The Rhode Island approach to Child Welfare: Throw away the money, throw away the kids!

The Rhode Island family police agency wants to spend up to $26 million 
to buy and renovate a residential treatment center that closed after revelations 
of widespread abuse. At the time, a state lawmaker said she could tell things 
were getting better because "I could smell the Pine-Sol

The state family police agency plans to spend up to $26 million to buy and renovate the notorious "House of Pine-Sol" RTC

Here’s what the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families wants to do with the now-closed hellhole institution known as St Mary’s Home for Children (or as it should be known, for reasons discussed below, the House of Pine-Sol):

 Spend $760,000 to buy what would have been a privately-run residential treatment center. Spend up to another $25 million to renovate the entire place and fix environmental problems.  Use only three of the seven buildings on the eight-acre site. Warehouse 16 girls there. 

(If you’re wondering why 16? It’s because large institutions are so inherently harmful that if more than 16 children are in one at any given time, the federal Medicaid program won’t pick up part of the very expensive tab.) 

And those are just the renovation costs. When it was privately run, DCYF was paying the operators more than $1,000 per day per child!

Apparently, no one in DCYF can think of a better way to spend all that money. This also helps explain why Rhode Island spends on “child welfare” at the highest rate in America, well over triple the national average  -while getting such dismal results. 

Rhode Island lawmakers haven’t shown much concern for the kids (or maybe they just don’t understand what’s best for children and won’t do what it takes to learn). But might they at least rebel at the cost to taxpayers? Nah. We already know that some Rhode Island lawmakers are pretty easy to fool. 

Look what happened after first the state’s Office of Child Advocate and then the Boston Globe exposed the extent to which St. Mary’s was rife with abuse. As we wrote on this blog in February 2024:

After her definitely-not-a-surprise inspection, Rep. Patricia  Serpa says things are soooooo much better now!  How does she know?  She told WPRI-TV: 

“What I saw today was encouraging.  The facility is clean. I could smell the Pine-Sol, I could smell the fresh paint. The kids’ rooms were kids’ rooms — they were messy, but an organized messy.” 

Of course!  Everyone knows children are never abused in rooms that smell of Pine-Sol!  And who would ever want to run from a room that was freshly painted?   (Where was Serpa expecting to see kids stay – in dungeons?)  

[DCYF Director Ashley] Deckert took the tour too. Deckert, more than any other individual, has a vested interest in downplaying any problems at the places where her agency institutionalizes children.  And sure enough, she called the progress “tremendous.” She, too, made a point of saying the place “smells nice.”

But in the end, St. Mary’s couldn’t pass the smell test. After DCYF stopped parking children there, the place had to close.

So what lesson did DCYF learn from this? We’ll buy the place and run it ourselves!

The rationale is the one you’ve heard a million times before – and it’s still BS: Some children have such severe problems they simply can’t stay in a home. They have to be in a residential treatment center – but this will be better because we’ll call it a psychiatric residential treatment center – and now, Rhode Island doesn’t have any of those.

That’s supposedly why so many children are being sent to RTCs out of state.

But the real reason Rhode Island sends all those kids out of state is that Rhode Island tears apart families at a rate more than 80% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

Of all the Rhode Island children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in 2024, 80% percent did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 65% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” 

Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back home, and Rhode Island will have plenty of room in good, safe family foster homes for all the children who really need them. As for those children who supposedly can’t live in a home: They can – if you provide intensive wraparound services to the family or the foster family. That’s an intervention proven to work – as opposed to residential treatment, which, even when the institutions aren’t hellholes, has been proven time and time again to fail. 

Wraparound also is far less expensive than residential treatment. You can buy a whole lot of it for $26 million – which apparently is readily at hand at DCYF. 

As for what might be done with the St. Mary’s campus: 

In 2024, Rhode Island threw more children into foster care because of inadequate housing than because of physical and sexual abuse combined. So how about renovating the place and using all seven buildings for housing for families that might otherwise lose their children to foster care, .  with some other agency – not DCYF – in charge of it.  Or, it might be used for a residential program that really can work: inpatient drug treatment where parents are allowed to stay with their children. 

Just don’t forget to keep a little extra money around for Pine-Sol.

