually using drugs to cope; the father of her own children was in and out of prison, and it seemed that every time she became pregnant he was locked up again.
Both the child welfare and the criminal justice systems caught up with Rushing when her infant was born with methamphetamine in his system.
