Our laws aren’t supposed to punish children for the deeds of their parents, but 32 states ban people who have been convicted of a drug felony from receiving government assistance.

Last week, Dr. Emily Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the Yale School of Medicine and the Associate Director of the Transitions Clinic Network, posted a piece in The American Prospect about a 23-year-old woman named Carla who served a sentence for a drug-related crime and now can’t get food stamps for herself and her children.

Carla is out of prison, but few people want to hire an ex-convict, so she’s having a hard time finding a job. And even though she’s going back to school and staying clean, she can’t get food stamps for her children.

The ban came from the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. It was an effort to keep people from trading food stamps for drugs, even though that wasn’t a huge problem.

My question would be why the law didn’t make it a felony to trade food stamps for drugs and leave it at that.

In this country, people who have served their time are supposed to be able to rebuild their lives, but laws like this make it damn near impossible. How can you stay out of trouble when the rules keep you from providing food to your children? What parent wouldn’t get frustrated enough to commit a crime to put food on the table?

Carla, because she has been playing by the rules, has regained custody of her children, but she can’t feed them. What kind of a society sets people up for failure on that scale?

Young people who use drugs can be redeemed, and many are — as long as they’re not caught and convicted, apparently.

People like Carla deserve a second chance. Bad decisions made in one’s youth shouldn’t mean the punishment continues for their lifetime, and for the lifetimes of their children.

Efforts to change the law in Congress have died in committee, and in Georgia, which has one of the highest recidivism rates in the country, the legislature won’t even consider removing the bad.

So people are left with the choice to violate the law or watch their children go hungry.

Which would you do?