Child welfare on Long Island: The depths of family policing cruelty

Sometimes the cruelty inflicted on children in the name of “protecting” them boggles the mind. Consider the case of a two-year-old boy who, in June, must have wondered: Where did Mommy go?  Why isn’t she in the house? Why do I never see her? Did I do something wrong? 

Perhaps he’s still wondering – since I haven’t been able to find an update to this story. 

It’s a story about a mother on Long Island who made a mistake. When she stopped at an outlet mall, she left the two-year-old in the car for 20 minutes. The doors were locked, but the motor was running – probably so she could keep the air conditioning on, which she did. 

Someone called the police. They arrested her and called the family police - child protective services. 

At least the child was not placed in foster care; he was allowed to live with his father.  But the Assistant District Attorney handling the case claimed that the mother’s mistake made her such an extreme threat to the safety of her child that she should be banned from the home and her child denied all contact with her. 

And what exactly was the risk? That Mom would sneak out of the house with her son just to get her jollies by leaving him alone in a car again? Seems unlikely. 

But the judge, sitting at his literal bench and on his figurative high horse, bought it. Told by the mother’s public defender that her exile might leave her homeless … 

Judge Alonzo Jacobs was unswayed. Calling her actions “a real lapse of judgment,” Jacobs granted the protective order in full and rebuked the mother in open court. “I care less about the homeless situation and more about the child’s life,” Jacobs said. “He could have been kidnapped. He could have suffocated.” 

Well, yes, he could have been kidnapped. The odds are roughly 1 in 486,000 – assuming he were left in the car for an entire year. The odds of anyone suffocating in a car parked outdoors for 20 minutes with the air conditioning on also are extremely low. 

In contrast, the odds that the judge inflicted psychological harm on the child by leaving him feeling his mother abandoned him are a whole lot higher. Is that how one cares about a child’s life? 

Surely no one seriously believes this mom is going to do the same thing again. So while it surely was not his intention, the judge’s cruelty accomplishes nothing except to hurt the child.  

Nice going, your honor.

NCCPR news and commentary roundup, week ending August 19, 2025

● Gothamist reports on that big victory for domestic violence survivors and their children in New York. The city’s family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, must stop harassing them simply because they survived violence from their partners. From the story: 

“Essentially, the ACS policy at issue in this case permits it to surveil the mother simply because the child’s father committed acts of domestic violence against her,” Associate Justice Ellen Gesmer wrote in the court’s ruling. “We cannot condone a policy based on this faulty and unlawful premise.” 

And hear reporter Samantha Max discuss the story on WNYC Public Radio. In particular, check out the excerpt from oral argument at 4:13 in; listen closely for the brief moment of derisive laughter directed toward the ACS attorney’s argument by one of the judges. 

● There was another significant victory for families, this time in Michigan – thanks to some University of Michigan Law School students. 

● The Imprint reports on a bill passed unanimously by the New York State Legislature that, if it becomes law, would take the first step toward seriously regulating the insidious practice of “hidden foster care.” What is that first step? Finding out how much of it there is. 

From the story: 

[U]nder a recently passed bill in New York, these arrangements would be brought into the light, marking a first step toward fully understanding the extent of the practice and perhaps curtailing it. Critics say hidden foster care circumvents legal protections, relieves governments of their responsibility, and robs caregivers of vital support and resources that are available under the formal child welfare process. 

Bringing hidden foster care into the open would have one other advantage: It would be harder for family police agencies to pretend they take fewer children than they really do. 

● You’ve heard the child welfare establishment types yell Drugs! Drugs! Drugs! as the all-purpose supposed reason for taking away so many children. But if they meant that, they’d distinguish between when drug abuse genuinely endangers children and when it does not. 

