"We Need to Forgive the College-Bound Mother Who Killed Her Child"

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Michelle Jones is not like other PhD candidates rolling up to New York University this year. Firstly, she only got out of the joint two days before school started. Secondly, folks at Harvard are still arguing over whether they should have admitted her. And thirdly, when she was still a teenager, she killed her 4-year-old son and buried his body in the woods

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There’s the story of the plucky young woman who got two degrees while incarcerated. These are not pity-diplomas. Through meticulous research conducted by laboriously sending out for photocopies from the Indiana Archives and poring through them for data, Jones discovered evidence of a whole slew of Catholic-run Magdalene laundry–like reformatories that had housed Indianan prostitutes and “fallen women” against their will in the 1840s. A paper she co-authored was published in The Journal of the Indiana Academy of Social Sciences in 2014. It won an award from Indiana’s historical society.

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Then there’s the story of the teenage mother who got pregnant at 14, was beaten by her mother while carrying the child and gave birth to Brandon, a child with a disability. Before his first birthday, court records show, her baby was taken from her for three years and lived with his father and paternal grandmother. Not too long after she regained custody, in 1992, she left him behind for the weekend when she went to an out-of-town theater conference. He was never seen again. His body has never been found. A friend later testified that Jones told her she thought she might have beaten him to death. 

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Mostly we should forgive Jones because continuing to punish a woman for something heinous she did while a teenager will not help that woman’s murdered child in any way. It will not bring him back or make his life more precious. Nor will it help future Brandons. Jones is in a unprecedented position to shed light on some of America’s thorniest problems: How can we make prisons better? How can we break the generational cycle of incarceration? What can we do to help our most vulnerable kids and mothers?

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None of that means Harvard or any other institution had to admit her. The university has the right and duty to put together the class it feels best about. It may be sacrilege to say this, but the difference between the education offered in Cambridge and the one offered at NYU is probably visible only to people from a small part Massachusetts in any case. Jones won’t much notice a loss. Harvard, on the other hand, might.

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