The “logic” behind America’s massive child welfare surveillance state is the equivalent of a house of cards. Thanks to a new study, it just collapsed.

KEY POINTS 

● For decades, we were told we have to take away more children to stop child abuse deaths. If you dare take fewer, it was claimed, then more children will die.  

● A study of 3.4 million records over 13 years finds it’s not true. The study concludes: “Child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates.” 

● In other words, huge numbers of children, whom family police agencies rushed to tear from their homes because supposedly it would reduce fatalities, suffered all the harm of needless foster care for nothing. 

● The very fact that this finding will surprise many is a testament to the success of the child welfare establishment in using “health terrorism” to craft a false narrative. 

● The finding is all-the-more alarming in light of another recent study, from Sweden, showing that children placed in foster care are more than four times more likely to die by age 20 than even comparably-maltreated children left in their own homes. The most common cause of death: suicide; suggesting that much of the problem is related to the inherent trauma of removal.

 Consider once again the sheer size of America’s child welfare surveillance state – and all the misery it inflicts in the name of “child protection.” 

More than one-third of all children, and more than half of Black children, will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation – and make no mistake, the trauma often is huge – before they are 18. In some cases, the investigation is necessary – but overwhelmingly, the allegations are false and/or confuse poverty with neglect. 

Based on numbers from recent years, it is likely that more than 170,000 children will be torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care in 2026. Half a million children are likely to spend some time in foster care this year. As anyone who remembers the cries of children separated at the border knows, no matter who does it and no matter what the reason, this is one of the worst traumas anyone can inflict on a child. 

In a small number of horror story cases, it’s necessary because even this trauma is less than the trauma of remaining in a horror story home. But nationwide in 2024, in 78% of cases, children were thrown into foster care where there was not even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In 60% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse – not just no allegation of running a meth lab or overdosing on fentanyl, no allegation of any use of any drug.  

The creation of this omnipresent surveillance state was not the result of any systematic study to determine what would work. Rather, it is the result of “health terrorism” – that’s not my term, it comes from a group that admits to having practiced it for decades. It’s simple enough: Take the worst horror stories, stories of sadists and brutes who torture, rape and murder children. Then lead us to believe that all or most cases are like that. Then demand that ever more families be surveilled and ever more children be taken. 

If you don’t agree with that approach, they say, then you must not care if children die. Because if we don’t take more children, they imply, that’s exactly what will happen. 

In the more than five decades since this system began, nobody ever actually stopped to check and see if this was true. Nobody asked: If we keep taking more kids, will fewer die? Nobody asked: If we take fewer kids, will that lead to more deaths? 

Until now. And it turns out the answer is no. The “logic” behind America’s massive child welfare surveillance state is the equivalent of a house of cards. It just collapsed. 

A study just published in the authoritative JAMA Network Open examined 3.4 million records of children in foster care from 2010 to 2023 and 24,108 fatalities that states attributed to child abuse or neglect. The result might best be described as a clear pattern – of no pattern. Or as the authors put it: 

“Child maltreatment mortality rates did not appear to decrease with higher foster care entry rates or increase with decreasing foster care entry rates.” 

It’s not just that correlation is not causation – there’s not even a correlation. 

The authors don’t offer any suggestions concerning why there’s no correlation. I will suggest one  possibility: 

Every child abuse death is the worst imaginable tragedy. They also are as rare as they are horrific. Even if you take the officially reported figure for child abuse deaths in a year – 2000- and double it, then compare it to the total child population, that still means that in any given year 99.995% of children will not die of child abuse. The odds of finding an impurity in Ivory Soap are greater than the odds that a child will die of abuse or neglect in the United States this year. 

Here’s how that looks on a pie chart:

 

Can’t see the part with the 0.005%? That’s the point. The line is really there (look very closely at about 3 O’Clock) but child abuse fatalities are needles in a giant haystack. 

So if you react to a horrible child abuse tragedy by making the haystack even bigger; suddenly sweeping a whole lot more children into foster care, the odds are extremely low that you’ll actually happen to sweep up a child who otherwise might die. The odds are excellent that you will expose many more children to the trauma – and worse – of needless foster care. 