And when it does, they would demand drug treatment – in particular, the kind that works best, where parents can stay with their children. But since Drugs! Drugs! Drugs! is mostly just an excuse to tear apart poor families so their children can be placed into “better” – i.e., whiter and/or wealthier – homes, the same establishment makes treatment as difficult as possible. Shoshana Walter, author of the new book Rehab: An American Scandal, discusses the problem for The Marshall Project. 

● In 2016, two legal scholars argued that, when it comes to the most sacred cow in child welfare, Court-Appointed Special Advocates, no matter how well-meaning the volunteers, the program is so steeped in unfixable racial and class bias that runs so deep, the program is, they said, “an act of white supremacy.”  And that was before, as The Imprint reports, this happened.

● WZTV reports on what a Tennessee family had to endure at the hands of the family police, even after a judge found them innocent.

● When one of Connecticut’s so-called STTAR home dumping ground shelters was engulfed in a scandal over rampant abuse, the Connecticut family police agency had the perfect answer! Spend more and change the acronym! (What, you were expecting real solutions?)  I have a blog post about it.

Child welfare in Connecticut: Here come the new shelters, just like the old shelters

Every state has them.  Short-term dumping grounds for children supposedly so difficult that no place else can handle them. 

The premise is false. The dumping grounds, like all institutional care, are a failed model. The homes that, with the right kind of help, can handle the children that supposedly can’t be handled are filled with children who never needed to be taken in the first place, and states are so busy pouring so much money into things like short-term dumping grounds, that they can’t invest in the Wraparound services that would make such placements work. 

In Connecticut, these dumping grounds are called Specialized Trauma-Informed Treatment, Assessment and Reunification Homes, or as a press release from Connecticut’s family police agency, the Department of Children and Families calls them, STAR homes. Or is it STTAR homes? Or STARR homes? DCF is so clueless it can’t even get the acronyms straight – the press release uses all three. 

As usual, in child welfare, the name is Orwellian. If anything, they are trauma-inducing, and they do nothing to help with reunification. They may even be one of the reasons Connecticut has one of the worst rates of reunifying children from foster care in the country. It also may help explain why Connecticut spends on “child welfare” at the third highest rate in the country, triple the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in, even as it backslides from progress it made during the last decade. (The problem isn’t the amount, it’s that so much of it goes to causing harm instead of helping.) 

As with so many of their counterparts across the country, really bad things can happen in Connecticut’s  STAR/STTAR/STARR homes. Here’s a small sample of what happened at one of them, according to a memo from a state trooper reported by Connecticut Inside Investigator. 

● The arrest of a 42-year-old male staff member for sexual intercourse with a 14-year-old female resident of the STAR home. 

● The arrest of a 39-year-old male staff member for physically assaulting a 17-year-old female resident after “kneeling and using bodyweight to hold her to the ground after slamming her to the ground several times.” 

● The arrest of an 18-year-old biological male who was transitioning to female for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old female in the home. 

● A melee involving four girls barricading themselves in the home, locking out staff, and requiring seven state troopers and multiple ambulances to be called to the scene, resulting in assaults on the state troopers and the arrest of the four juveniles. 

● The sexual assault of four female residents between the ages of 14 and 17 by a 25-year-old female staff member. An arrest warrant was being drafted for the staff member at the time of the memorandum. 

But don’t worry, DCF has a solution: Give the homes more money – and build more of them! (What? You were expecting a real solution?)

So now, in addition to the STAR/STTAR/STARR homes, Connecticut will have ITTC homes! That’s Intensive Transitional Treatment Centers. What’s the difference between an ITTC and a STAR/STTAR/STAR home? Well, says a DCF bureaucrat, “the budget is bigger, so it provides the opportunity for additional resources …” 

But would you trust any young person, let alone one who is troubled, in the hands of an agency that stuffs into its own press release a paragraph like this?: 

Youth who stabilize in these ITTC programs who cannot be provided a home setting in a timely manner will be referred to Therapeutic Group Home (TGH) level of care. Youth who continue to be acute and/or whose needs exceed the ability of what the ITTC can provide will be referred to psychiatric residential treatment facility (PRTF) level of care.

