NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 8, 2024

● The Imprint reports on a series of meetings in which families and their advocates told some of New York City’s biggest names in family policing – private agencies that have been around in some cases for a century or more - how much harm they have done.  No surprise there. Here’s the surprise: The agencies’ response boiled down to – well yes, you’re right.  Here’s how the story begins:

 A pediatrician imploring fellow physicians to stop wrenching newborns from their mothers. A social worker who doesn’t want to report kids in dirty clothes to CPS. A case planner living with regrets that he failed to avoid a family separation through foster care.

 These rare, firsthand stories from the frontlines of the child welfare system are not often shared with the public. But they’re examples of the remarkable testimony presented over three sessions in New York City this year, gatherings titled The Reckoning: Transforming Systems to Achieve Family Justice and Integrity. More than 600 social workers, nonprofit executives and staff, legal experts and advocates for parents’ rights have joined the hours-long convenings that began in March. …

 ● Longtime followers of family policing will recall when Maryville, a modern-day orphanage near Chicago, was cited as a national model – so wonderful, in fact, that it was the centerpiece of a 1995 60 Minutes story touting orphanages.  Seven years later it was exposed as rife with so much abuse that Illinois took all foster youth out of the place.  In 2016 the entire residential program was shut down.

Want to know how much Illinois learned from this?  

In 2019, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services touted the brand new Aunt Martha’s Integrated Care Center as a national model.  Just five years later, amid a sexual abuse scandal, it was shut down.  But, as the nonprofit news site Injustice Watch explains, the abuse scandal was only the beginning: 

The list of alleged transgressions — many seemingly overlooked by state officials for years — includes: sex trafficking of minors; staffers who should never have been hired in the first place because of disqualifying prior arrests; overlooked claims of guards using sexual innuendos with children, sleeping on the job, and sharing pornographic videos among themselves at work; and thousands of reported violent attacks among young residents. 

Somehow in just five years, a facility with only 33 beds racked up 

3,850 unusual incident reports when young residents displayed “physically aggressive behavior” against their peers or staff, records show. 

Oh, and care to guess where the director of DCFS during most of this time used to work? 

See also this follow-up story from Injustice Watch. 

● Of course, as a Philadelphia Inquirer story makes clear, it’s not just one institution in one state.  Consider what instututionalized young people told the Juvenile Law Center for their latest report on these places: 

“What should have happened in my story is that someone should have asked me why I was always late to school. Instead, no one asked me, and I was sent away.” 

“I felt like I was a prisoner there and I didn’t feel safe there.” 

“It messes with your head to be kept in a cage for so long.” 

“You go in there with one specific problem, and then you come back out with 30.″ 

JLC Senior Attorney Malik Pickett summed it up: 

“A lot of people tend to have this glorified view of what placement looks like, especially residential juvenile justice facilities. And they kind of picture it like this beautiful college campus where youth are getting treatment services, but they don’t really realize the horrors that are going on behind those walls. They’re so blind to what’s actually happening inside these facilities.” 

See also The Imprint’s story about the report. 

● And now over to Arkansas, where the Arkansas Times has done a deep dive into the harm caused by that state’s residential treatment industry.  The story quotes Reagan Stanford of Disability Rights Arkansas who told lawmakers: 

“Across Arkansas, facilities are rife with countless examples of abuse, violence and neglect.  The child is often seen as the failure, not the treatment facility. And because they are viewed as the failure, all too often the child gets cycled back into a residential placement.” 

● Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in Congress concerning hidden foster care – essentially blackmail placements in which parents are coerced into “voluntarily” placing their child in foster care.  The Imprint reports that the bill would not regulate the practice, but it would force states to reveal how often it happens – so we’ll finally know how many children really are torn from their homes every year.

● After the New Jersey Attorney General sued a chain of hospitals for testing all pregnant women for drug use, often without their knowledge or consent, NJ Spotlight News reports the hospital chain is modifying its approach.  But the new approach may just lead to new forms of discrimination. 

