From the bus system she describes, the prison job, and her general description in the tag, it sounds like she is in Springfield, Missouri like I am.
She needs to go to Teletech and get a job that will pay $10.50 an hour to start. Our local big chain of convenience stores start at $12 an hour, and our cost of living is very low.
But honestly, she sounds like the type of person who is properly USING the social safety net and not ABUSING it, which is my biggest complaint. If you need SNAP for your kids, I don’t have a problem with you buying nutritious food with it.
But to refocus on her for a minute, with the number of jobs she has said she has had, it sounds like there are some personal issues that makes it so she can’t hold down a job. Starting a job at $10, $11, and $12 an hour isn’t unreasonable considering you will likely start getting raises when you stick with a job for more than six months.
But when I worked at Teletech, most of the people I worked with had trouble holding a single job more than six months at a time. So they bounced from entry level pay to entry level pay for years and decades.
You hit all her nail on the head! Particularly on refocus on her.
Those types of irresponsible short-termers are often the ones that show up late day after day or take days off without Manager’s OK regardless of the work schedule.