Got that? If the STTAR doesn’t work, ship ‘em to the ITTC, and then to the TGH or the PRTF. 

But perhaps most striking, and most indicative of the DCF mindset, is the fact that the new plan also will give each STAR/STTAR/STARR program $125,000 for “therapeutic recreational activities” which as CT Mirror explained, translates into things to do so the kids don’t get bored while they’re institutionalized. 

Young people really do need that, of course. But let’s contrast the acronym-laden, bureaucratic DCF approach with how the late Karl Dennis, the “father of Wraparound” dealt with the same problem.  

I have often embedded the video below, in which Dennis explains how he returned safely to his own mother a teenager so difficult the local jail couldn’t handle him. His mother was hesitant, so Dennis kept asking her what she would need to be able to take care of her son. This time, I’ve cued this link to the video to what Dennis did when faced with the same issue as Connecticut DCF. (Or watch the embed below, starting at exactly 10:00 in).

If only there were an acronym for that.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 12, 2025

● In his Reliable Sources newsletter last Friday, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter documents how the Trump Administration fans fear of crime with argument-by-anecdote to drown out the data showing that crime has decreased. Mainstream media aren’t falling for it. So why do so many keep falling for it when the topic is child welfare? I have a blog post about it, with a link to the full newsletter. 

● In a recent case in his state, Prof. Vivek Sankaran writes in Bridge Michigan 

CPS made the right call by not needlessly separating these children from their family.  But somewhere along the way, we’ve taken the right lesson — that poverty is not neglect — and twisted it into an excuse for inaction. … 

Michigan lawmakers should take this moment to separate the functions of child protection and child welfare. Let CPS investigate serious abuse and neglect. But create a parallel, well-funded infrastructure whose sole mission is to stabilize families, address poverty and keep children safe without separating them from their parents.

● The Imprint reports on what is believed to be the first national survey of current and former Native American foster youth.  One of those responding wrote: 

“Our connection to culture, land, and community is not optional — it’s vital. When those ties are broken by placement in non-Native homes or systems that don’t understand our identity, it creates deep, long-term harm. Too often, Indigenous youth in care are expected to adapt to systems that weren’t built for us — systems that have historically contributed to our displacement and trauma.’’ 

● In Reason, Lenore Skenazy reprints a letter from a Virginia mother whose family had been repeatedly harassed, and their children traumatized, when child protective services investigated them – for letting the children play outside.  Fortunately, Virginia has passed a Reasonable Childhood Independence law.  But even so, check out what families have to go through: 

[E]ven with the legislation we helped to pass, my kids are hesitant to exercise their independence. Few people know that parents have the right to decide what their children are capable of handling. I have equipped my kids with a "license" that they keep on them when they roam our small, rural neighborhood. It says across the top in big, bold letters "MY PARENTS KNOW I'M HERE" and includes information about SB1367 (Virginia's Reasonable Childhood Independence law) as well as my name and phone number. My children have been stopped by neighbors, produced their license, and thankfully were then left unbothered.

It's even worse, of course, in the 39 states that don’t have Reasonable Childhood Independence laws, so children can be caught playing outside without a “license.” 

● Also in Reason, Skenazy points out that all the restrictions on children’s ability to play freely and interact IRL are part of what’s driving their addiction to their phones. 

● It’s good to see the Minnesota Star Tribune widening the range of viewpoints it will publish on child welfare. In this column, Amelia Franck Meyer of Alia Innovations explains why Minnesota needs those great new child welfare laws to improve child safety and well-being. 

● But plenty of bad laws remain in Minnesota, including a draconian law that forces schools to call CPS on any family where a child under age 12 has had seven unexcused absences. In contrast, more than half the states don’t include “educational neglect” as part of CPS’ responsibilities at all. Educational neglect allegations also are a potent way for school districts to shut up parents who are demanding things like the kind of special education plan a child is entitled to by law. 