● And the text of NCCPR’s presentation to this year’s Kempe Center conference is now available on this blog.  It’s called Attn: Family Police: Children’s “Well-being” is None of Your Damn Business.”

NCCPR at the Kempe Center Conference: Attn: Family Police: Children's "well-being" is none of your damn business!

 This is the text of the NCCPR’s presentation at the 2024 Kempe Center International Virtual Conference: A Call to Action to Change Child Welfare

            

What the cover says 

How many times have we heard it or read it? “Safety, permanency, well-being.”  It’s practically the slogan of everyone in the family policing establishment, from the federal government’s Administration for Children and Families to the smallest county family police agency.

We hear family police agencies even claiming they want a “child and family well-being system.” In a truly Orwellian touch, San Diego County California even makes its family police part of its new “Department of Child and Family Well-being.”

            And yet, when it comes to safety, permanency and well-being the family police have managed to screw up all three.

            Family police is a term I will use throughout this presentation, since it’s when it comes to an agency with the power to march into any home in America, search it top to bottom, stripsearch children, walk right out with them and consign them to the chaos of foster care, that is a vastly more accurate term than “child protection” or “child welfare” agency.

            And it’s important to draw a distinction between that one element of government – the family police – and government as a whole.

            I am a lifelong tax-and-spend liberal and proud of it. I’m old enough to have cast my first vote in a presidential election for George McGovern and my last vote in a contested presidential primary – 2020 -- for Elizabeth Warren.  I think government can play a huge, constructive role in promoting the well-being of children.

            But the family police cannot.

            After all, they’ve screwed up stuff that’s a lot easier to define.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Oct. 1, 2024

● This just in: America’s foremost scholar on the intersection of racism and family policing (and a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors) Prof. Dorothy Roberts has received a MacArthur Fellowship -- the awards that are commonly known as “genius grants.”  

From the New York Times story: 

Another fellow, Dorothy Roberts, a legal scholar and public policy researcher focused on racial inequities in social services, said she appreciated receiving the fellowship after spending decades writing about topics — such as the prosecution of pregnant Black women for using drugs, which she argues is inherently unjust — that other scholars considered inappropriate. 

“I started this work in 1988,” said Roberts, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s law school and the author of books including “Shattered Bonds” and “Torn Apart,” both about institutional racism in the child welfare system. “To get this kind of recognition is very gratifying. Not only for me personally, but for all the people, especially Black women, who’ve been devalued in these systems.”

This story from The Imprint has a good summary of Prof. Roberts' work and a link to their interview with her for their podcast. 

● Sometimes one small detail from a government document tells a huge story – especially when a good reporter adds a little context.  Rolling Stone has published a superb deep dive that begins as an exploration of needless family destruction because a pregnant mother smoked pot, then expands into an in-depth look at the confusion of poverty with neglect.  It includes this paragraph: 

Some states practically name poverty in their child separation policies: If “family finances are insufficient to support unusual need[s],” child separation could be justified, Arizona’s DCF policy reads. (Using data from 2022, the Federal Reserve reported that 43 percent of parents — more than 14 million families — did not have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense.) 

● Among the he consequences of this kind of thinking in Arizona: tearing apart families at a rate far above the national average, so children are dumped into substandard placements.  Like that time a child with Type 1 diabetes, needlessly taken from a loving home, died in an Arizona group home.  What, you think you already saw that story? No. ABC15’s investigation concerns another child in another Arizona group home – including some harrowing police bodycam video. 

● One state moving in the right direction on these issues is New Jersey. In a move that would have been unheard-of just a few years ago, New Jersey Spotlight News reports that the state Attorney General is suing a chain of hospitals to stop them from performing clandestine drug tests on pregnant women and then reporting the results to the family police.  According to the story:

Patients were referred to state child welfare officials even when the positive test resulted from prescribed medication, over-the-counter drugs or a poppyseed bagel, according to the state’s lawsuit …

And if you’re wondering which neighborhoods these hospitals serve, it’s the ones you think. 

