Cutting through the spin about predictive analytics in child welfare

The Scarlet Number: Allegheny County (metropolitan Pittsburgh) has been
trying to slap a "risk score" on every child at birth. The score could haunt
them their entire lives.

In Allegheny County, Pa., even the county’s hand-picked ethics reviewers had reservations about the county’s Orwellian “Hello Baby” algorithm.  A key feature of the program flunked one reviewer’s ethics test. 

Second of two parts.  Read part one here.

Yesterday’s post to this blog discussed the amazing good fortune of Emily Putnam-Hornstein, America’s foremost evangelist for using “predictive analytics” to advise family policing agencies concerning everything from who should get “preventive services” to which children should be torn from their parents’ arms. (Another term for this is “predictive risk modeling” (PRM), but a better term than either is computerized racial profiling.) 

It seems that whenever Putnam-Hornstein co-authors an algorithm, the people chosen to do an “independent” ethics review are predisposed to favor it.  At a minimum, they seem to be ideological soulmates.  Sometimes they’ve co-authored papers with Putnam-Hornstein herself or with someone who wrote an algorithm with her. 

But even with the deck so stacked, in one case the ethics reviews offered some strong cautions–including suggesting that a key part of the program for which the algorithm would be used is unethical.  Though generally the reviews were favorable, the reviewers’ concerns were so serious that the agency that commissioned the reviews, the Allegheny County, Pa., Department of Human Services, went to great lengths to spin the results and direct readers toward the spin instead of the reviews themselves.  

The algorithm in question is the second of two in use in Allegheny County. 

The first, the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) stamps an invisible “scarlet number” risk score on every child who is the subject of a neglect allegation screened by the county’s child abuse hotline.  The higher the score, the greater the supposed risk.  Even though the ethics review for that one was co-authored by a faculty colleague of one of the creators of the algorithm, it cautioned that one reason AFST is ethical is that it does not attempt to stamp the scarlet number on every child at birth – something known as “universal-level risk stratification.” 

This is so Orwellian that even other family policing agencies can’t stomach it.  As noted in yesterday’s post, about Putnam-Hornstein’s work in California, the California Department of Social Services declared that 

The Department believes that “universal-level risk stratification” is unethical and has no intention to use it now or in the future. Identifying and proactively targeting services to families with no [child welfare services] involvement is a violation of families’ privacy and their rights to parent as they see fit. This would be an overreach in the roles and responsibilities of a government agency. 

So when Allegheny County decided that, ethics-be-damned, it wanted an algorithm to do exactly what appalled their counterparts in California, and exactly what their own prior ethics review implied would be unethical, the solution was obvious: Commission another ethics review! 

In fact, they commissioned two (or maybe three) – one of them from an ideological soulmate of the co-author of both Allegheny County algorithms -- Putnam-Hornstein.  

Sure enough, the county got much of what it wanted.  But the reviews displayed far more nuance than the county apparently expected, going into detail about serious problems with this approach, even as they claimed these obstacles could be overcome. 

So the county went into full spin mode.  In 2019, its first publication about the new algorithm, part of a program called “Hello Baby” merely declared that the ethics reviews existed, implying that Hello Baby got a seal of approval – but with no link to the documents themselves. 

A year later, the county put out its own summary of the ethics reviews. Although at last the actual reviews were posted online, there were no links from the county’s summary – and the reviews remain harder to find.  As we noted in our previous post, it’s sort of like the way Donald Trump’s attorney general, Willam Barr, handled the Mueller report.  In the case of the Allegheny County algorithm, the gap between the actual documents and the spin isn’t as wide – but it still tells an interesting story. 

So let’s look closely at the parts of those reviews that Allegheny County, and Putnam-Hornstein, probably least want you to notice. 

● The first thing to notice is that one of the two published reviews may never have been completed. It’s labeled a draft. 

● The second thing to notice is that the draft refers to itself as “one out of three perspectives from cross-disciplinary researchers looking different aspects of the risk-scoring system that Allegheny County plans to deploy.” [Emphasis added.]  But the county has only published two, and only ever refers to two.  What happened to the third? UPDATE, FEB. 22: Responding to an email query from NCCPR, Erin Dalton, director of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services, says there were only two ethics reviews. She said the draft may have been referring to a separate review of methodology and data science.