As the respected Vera Institute of Justice found long ago, for older children “educational neglect” should not be part of CPS’ domain, period, and for younger children there should be strict limits. Among other things, their study refuted the widely-held myth that “educational neglect” is a sort of “gateway allegation” signaling that horrible things are happening in the family. 

At a minimum, such reports should be discretionary. But in the absence of either getting rid of the category or allowing discretion, The Imprint reports, some school districts in Minnesota have received funding to reach out to help families first, so they never reach that seven-day mark. Unfortunately, the story gives unjustified credence to the whole “gateway allegation” myth, never mentions all those states that don’t deem “educational neglect” a CPS responsibility at all, and never mentions the issue of harassment. 

● On the NCCPR Blog, I write briefly about Paul Vincent and Karl Dennis, two heroes the child welfare field lost recently.  The Imprint also has stories about Vincent and Dennis.

The “irresponsible media megaphones” of child welfare

Friday’s Reliable Sources newsletter from CNN’s indefatigable media reporter Brian Stelter was all about the way many journalists still cover child welfare – though I’m sure Stelter didn’t realize it. In fact, the column says not a word about the “child welfare” system or, as it should be called, the family policing system. 

Rather, the column was devoted to politicians who exploit horror stories to boost the power of the traditional police. He cites this example: 

We can see it happening this week in the sudden storyline about Trump increasing federal law enforcement in DC while fear-mongering about crime being "totally out of control."

 

Responsible news outlets keep pointing out, as PBS "NewsHour" did, that "contrary to the president’s claims, violent crime in Washington, DC, last year hit a 30-year low." Nationally, as well, there is clear FBI data "showing crime down in every category," anchor Geoff Bennett said. …

 

But irresponsible media megaphones are engaging in argument by anecdote. They're citing highly visible crimes … to justify Trump's desire to exert more control in DC. For example, Fox's story about the show of force asserts "a concerning surge in violent crime" with no mention of data to the contrary. [Emphasis in original – it’s Stelter’s style.]

 

This has, of course, been the “child welfare” establishment playbook pretty much forever. There’s even a name for it: “health terrorism.” Take a horror story, generalize from it (argue by anecdote), and use it to demand a vast increase in the number of children torn from everyone they know and love in cases that are nothing like that horror story. Instead of making children safer, it traumatizes thousands of children with needless foster care, exposes them to the high risk of abuse in foster care itself and so overloads the system that workers have even less time to find those few children in real danger.

 

But, as Stelter points out, while mainstream news organizations aren’t falling for it when it comes from Trump, often they still fall for it in “child welfare” when it comes from extremists who happen to have “professor” in front of their names, or cushy posts at extremist think tanks. Or they fall for it when it comes from a grandstanding local pol or the head of the local so-called “child advocacy” organization.

 

The good news: Journalists are falling for it a lot less than they used to. When they still fall for it, politicians are less likely to respond with knee-jerk demands to tear apart more families. And when they fall for it, it’s usually just that; a blunder based on the revulsion we all feel when adults do horrible things to children and a failure to seek more context and a wider variety of sources, rather an reporters being irresponsible.

 

Oh, by the way: Look through back editions of the federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment report, and you’ll find that the rate of child abuse in America peaked in 1993. It’s declined more than 50% since then, reaching a record low in 2023. During the first few years of this time period, foster care numbers went up. For the rest, they went down.

 

So here’s a suggestion to reporters covering child welfare: The next time anyone tries to exploit a tragedy to stampede us into demanding that we tear apart more families, imagine that Donald Trump is uttering those words.  Then fact-check accordingly.

Child welfare loses two heroes

There are not many true heroes in child welfare. Recently, we lost two of them.

