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It is an honor to take up this discussion with Michelle Fine (this issue), whose work serves as a model and as sustenance for so many of us trying to imagine and live in a more just world. Her response shines light on important gaps to be filled in my discussion of the “good mother/bad mother,” the first being discussion of the conflation of the good mother and Whiteness and along with that, the insidious notion of “perfect.” (On these matters, Fine and Asch's 1988 work on disability is an excellent resource and an interesting dialogue partner.)

Another gap would be some consideration of how the “good mother” image, or at least its façade, can be bought and how, having made the purchase, once in possession of certain cultural capital, the court system opens its doors and as Fine writes, demonization becomes tragedy-ization. A third might be the questions about the recipients of these projections and splits—how they attach or bounce off, deflate or ignite, define or defy, prickle or scar the psyches and souls of the women at whom they take aim. Here Bion's (1963) discussion of the “containing” function of the recipient of a projection may be of interest.

As this piece goes to press, there is legislation on the desk of New York's Governor David Paterson that would restore judges' discretion in the sentencing of drug-possession crimes and increase funding for treatment programs that could serve as alternatives to incarceration. I am the first to celebrate the hard work of activist and advocate groups who have struggled for these much overdue changes. The familiar verbiage, however, verbiage that seeks to prevent “low-level,” “first-time,” “nonviolent” offenders from being “lumped” with the rest, still predominates this legislative initiative and most of our strategies around criminal justice reform in general. The infant “predominately keeps the good object apart from the bad one, and thus, in a fundamental way, preserves it,” says Klein (1955, p. 191). “You seemed to ha