● And from 2023: A reminder from this blog that not all pot-smoking moms are treated horribly. Some even are celebrated.  

● From The Conversation: An exploration of another group that faces discrimination in the family policing system: the disabled. (And again a reminder: The U.S. Department of Justice reportedly is investigating whether such discrimination has gone high-tech in Pittsburgh.) 

● Harvard Law Today looks at the Medical-Legal Partnership forged by the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau’s Family Defense Practice and Boston Medical Center. 

There are several interesting new laws in California: 

● Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill to stop county family police agencies from stealing foster youth’s Social Security survivor benefits.  But they will remain free to steal their disability benefits. (A bill that would have barred both was vetoed by Newsom last year.) 

● He also signed a bill concerning residential treatment, The Imprint reports the new law 

requires the state Department of Social Services to publicly report how often and why children have been physically restrained or sent to seclusion.

The law does not require the RTCs to stop doing any of it.  But their trade association says even reporting when it happens is unnecessary because, really, everything is just fine in California institutions already. 

● And Native News Online reports on a law strengthening protections for California’s Native American children. 

● But efforts to undermine the rights of Native children continue.  The Imprint reports there’s another challenge to the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, with opponents apparently trying to use a state court and a similar state law to worm their way back to the U.S. Supreme Court, even though that court upheld ICWA last year.  The challenge is taking place in Minnesota – the state with the worst record in America for separating Native American families. 

In more examples of how The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From KJRH-TV, Oklahoma:

“A literal nightmare,” Alexis Fridenberg called her childhood foster, and ultimately adoptive, home.  At four years old, Fridenberg said she was placed into a home of “career” foster parents.  “That is what they got out of it, the money,” she said. … 

Alexis said her adoptive brother, the parents’ biological son, Sammy Fridenberg, sexually assaulted her daily from age 7 to 18. He now faces multiple charges. Court documents show other relatives have come forward alleging abuse as well.

●VT Digger reports that 

In the past two years, two Florida residential facilities experienced outbreaks of violence that left multiple youths injured. Vermont’s human services agency continued to send teens there — even after the incidents. 

Yeah; that’s going to happen when in a state like progressive little Vermont, which keeps tearing apart families at the second highest rate in America – more than quadruple the national average. 

Two stories about death in Kansas: 

●The Kansas Beacon reports on two foster youth who died while being warehoused in state offices. 

●From the Topeka Capital-Journal:

 Police in a small town near Wichita have publicly identified the child whose decomposing body was found in a backyard after officers were called to a home for an unrelated matter earlier in September. 

Rose Hill police chief Taylor Parlier on Friday identified the girl as Kennedy Jean Schroer, who is believed to have been about 6 years old when she died. Kennedy was born July 14, 2014, and was adopted in November 2018. Police believe she died in late 2020. ...

Once again, none of this should be a surprise in a state that, while not as bad as Vermont, still has, for decades, overloaded its system by tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in the nation.

UPDATED: New York’s structure for screening child abuse reports guarantees one thing: mutually-assured buck-passing. The Legislature should change that.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Child Welfare Information Gateway, 2018

The State Assembly holds a hearing Oct. 9 that could be a first step in the right direction

Last March, the New York City Family Policy Project, an essential resource, and not just for New Yorkers, published a comprehensive report on the harm done by the state’s child abuse hotline, which is run by the state Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS).  The report found that New York screens out false reports at a far lower rate than most states. That causes havoc for families wrongly investigated, and deluges workers with so many false reports they have less time to find the few children in real danger. 

Responding to the Family Policy Project report, the State Assembly Committee on Children and Families announced it will hold a hearing on the issue on Oct. 9.  

I hope they will zero-in on one nearly unique element in the New York system that makes it particularly destructive: a built-in incentive for what should be called mutually-assured buck-passing. Only one other state has the structural problem New York has built into its process.  I also hope the legislature will take a look at some relevant history, both recent and ancient. 