Paul Vincent

Paul Vincent died on July 25. Paul led the child welfare division of the Alabama Department of Human Resources when it was the subject of a pioneering class-action lawsuit that demanded the system rebuild to emphasize keeping families together. (A member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors, Ira Burnim of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, was co-counsel for the plaintiffs.) Paul welcomed the suit and worked hard to make it succeed.  And it did. For a while, Alabama was the unlikely leader in doing child welfare right – to the point that it made the front page of The New York Times. 

Paul also served on the “Marisol Panel,” an advisory group that grew out of a class-action lawsuit settlement in New York City. The group was strictly advisory. But because of who was on it, and because the head of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, Nicholas Scoppetta, surprised almost everyone by taking a lot of the panel’s advice, it did a lot to set in motion some of the changes for the better in  New York City. 

Then Paul founded the Child Welfare Policy and Practice Group, which issues outstanding reports on systems across the country, including Iowa, Indiana and Philadelphia. You can read more about Paul here. 

Karl Dennis 

Karl Dennis, the "father of Wraparound” -- or, as he preferred to call it, Unconditional Care -- died in June.  In a tribute to Dennis in Youth Today, David Osher writes: 

Karl also understood that each person and each context was unique and that settings, programs and even systems had to adapt to the youth and family rather than the opposite. Just as Karl never wrote off a young person, he never wrote off families even though most or perhaps all Kaleidoscope youth had experienced trauma, and agencies claimed the parents were hard to find and would not comply. He believed in family ties and understood that family included aunts, uncles, grandparents, even close friends, neighbors, and the whole tribe. Because Karl viewed families as valuable resources — and Kaleidoscope worked hard to find them — when they found them they treated them with respect and worked to earn trust, believing that wraparound should be family-driven. 

Karl understood the toxic impacts of language on people, worker-youth/family alliance, and organizational behavior. Karl insisted that his staff never applied the pejorative clinical language of “dysfunction” to families; rather, he saw systems that did not provide appropriate support to families and youth as dysfunctional. 

But it’s best to let Karl Dennis speak for himself, as he did in this presentation in 2009: 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 5, 2025

● All over the country, private foster care agencies are fearmongering in a desperate attempt to get taxpayer bailouts and/or near immunity from liability – because now that victims of child abuse on their watch can sue, there are so many lawsuits that the agencies can’t afford insurance. In Youth Today, NCCPR suggests a better idea. 

● In a column for The Imprint, one of a series documenting what it takes to stop families from being torn apart when their poverty is confused with neglect, Sarah Winograd of Together With Families writes about a case in Georgia which began with this ultimatum: 

Child Protective Services gave Maurice a deadline: fix your home, or your granddaughters will be placed in foster care. 

That’s pretty amazing, since foster care apologists keep telling us such cases don’t exist. The column documents how much it took to cobble together the support this grandfather needed to save his children from foster care. It reminded me of the question I posed concerning a similar example from Missouri: Why is foster care so easy and everything else so hard? 

● Also in The Imprint, Prof. Dale Margolin Cecka, Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, documents the enormous harm of anonymous child abuse reporting, and why New York Gov. Kathy Hochul should sign a bill to replace it with confidential reporting. 

● If we must have offices of Child Advocate/Ombudsman, then at least let's structure them to be unbiased and recognize error in all directions. In a column for the Maine Morning Star about what is currently one of the worst such offices, I suggest ways to do that. 

● The American Law Institute periodically issues what it calls “Restatements” of aspects of American law. They are massive undertakings, and until now ALI had not tried it with child welfare law. Now that they have, Prof. Martin Guggenheim has written a commentary on the Restatement for Family Court Review that also is an assessment of the current state of family defense – and the current state of the teaching of family defense in law schools.  

In the same issue, Prof. Shanta Trivedi writes that 

The family policing system separates families every day. As a result, children and their parents suffer lifelong, irreversible trauma and a host of other negative consequences. The Restatement acknowledges these harms and directs courts to consider the harms of removal throughout court proceedings when deciding whether a child should be removed from their parents or in determining if reunification is appropriate.