The other published ethics review strongly suggests a key feature of  Hello Baby – the fact that you’re in it unless you remember to opt-out – is unethical.  The review sets criteria for such a feature to be ethical. Hello Baby doesn’t meet the criteria. 

Selling Hello Baby 

There are two key selling points for Hello Baby: One, it’s supposedly a purely voluntary program, two, the vast troves of data will be used only for targeting prevention.  We’ll start with the second. 

Child abuse investigations are run by another division of the same agency that oversees Hello Baby.  Both divisions of this same agency are ultimately overseen by Erin Dalton, who is as nonchalant about the harm of foster care as she is fanatical in her desire to vacuum up data about poor people.  Nevertheless, Dalton’s agency publicly promises that child abuse investigators won’t see the Hello Baby risk scores or other data from that program. 

One of the ethics reviewers, Prof. Michael Veale of University College, London, saw the problem. It turns out, there’s even a name for it: Function Creep.  He writes: 

One underlying anxiety concerning predictive systems in the public sector is that by virtue of being created for one task, they establish an infrastructure consisting of many aspects—including data, technology, expertise and culture—which might expand beyond its original scope into areas its original democratic and societal mandate did not permit. …

Some will be concerned that while [using the Hello Baby risk score only for prevention] might be the policy today, it might not be robust to change in the future. Similarly, those who might have lost trust in a public service more generally might not trust assurances that this inferred data is deleted or not passed onto other actors in the system. 

Veale suggests that the county come up with 

some legally binding declaration … delimiting the purposes of this system in advance to a sufficiently narrow scope and set of actors. This agreement would then serve as a mechanism that could be used to hold future uses of this model to account—at least insofar as it would have to be actively and ideally publicly removed before the purposes of a score or a model could change. 

This appears based on the naïve assumption that, were Allegheny County to want to use Hello Baby for child abuse investigations, the shame of having to go public might be a deterrent. 

On the contrary, when – not if, because it’s going to happen – the data are used to decide who to investigate as a potential child abuser and when to take their children it will be done with pride and fanfare.  Because here’s how it will happen: 

A three-year-old boy, call him Jason, is killed by his father.  Jason was “known to the system,” a previous allegation had been deemed unfounded.  Somebody leaks the fact that Jason’s father had a high risk score using Hello Baby.  The caseworker who investigated the father gives a tearful television interview in which she says: “If only I’d known that Hello Baby thought he was high risk, I never would have left the child in that home.” 

At that point three things happen: 

● A member of the Pennsylvania Legislature introduces “Jason’s Law,” a bill requiring that information from Hello Baby and anything else in the state like it be fully shared with child protective services.  He calls it “Jason’s Law” of course. 

● Erin Dalton or her successor calls a news conference and declares that the Allegheny County Department of Human Services isn’t about to wait for the legislature – they’re ordering full information sharing right now!  

● There are warnings that algorithms that predict terrible harm will come to a child, including AFST, have a record of being wrong more than 95% of the time  - potentially flooding the system with “false positives” that do enormous harm to innocent families and make it harder to find the few children in real danger.  The warnings are ignored. 

A pinky swear is not enough. 

Having raised an urgent concern, Veale comes up with a solution that has all the enforceability of a pinky swear – or maybe something more like this: 

 

There’s still another danger.  Anyone Hello Baby labels high-risk will be offered a series of services not offered to anyone else.  At the highest alleged level of risk, the program calls it “relentless engagement.”  Therefore, the service provider, who will be regularly coming into the home to engage relentlessly will know from day one that a high-tech algorithm has branded these parents high risk for abusing their children.  That service provider almost always will be a mandated reporter, required to report any suspicion of child abuse and neglect (and in Pennsylvania, the training curriculum is fanatical about urging reporters to report! Report! Report!) 