The structural problem 

In most states, the family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) is a state agency.  That state agency runs the hotline and that state agency does the investigations and takes away the children.  In 10 states,* the investigating and family-separating is a local government function.  But in five of those states, including California and Minnesota, the localities typically run the hotline as well, while in three more, localities can screen most or all reports sent from the state hotline. 

Only one other state, North Dakota, does it in the awful way New York does it: 

In New York, all calls alleging child abuse and neglect go to the statewide hotline run by OCFS.  They then send the reports they screen-in to localities to investigate.  The localities have no choice – if the state hotline sends it, the locality must investigate it. 

And it sure seems like, at least in New York City, they want to keep it that way.  The reason for that has to do with safety – no, no, not safety for the children, safety for the city family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). 

Over and over again, when ACS needlessly investigates and traumatizes an innocent family, the
agency’s commissioner, Jess Dannhauser, says something like: We didn’t want to wreak havoc on this family; the state made us do it!  

The state, for its part, has an incentive to send huge numbers of reports to the localities.  After all, if the hotline wrongly screens out a report and later there’s a tragedy, the state agency gets the blame.  This may well be a key reason the New York hotline wrongly screens in so many cases. 

Meanwhile, ACS speaks often of the need for better training so mandatory reporters don’t phone in false reports, (but since they’re mandatory reporters, they still may be afraid not to report) and ACS is piloting some supports in schools to encourage those reporters to seek alternatives to calling the hotline.  But Commissioner Dannhauser has never publicly called for the Legislature to simply give ACS the power to screen out false reports sent to his agency by the OCFS hotline. 

And no wonder: If ACS were to get that power, screen out a report, and then there’s a tragedy  – well, you know. 

Hence, mutually-assured buck-passing. 

I figure Dannhouser is likely to testify at the Oct. 9 hearing.  I hope one of the lawmakers asks him this question: You keep blaming the state hotline for forcing you to investigate reports you know are b.s.  Why have you never asked us for a law allowing you to screen out those reports yourself?  (And if the legislators don’t, I hope a reporter covering the hearing will.) 

UPDATE, OCT 10. WHAT HAPPENED AT THE HEARING:

On the one hand, for the first time I know of, Dannhauser made some noises about wanting some power to screen calls after they are received from the hotline. 

 However, Dannhauser is a master of calculated ambiguity.

 All he really said in his prepared testimony is that the state should consider creating a system in which localities would submit a plan that OCFS would then have to approve which would allow ACS to "conduct an expedited and less intrusive review of the allegations." He seemed to go a little further in answer to questions – or did he?  But this is certain: At no time did he call for simply giving his own agency the power to screen out reports it deems to be false.  It doesn’t sound like he wants to give up the power ACS truly covets: the power to pass the buck.

As I said, only North Dakota does it the way New York does it.  There also are two hybrid states.  In Colorado, there’s a state hotline and local hotlines.  Most calls go directly to the local hotlines which, of course, can screen reports. Pennsylvania has a state hotline that passes on calls to local family police agencies.  But, unlike New York, those local agencies have discretion to screen out almost all reports alleging “neglect” – which are, of course, the overwhelming majority of reports. Pennsylvania localities are not allowed to screen out reports alleging abuse or “severe neglect” – but this still is an improvement over New York’s approach. 

Pennsylvania also teaches something else: Giving localities the authority to screen won’t work miracles. Both Philadelphia and Pittsburgh take away proportionately far more children than New York City – and Pittsburgh decided to screen in the worst possible way – using “predictive analytics.” 

So why make the change? For starters, just taking away ACS’ excuse and making localities accountable for launching needless, harrowing investigations of families would be worth it. 

But also: right now, New York localities have to investigate 100% of the reports sent to them by the hotline.  If they get the authority to screen and wind up investigating 90% of the reports instead of 100% that’s still an improvement. And there’s nothing to stop OCFS from using predictive analytics at the state level should it so choose. 

Even without a law, it is possible to change regulations to allow for a kind of “circuit breaker” in which localities would have the authority to stop an investigation at a very early stage if the report never should have been sent to them in the first place. 

