NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 27, 2026

● Who would have thought that one of the most damning indictments of foster care would come from one of the most prominent defenders of tearing apart families? But that’s what happened when Prof. Jill Durerr-Berrick declared that “We don’t know whether [foster care is] a powerful intervention toward the positive or a powerful intervention toward the negative.” So, best case, we’ve been spending decades conducting a massive experiment on human test subjects without their informed consent – all of them children and, of course, disproportionately nonwhite. If a drug company did it, it would be criminal. The full story is in this NCCPR column in Youth Today. 

● I was a guest on the podcast appropriately named “The F Word” discussing the high rates of abuse in foster care, the mountain of evidence documenting the inherent harm to children when torn from their homes, and the perverse financial incentives that oil the child welfare removal machine: 

 

● As for what to do about those awful financial incentives, check out this webinar from United Family Advocates (enter passcode: mEg.$4MM)  on their bipartisan reform plan. If you don’t have time for all of it, be sure to check out the part starting at 51:17 in, which answers those who can't imagine giving up open-ended entitlement funding for tearing apart families – just in case they feel some urgent need to tear apart more families. 

● Kanaiyah Ward was placed in foster care not because her mother abused or neglected her, but because her mother couldn’t handle her behavior problems – and couldn’t afford to buy the help routinely available to affluent families. So she surrendered her child to the family policing system – which dumped her into a hotel where she committed suicide. Now Kanaiyha’s mother has filed a wrongful death suit.  “They killed my child,” Ward told WRC-TV. “Kanaiyah was my only child, and I couldn’t take care of her as a parent and with her condition, so I gave her to the state and they killed her.” 

● Also in Maryland, from WBFF-TV: Still another expose of still another place where Maryland children are institutionalized. 

● Meanwhile in Arizona, which has seen many such exposes, KNXV-TV reports, the head of the state family police agency has finally figured out how to solve the problem of all those foster children who run away from group homes and institutions: Let the group homes and institutions delay telling the cops that the kids are missing! 

● When Congress passed the Family First Act, it was supposed to curb institutionalization of children. But the institutions lobby made sure they got a great big loophole: They could keep scarfing up federal funds as long as they met minimal requirements to become so called Qualified Residential Treatment Programs. The federal Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General decided to see how that was working out in Kentucky. Here’s what they found: 

70 instances of noncompliance in 25 of the 30 children's case files and records that we reviewed, including missing family support group documentation, court approvals, discharge plans, and health records and screenings. 

165 instances of noncompliance across the 15 QRTPs that we reviewed related to requirements for background checks, personnel and training records, written policies, staffing, and physical environment. 

These weaknesses exposed children in Kentucky’s QRTPs to unsafe environments, inadequate care, and unqualified staff, and resulted in $571,306 ($416,009 Federal share) in improper Title IV‑E payments during the placements. 

● Family police agencies just hate it when you call them family police agencies. Good heavens, no! We’re kindly caseworkers who just want to help!  And yet, The Center Square reports, those kindly caseworkers at Georgia’s family police – sorry, child welfare agency spent nearly $1 million on a spy truck  - a specially-equipped Chevrolet Traverse outfitted with the latest high tech spy gear – the kind of stuff generally used by, uh, police departments that are supposed to get, you know, warrants before doing the spying. 

Oh, and those kindly caseworkers paid for their big, fancy specially-equipped spy truck in part with money from the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) – the program that’s supposed to help poor people become self-sufficient. You can read more here about how many states routinely use TANF as a child welfare slush fund. 

● The Guardian tells a story of international adoption in general and adoption of Korean children in particular that is largely ignored amid the treacly features about white savior American parents “rescuing” supposedly abandoned children. From the story: 

In March of 2025, South Korea admitted government responsibility for enabling private adoption agencies to “mass export” Korean children for sale abroad, sometimes without the consent of birth families, since the 1950s. Now, more than 100,000 Korean-born adoptees in the US are asking themselves questions like: “Who am I, really? And how did I get here?” … 

South Korea announced international adoption of its children will end by 2029. … Months before the announcement, Korea’s president, Lee Jae Myung, offered a “heartfelt apology” to adoptees and birth parents for the government’s complicity in allowing agencies to dismantle generations of Korean families so white people could make new ones in the west.

The Guardian tells the stories of what some of those children endured.