And that’s where another recent study comes in. This one, from Sweden, is the latest in a long line of studies, the others almost all from North America, which compare what happens in typical cases – not the horror stories. Over and over, they find that, in these typical cases, children left in their own homes fare better on all sorts of measures even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. 

The latest study found the children left in their own homes fared better on the most important measure of all: surviving until adulthood.  The foster children were more than four times more likely to die by age 20. The major cause of death: suicide, which would appear to say something about the enormous trauma inherent in removal. 

So consider the implications of these two studies together: 

● Taking away more children will not reduce child abuse deaths.

● But the additional children taken will be a lot more likely to die by age 20 than if they were left in their own homes.

And then there’s that whole other set of studies showing horribly high rates of abuse in foster care itself. Indeed, when child welfare agencies react to tragedies by rushing to take away more children – foster-care panics -- the odds of a child needlessly taken being abused in foster care itself are far greater than the odds that the agency will happen to find a child who otherwise would die. 

This also explains another study finding: The researchers accounted for the claim that the number of child abuse deaths is understated. The authors ran a series of simulations. They simulated under-reporting of fatalities, assuming that as many as 75% of all deaths weren’t reported, and found even that wouldn’t change the result. 

What do we do instead? 

This doesn’t mean we give up. The only acceptable goal for child abuse fatalities is zero; we strive for it even as we know our reach always will exceed our grasp. But bringing us closer to that goal requires rejecting the false narrative of health terrorism that’s only led us farther from it. 

Instead, we start with a laser focus on ameliorating the worst effects of poverty. Study after study finds even small amounts of cash can go a long way.  And not just in curbing “neglect.” Remember the COVID pandemic when the health terrorists predicted a “pandemic of child abuse” because all those overwhelmingly middle-class, disproportionately white professionals didn’t have their eyes on children who are neither? Instead, the family police were forced to step back, community-based, community-run mutual aid organizations stepped up, and the federal government stepped in with no-strings-attached cash. The result, even severe child abuse declined. 

Yes, but what about when the problem isn’t poverty “alone”? Then the solution often still is money – so poor families can buy the help they need with those other problems, the same way middle-class families do, instead of forcing their children to endure the trauma of being confiscated by the state. 

Other solutions involve making the haystack smaller instead of bigger: These include replacing mandatory reporting with permissive reporting, leaving professionals free to exercise their professional judgments instead of flooding the system with false reports, and narrowing definitions of neglect, which often are definitions of poverty. 

All of this needs to be enforced – and that requires high-quality legal representation for families from the moment the family police are at the door. No, it’s not to get “bad parents” off; it’s to provide alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” often churned out by family police agencies. It’s been proven to reduce foster care with no compromise of safety. 

More details concerning these and other solutions can be found in the solutions section at www.nccpr.org 

But here’s step one: The health terrorists misled us for decades. Don’t let them do it again.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, weeks ending January 2, 2026

● This first item made it into our “Year-in-Review” last week, but in case nobody read that far down: 

Just as the year was ending, families in New York won a huge victory when Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a bill that replaces anonymous reporting with confidential reporting. The accused still doesn’t get to know who called the child abuse hotline, but the hotline and local caseworkers need to know – in order to discourage false reports by ex-spouses, angry neighbors, landlords or anyone else abusing the process to carry out a grudge. 

amNY has a particularly good story about the law. The Imprint also has a story about the signing. So does the New York Daily News. And before it passed: ProPublica published a good story on the bill. Also: there was an excellent editorial from the Syracuse Post-Standard, a superb commentary in The Imprint, from Prof. Dale Margolin Cecka, Director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, and another outstanding commentary from the lawyers who regularly represent children in these cases, concerning why this law is needed – and why 48 states and D.C. should follow New York and Texas in enacting such laws. 

● The Reason Foundation is the latest to explore the harm done when families are needlessly torn apart because of housing.  From their analysis: 

To improve child safety outcomes, eviction and homelessness should not be treated as proxies for parental failure. Stable housing is not a secondary concern but a foundational condition for family stability and child well-being. When families secure stable housing, children are more likely to remain safely in their homes, child welfare systems avoid unnecessary interventions, and communities reduce the fiscal and social costs associated with family separation. If the core objective is child safety, policy should prioritize measures that establish stability upstream rather than escalating surveillance or interventions that increase the risk of removal. 