So even the other ethics reviewer, Deborah Daro, a Senior Research Fellow at Chapin Hall, and an ideological soulmate of Putnam-Hornstein expressed concern about this.  She writes: 

All home visitors report a proportion of their participants to child protective services. … The [Predictive Risk Model] gives service providers additional information on a family’s history that may alter the way workers interpret the conditions they do observe. Even if the exact details regarding a family’s history is [sic] not provided to program staff or other providers, the fact parents have been identified through the PRM as being at high-risk will convey a general profile of concerns. As such, key  implementation questions for the county to address include: 

• How might knowledge of a family’s prior history with the child welfare and justice systems impact a provider’s judgment regarding current relationships in the home and the ability of other caretakers (particularly the father) to appropriately care for the infant? 

• How does this knowledge impact how providers might interpret a mother’s actions – will they be less forgiving of minor concerns they observe? 

• Will knowledge of a family’s history increase the likelihood a provider will report the family to child welfare as a potential risk for maltreatment if the family drops out or refuses additional program services? … 

Heightened awareness of a family’s circumstances may create surveillance bias, resulting in a higher probability of a family being reported. Providers will know more about a family and will need to weigh this knowledge against a family’s willingness or reluctance to remain in the program. 

Notice Daro’s own bias here.  Allegheny County brags that all services provided under
Hello Baby are purely voluntary and families are free to drop out at any time.  But Daro seems to think exercising that right is still another reason for heightened suspicion. 

Having raised the surveillance bias issue, Daro then cops out, suggesting the same failed solution that proponents of the child welfare surveillance state fall back on whenever the harm they do comes to light: We’ll fix it with more “training.” 

Defining “voluntary” 

Another key element of the selling of Hello Baby is the claim that it’s purely voluntary.  Technically yes, but you’d better be very sharp and wide awake during the first days and hours of your baby’s life to avoid being forced into the program – and isn’t everyone wide awake and able to absorb everything during that time? 

Because Hello Baby forces you in, unless you affirmatively opt out.  And you get only two chances to opt out.  The first chance is while you and your newborn are still in the hospital.  Amidst everyone else coming and going and handing you forms and discharge papers and God-knows-what else, you are given an information packet selling Hello Baby that also tells you how to opt out.  The second, and last, chance comes in the form of a postcard sent to your home – it’s not clear when, but presumably very soon after coming home with your baby.  You have to mail it back.  Miss those chances and Allegheny County has free reign to dig up all the electronic dirt on you that is called for in the algorithm and slap a risk score on you and your baby.  The score can follow you, and your child, forever. 

Oh, you can drop out of any services offered under the program at any time – though, as noted above that might prompt the service “provider” to call the child abuse hotline on you – but you never again get a chance to opt out of data collection or make them delete the data they’ve already gathered. 

Here’s what Daro writes about when this approach, called “passive consent,” is ethical and when it is not: 

This approach is considered appropriate only if the intervention or strategy involves minimal risk to the participant and if obtaining written approval for the procedure is not practical or feasible. [Emphasis added.] It is not clear if this approach has already been approved by the county’s Institutional Review Board. If it has, then the approach has been judged appropriate in this instance. If it has not, the county will need to make the case as to why it is not asking parents to “opt in” for the screen. 

It is just as “practical and feasible” to presume someone is not in the program until they check a box saying they’re in, as it is to presume they’re in until they check a box that says they’re out.  So by Daro’s own criteria, this key aspect of Hello Baby is unethical. 

And the county’s response illustrates perfectly why putting all this data power in their hands is so dangerous. They respond that: 

The “passive consent” is only for running the PRM, which commits clients to nothing. 

After all, the county continues, families still don’t have to accept the “services.”  But, of course, allowing the county to run the PRM commits the family to surrendering vast amounts of personal data that can then be turned against them at any time. That’s hardly nothing. 

As for Daro’s stipulation that this aspect of Hello Baby should be approved by the county’s Institutional Review Board, the Allegheny County Department of Human Services replied: 

Allegheny County does not have an institutional review board.

Predictive analytics in child welfare: The selling of Hello Baby

If the Orwellian predictive analytics model in Allegheny County is really so great, why does the county’s human services director have to obfuscate about what it is and how it works?

 Read between the lines in some of the comments of those supporting Allegheny County’s Orwellian use of “predictive analytics” in child welfare – now including a plan to try to label every baby with a “risk score” at birth -- and you find something that boils down to this:  Well, yes, it’s potentially dangerous, but we trust Marc Cherna.  Cherna is the longtime director of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services.  

