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| Bipartisanship in action! In Arizona both parties have failed the state's children |
(This post is adapted from NCCPR’s press release to Arizona media.)
NCCPR has updated its Big CityRate-of-Removal Index, comparing the propensity of America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties, to tear apart families. Once again, the champion for big-city family destruction, metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona.
Children are at greater risk of being torn from everyone they know and love and consigned to the chaos of foster care in Phoenix than in any other of America’s largest cities. It’s a long, ugly tradition.
Year after year, the Department of Child Safety, Arizona’s family police agency (a more accurate term than ‘child welfare’ agency), cuts a swath of destruction through poor families in Phoenix at a vastly higher rate than any other such agency does in any other of America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties.
And while it’s all done in the name of ‘child safety,’ of course, the DCS take-the-child-and-run mentality makes all children less safe. The mentality was revealed to the nation in 2020 when workers in a DCS office thought it would be a laugh riot to wear matching t-shirts emblazoned with the words ‘Professional Kidnapper.’ The workers were fired, but the data show the mentality remains.
NCCPR’s Big City Rate-of-Removal Index compares the number of children thrown into foster care to the impoverished child population in America’s ten largest cities and their surrounding counties. Maricopa County (metropolitan Phoenix) is an extreme outlier. Children are taken from their parents in Maricopa County at a rate:
● 50% percent higher than the second-worst region – Santa
Clara County.
● More than 60% higher than the third worst, Los Angeles
County.
● Nearly two-and-a-half times the national average for big
cities.
● More than triple the rate of New York City.
● Nearly six times the rate of Chicago.
There is no evidence that Phoenix is a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than any other big city in America. Rather, this is evidence of a take-the-child-and-run mentality, rooted in racial and class bias, that has plagued child welfare in Arizona for decades.
The problem is compounded by Arizona’s overreliance on the worst, and most dangerous, form of care – group homes and institutions. Arizona institutionalizes 41% of children entering foster care, a rate more than two-and-a-half times the national average.
You may be sure that DCS will respond to the facts about its abysmal performance with the Big Lie of American child welfare: the false claim that child removal equals child safety.
But the Big Lie ignores:
● The mass of research showing that, in typical cases, not the horror
stories, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than
comparably-maltreated children thrown into foster care. That research includes a
stunning recent study showing that, under these circumstances, by age 20, the
foster children were more than four times more likely to die.
● The mass of research showing high rates of abuse in foster homes and
even higher rates of abuse in group homes and institutions – all those news
accounts about the horrors of Arizona group homes and institutions are not
aberrations.
● The mass of research showing that poverty is routinely
confused with neglect. The research is confirmed by data from Arizona, where, in 87% of cases in which
children were thrown into foster care, there was not even an accusation of
sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In fact, Arizona took away more
children because of inadequate housing than for physical and sexual abuse
combined. In 62% there was not even an accusation of any form of drug or
alcohol abuse – not just no accusation of meth or fentanyl, no accusation of
any drug or alcohol abuse of any kind.
All this does enormous harm to the children needlessly taken – and also
to those who might be spared foster care but still face the enormous trauma of
a child abuse investigation – which involves a traumatic interrogation and, sometimes,
a stripsearch. Almost always, this trauma is inflicted as a result
of a false report or a poverty case. Nationwide, more than half of all Black
children will be forced to endure this trauma at some point in their
childhoods. But Arizona is different. In Arizona, it’s two-thirds.
But these aren’t the only children harmed. All the time, money and
effort wasted harming children in these cases is, in effect, stolen from
finding the relatively few children in real danger. That’s almost always the
real reason such children are overlooked, leading to the horror stories that,
rightly, make headlines. That’s how the Arizona approach makes all children
less safe.
Actions by Gov. Katie Hobbs have compounded the problems. These actions
include:
● Giving a giant rate increase to a politically-connected group home
operator.
● Giving a giant pay raise to foster parents – and, in effect, making poor people
pay for it.
● Taking away support for the least harmful form of foster
care, kinship foster care, in which children are placed with extended family.
But the governor’s political opponents have no cause to gloat. In a rare
example of bipartisanship, governors and legislators from both parties have
been failing Arizona’s vulnerable children for decades, something we documented
in a report we released on Arizona child welfare in 2007.
It doesn’t have to be that way. In other states, lawmakers and state
leaders have worked across party lines to curb needless removal and make all
children safer. In Texas, for example, with strong bipartisan support,
lawmakers raised the threshold for coercive intervention into families. In New
York and New Jersey, governments bolstered high-quality legal defense for
families – not to get “bad parents” off but to craft alternatives to the
cookie-cutter ‘service plans’ churned out by agencies like DCS. For more
solutions, see NCCPR’s Due
Process Agenda and for more examples of strong legislation see the NCCPR Good Bill Bank. Together,
these bills and other solutions create a true blueprint for child safety.
They represent ways Arizona could turn its system around and make all children safer. All it needs is the will to finally renounce the take-the-child-and-run mentality that has made all of the state’s children less safe.