● New Hampshire Public Radio reports that under a new law children in child welfare hearings in that state will get a lawyer charged with advocating for what the child actually wants. That’s not because a child necessarily should get that outcome. But the only way to know what’s best is if all parties have someone making the best possible case for their preferred outcome.  Until now, children in New Hampshire have gotten only a guardian ad litem or, worse, a CASA. They advocate for what they think is best for the child. If the child disagrees s/he is effectively silenced. 

● The Imprint reports on a hearing during which the head of Georgia’s family police agency was questioned about the severe cuts to services to help families stay together. 

Multiple providers testified about the immediate impacts of the restrictions: Children are no longer visiting their parents. Parents are not getting needed assessments required by their court-approved case plan. Working foster parents are losing resources they were promised to help them care for the highest-need children. 

● The Imprint also reports on how, for the usual despicable reasons, the Trump Administration has terminated a series of grants to agencies that help families, including Rise, which gives voice, and provides help, to families caught in the family policing net. From the story: 

“The saddest part is letting staff go during the holiday season with no advance notice,” said Jeanette Vega, executive director of Rise, which received a $1.5 million grant for a peer care initiative. “And we have to turn away families who need our support as we do not have the finances to purchase family basic needs after we promised supporting them before the holidays.” 

● NBC News has two stories on the harm done to families by misdiagnoses of so-called shaken baby syndrome. 

● CT Mirror reports on the progress Connecticut has made in increasing the use of the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care. Much of that progress was a result of the work of a former director of the state child welfare agency, Joette Katz. 

● In The Imprint, Mike Leach, former head of South Carolina’s child welfare agency writes about still another little-known way the system hurts the children it was meant to help. Federal law mandates volunteer citizen review boards review individual cases and make recommendations. Here’s how it works in practice: 

[B]ias and misunderstanding manifest in board recommendations. Families, especially those navigating poverty, are often judged harshly for missed visits or slow progress on case plans. A parent working double shifts at Waffle House to keep the lights on might be labeled “uninvolved.” A grandmother caring for multiple grandchildren on a fixed income may be called “unstable.” 

Volunteers who serve on these boards are, in my experience,  often from a higher socioeconomic level than the families whose cases they oversee and, as a result, may lack an understanding of the barriers to case plan compliance those families face. Poverty is not neglect, but when oversight lacks context, the system treats it that way. 

Youth who have attended these reviews have described them to me as cold and humiliating: strangers reading files aloud, offering opinions without real conversation or relational understanding. That is not accountability. It is surveillance without compassion. 

● Also in The Imprint, Sarah Winograd of Together With Families, offers lessons on how to keep families together by giving them what they really need, instead of what makes the helpers feel good: 

People often ask how to build a program that helps families experiencing a crisis. They usually want a model, a toolkit or a checklist. We learned quickly that the work does not function that way. 

Families do not fail programs. Programs fail families when they cannot adapt.

What helps one family stabilize today may be irrelevant six months from now. Effective prevention work is not a fixed model that can be copied and pasted. It is a living approach that must remain responsive to the people it serves. 

Flexibility is not optional. It is foundational. 

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

From County 10, Wyoming: 

Governor Mark Gordon announced today, December 29, his support for rescinding a 2014 National Adoption Excellence Award granted to Steve and Kristine Marler of Casper. Steve Marler was convicted in 2025 of 11 counts of child abuse of minors, five counts of misdemeanor battery, and one count of child endangerment. 

He was also sentenced to a minimum of 128 years on eight felony counts for sexually abusing two girls under his foster or adoptive care and for sexual abuse and battery of foster children. 

● A story from Honolulu Civil Beat includes this chilling reminder: 

In at least five recent cases, children died in homes where they were placed by the state and Family Court and at some point subject to supervision by CWS caseworkers. In two of these, CWS either admits or relatives allege there had been earlier reports of maltreatment.

 And finally …

 ● If you missed it over the holidays, here’s our Year-in-Review for 2025

 ● And NCCPR starts the new year with an updated website. Check it out!