The sentiment is understandable.  Cherna has held the job since 1997.  I served on a search committee that unanimously recommended him.  For a long time I was proud of that. Cherna built an impressive record as a reformer, curbing the number of children in foster care and becoming a leader in the use of kinship foster care, among other accomplishments.  That built him a reservoir of goodwill.

But there are two principal problems with the “trust Marc” argument. First, Marc won’t be there forever.  And second, the way he is selling the program undermines trust.

It’s not the embrace of predictive analytics that raises questions about trust. There are other good, honorable child welfare system leaders who support it (though it appears that most of the leading proponents also are the most extreme supporters of a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare).  The trust questions arise because of how the county has sought to sell the first predictive analytics program, the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), which is used to help decide when to investigate reports alleging child neglect, and the even worse “Hello Baby” program – the one that seeks to slap that risk score on every newborn in the county.

The problems with the sales job are apparent in an article Cherna wrote for the Department of Health and Human Services publication Children’s Bureau Express.

Compare the rhetoric to reality

Cherna writes that the program is “supported by the use of integrated data and a predictive risk model…”  That’s it; there’s no further explanation.  In fact, the “predictive risk model” is the lynchpin of Hello Baby – the whole thing collapses without it.

Under that model, vast amounts of  data are collected, most of it from systems that enmesh primarily poor people. Then the system coughs up a “risk score” for the newborn based on how their parents have interacted with those systems.   Cherna promises that the risk score will be used only to target prevention programs. Those with the highest risk scores will get the most intensive “help.”  But there is nothing to stop Cherna, or his successor, from using the data in any other way they choose. We just have to trust them.

Cherna writes that “Hello Baby is a program of DHS's Office of Community Services and is not connected with child protective services.”  He neglects two key points:

● The helpers – who are being sent into a home precisely because an algorithm says the baby is at high risk of child abuse -- also are mandated reporters of child abuse. 

● The person in charge of both the Office of Community Services and child protective services is – Marc Cherna. He, or a successor or a successor’s successor, are free to tear down that wall of separation.

Cherna writes that the program is “voluntary.”  Technically, yes.  But when most people think of voluntary, they think of something that is offered to them and they then choose whether to take part.  Hello Baby doesn’t work that way.  Hello Baby assumes that you have agreed to surrender your data and have your baby labeled with a risk score at birth unless you affirmatively opt-out.  And it is unclear how much chance you have to do that.

So ask yourself: If Hello Baby is so great, why do they have to, in effect, sneak it past the very people its proponents say are most likely to benefit, instead of being open and aboveboard about exactly what it is, and letting people opt in if they really want it?  If it’s as wonderful as Cherna says, people should be lining up to take part.

Cherna goes on to tout the “ethical analyses” done of Hello Baby.  But he doesn’t mention how the county has stacked the deck for such analyses from the start. 

The first “ethics review” done for the AFST program, was a once-over-lightly review of a few papers, all of which were written by one of the designers of AFST or by one of the “reviewers” himself.   That reviewer is a faculty colleague of one of the AFST designers – in fact, they’ve co-authored papers together.

Even that review said AFST was ethical, in part, because it was triggered only if someone called the child abuse hotline and alleged maltreatment.  They wrote:

[The issue of informed consent] is one of a number of points at which we think that it is ethically significant that the AFST will provide risk assessment in response to a call to the call center, rather than at the birth of every child. [Emphasis added.]

So, now that Cherna is rolling out a use of analytics that does just that, what to do? First, call it “voluntary” by, as noted above, stretching the meaning of that word almost to the breaking point.  Then, commission more ethics reviews!  But make sure they’re from people strongly predisposed to support Hello Baby or apparently unfamiliar with child welfare.

All of which leaves one question: Should we be comfortable giving so much data and so much power to use that data to an agency that sells the program this way?

Pittsburgh’s child welfare agency goes full Orwell

Starting in 2020, Allegheny County, Pa. will attempt to, in effect, stamp EVERY
child born in the county with a "scarlet number" risk score that could haunt
the child and her or his family for life.