Also, there’s a more encouraging lesson from a county in Upstate New York. 

The relatively recent history 

At one time, two Upstate counties, Monroe (metropolitan Rochester) and Onondaga (metropolitan Syracuse) ran their own hotlines.  In Monroe County that was true until 2015 when, in the wake of a child abuse death, the state took that authority away.  Showing notably more courage than their New York City counterparts, Monroe County officials actually asked for that authority back. But, in a remarkably nasty response, the state OFCS said no – because, they said, when Monroe had its own hotline they screened out too many calls.  

Well, OCFS sure “fixed” that problem! Once the state took over, the number of screened-in calls skyrocketed. 

The ancient history 

All the way back in 1987, the (long-since defunct) New York State Legislative Commission on Expenditure Review gave hypotheticals to 23 hotline operators, 12 at the state hotline in Albany, eight in Onondaga County and three in Monroe County.  In each case, they asked: Screen-in or screen-out?  

The results: Big differences between Monroe County, Onondaga County and state hotline screeners (at that time the Monroe County operators were far more likely to screen-in reports) and no consistency among the state hotline operators. 

In one case, for example, all the Monroe County operators said screen it in, almost all the Onondaga County operators said screen it out, and the 12 operators at the state hotline split: 8 yes, 4 no. 

There is no reason to think the hotline is any less arbitrary, less capricious or less cruel today. 

Improving that will require a better screening tool and yes, operators will have to be trained in how to use it, and others will have to be trained to be sure they are using it correctly.  But beware of the use of “training” as a copout. Because in addition to being invoked when it’s needed, it’s also invoked – endlessly – as a way to avoid real change.  Training is no substitute for due process. 

So if you’re in Albany on Oct. 9, please be extra careful on the roads.  Because if anyone suggests a drinking game based on how often some family police official at the hearing uses the word “training,” you can expect a lot of drunk driving. 

*-Nine states are fully local. I also count Wisconsin, since the state runs child welfare in only one county, albeit the largest, Milwaukee.  I do not count Nevada, where the state runs the system everywhere except the largest county Clark County (metropolitan Las Vegas)

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Sept. 24, 2024

● Often children are taken when their poverty is confused with neglect only to face actual abuse in foster care.  But rarely children really do face horrific abuse in their own homes.  This story from The Press-Enterprise in Riverside describes a case in California in which that happened – and then the children faced horrific abuse in a foster home overseen by a private agency. 

● I mention the item above because right now, California’s private foster care agencies are rushing to make sure it never happens again – no, no, not the abuse, the lawsuits.  They’re pushing for legislation that would make them almost immune from such suits. You can read about it in this NCCPR column for WitnessLA.  The column asks if would make more sense to stop pouring billions of dollars into a system – foster care – that is so unsafe it is becoming uninsurable. 

● The research arm of the Maine Legislature produced a series of reports on recent child abuse deaths.  The reports were careful, nuanced assessments – far better than what’s spewed forth from certain politicians, and the state’s child welfare “ombudsman.”  In addition to summarizing the reports, this story from the Maine Monitor points out what isn’t covered – making the last 11 paragraphs particularly valuable. 

● Those last 11 paragraphs are an indirect reminder of how, in less than 25 years, Maine child welfare went from national scandal to national model to national disgrace.  In the Maine Morning Star I have a more direct reminder – and what can be done about it. 

● The New York Daily News reports on an initiative by the city’s family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, to bring resources into schools that, in theory, may help the process of what Joyce McMillan calls turning mandated reporters into mandated supporters. (McMillan’s vision for this is, of course, considerably more comprehensive.)  But the story also cites this caution: 

“ACS has a reputation as being the agency that can take your kids away from you,” said Nora McCarthy, director of New York City Family Policy Project. “It’s the right idea to expand support options for families, but having a feared agency being the one contracting and providing that support may be a problem. It might deter families from accessing the services.”

● There are plenty of mandated reporters who want to be mandated supporters and chafe at what the family policing system forces them to do.  In the authoritative British medical journal The Lancet, two US pediatricians write:

[W]e have often felt complicit witnessing our physician and other health-care colleagues dismiss an abuse diagnosis easily within middle-class white families while over-evaluating and subsequently reporting Black and Brown children for, say, accidental falls from bed. If the mandate of paediatrics in general, and child abuse paediatricians in particular, is protecting the young, it has become clear to both of us that the current system is not working as it should. 

● Stateline reports on something some in the medical profession are doing about it: 

Some states and hospital systems have updated their policies on drug testing for pregnant women and newborns, aiming to better support patients’ treatment and recovery from substance use disorder and combat racial disparities in testing and reporting. 

● For some more comprehensive ideas, check out this webinar from Pale Blue:

● Responding to a New York Times column by Surgeon General Vivek Murthy about the enormous stress faced by parents, Kathryn Icenhower C.E.O. of SHIELDS for Families, writes a letter to the editor (the second one down when you click on this link) about a major stress Murthy left out: 

Most families experience economic anxiety at some point. For many, it’s passing. But for Black families, economic anxiety is compounded by the justified fear that they are at a higher risk for having their children taken away. That stress can never fully go away. 

● In his Substack column, Play Makes Us Human, Peter Gray discusses what it is that often takes away the human right to play.  It’s what you think. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● Another state is playing a sick game of whack-a-mole with children’s lives.  Responding to horrific abuse in a Rhode Island residential treatment center, did the Rhode Island family police agency finally stop tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in America?  Of course not!  Instead, the Boston Globe reports, they did exactly what we’ve come to expect from family police agencies.  As the Globe explains: 

Dozens of youths and young adults in the state child welfare system are being sent to residential treatment facilities outside of Rhode Island — including some places accused of abuse, neglect, and dysfunction. 

These were the same types of problems that led the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families to stop sending youths to St. Mary’s Home for Children in North Providence last fall — and then remove them entirely in June. 

● In Nevada, the Nevada Independent reports: 

A January legislative audit identified seven care facilities for children that failed to adequately protect those in their care, with complaints ranging from children self-administering medication to substance abuse issues. 

● And KWGS public radio in Tulsa reports that 

A state committee has granted law enforcement leeway to investigate the Department of Human Services after a parent accused the agency of negligence in handling his son’s abuse report. 

Stillwater parent Darrel Dougherty testified before the Oklahoma Legislature’s House Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee on Monday that DHS investigators covered up his son’s abuse while his son was in state custody. DHS staff said Dougherty complained too much and refused to investigate allegations. 

And finally … 

● The University of Pennsylvania has, at long last, disciplined self-proclaimed “race realist” law professor Amy Wax.  What does that have to do with “child welfare”?  Check out this NCCPR Blog post from last year about Wax and some of those in a group allied with her.

NCCPR in the Maine Morning Star: Maine child welfare can become a national model again – if we learn from Logan Marr

Child welfare systems fail all over the country. But what is happening in Maine may be the saddest story of all. 

Over less than a quarter century Maine child welfare went from national scandal to national model to national disgrace. For a few years, Maine was one of the very few places getting child welfare right. But then, thanks to a few demagogic politicians and a case of collective amnesia, Maine threw it all away. ...

Read the full column in the Maine Morning Star

NCCPR in WitnessLA: Don’t shield private foster care agencies from accountability for abuse; the “crisis” facing Foster Family Agencies is an opportunity for real reform

Recent developments in California and New York make it clear: Foster care is now known to be so harmful to children—and there is so much abuse in foster care—that agencies providing it are becoming uninsurable. 

Private foster care agencies are, of course, portraying this matter as a crisis. As a result, they’re seeking various forms of immunity from liability for the horrible things done to some children on their watch. This should not be seen as a crisis that demands the kind of remedies that could eliminate the last vestiges of accountability and deny children justice. Instead, these developments should be seen as an opportunity—a chance to finally make meaningful change in a system that so often destroys children in order to save them ...

Read the full column in WitnessLA