KEY POINTS 

● They’re moving ahead with plans to try to label EVERY child born in the county with a predictive analytics risk score that could haunt the child for life.

● To avoid the stigma, parents have to affirmatively opt out. If they opt out, they lose out on help for their newborns. But there may be even bigger risks if they stay in.

● The county’s first “ethics review” found that its use of algorithms was ethical in part because it wouldn’t be applied to all children at birth.  The county solved this little problem by commissioning another ethics review.

● County officials promise this label-every-child-at-birth algorithm will be used only to target prevention. That’s absolutely true – until it isn’t.  Because this promise relies exclusively on self-policing by the same county officials who created this nightmare in the first place.

● And an algorithm isn’t needed to target prevention programs.

It is perhaps the ultimate Orwellian nightmare: From the moment your child is born, the child and family are labeled with a “risk score” – a number that supposedly tells authorities how likely you are to abuse your newborn.  The big government agency that slaps this invisible scarlet number on you and your newborn promises it will be used only to decide if you need extra help to raise your child, and the help will be voluntary. 

But once you’re in the database, that score stays there forever. And if, someday, the same big government agency wants to use the score to help decide you’re too much of a risk to be allowed to keep your child, there is nothing to stop them.  The scarlet number may haunt your family for generations. The fact that your child was supposedly born into a “high risk” family may be used against the child when s/he has children.

Welcome to the dystopian future of child welfare – and childbirth – in metropolitan Pittsburgh, Pa.

For a couple of years now, Allegheny County,  which includes Pittsburgh and surrounding suburbs, has been using something called the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), a predictive analytics algorithm, to help decide which families should be investigated as alleged child abusers.

Back when Facebook was fined, we pointed out the similarities
to how Allegheny County's child protective services agency
uses data.

The algorithm coughs up a “risk score” – an invisible scarlet number. The higher the number the greater the supposed risk.  It’s all made possible by a massive trove of data on families that Allegheny County has gathered in a way reminiscent of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Though Allegheny County’s behavior is perfectly legal, it has amassed the without the informed consent of the poor people in the database to have the data turned against them.

The algorithm is weighted heavily toward punishing parents for being poor. In her brilliant book, Automating Inequality, Prof. Virginia Eubanks calls it “poverty profiling.”   In her review of Automating Inequality, Prof. Dorothy Roberts (a member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors) extends the analysis to show how predictive analytics reinforces racial bias.

To justify all this, the county submitted its plans to a couple of scholars for an “ethics review.”  But one of the reviewers is a faculty colleague and co-author of papers with one of the creators of the algorithm.  Even this ethically-challenged ethics review gave a seal of approval to AFST in part based on the premise that it would not be applied to every child at birth.

But getting the chance to slap a scarlet number on every child at birth is the Holy Grail for some predictive analytics proponents.  And now it appears that was the goal of the Allegheny County Department of Human Services all along. 

The birth of “Hello Baby”

In her book, Eubanks reports that the county was, at a minimum, considering introducing “‘a second predictive model … [that] would be run on a daily or weekly basis on all babies born in Allegheny County the prior day or week,’ according to a September 2017 email” from a deputy director of Allegheny County DHS, Erin Dalton.  (Dalton is also disturbingly sanguine about the harm of foster care.) As I noted in a 2018 column for Youth Today, such a model already exists — indeed it’s one of the models the designers of AFST proposed to the county in the first place.

The county apparently turned it down initially because they didn’t think they could sell it politically.  But clearly, with a couple of tweaks to the algorithm, now they think they can – and, sadly, they may be right.

And so, starting in January, 2020, the county plans to phase in a “prevention” program it calls “Hello Baby.”

Here’s how the county says it will work.

During some of the most chaotic hours of a family’s life, those hours in the hospital after a baby is born, when one medical professional, volunteer or other hospital-affiliated person after another is traipsing in and out of the room, the family will be handed a packet of information about the help available through “Hello Baby.”  A nurse may also discuss the program with the family.

The program offers three tiers of services.  Tier 1 is automatically available to everyone without having to surrender their data.  That tier is simply information about help that’s already out there.  Tiers two and three provide more intensive help to individual families. But to get that help you must accept having the child labeled by an algorithm as at moderate or high risk of abuse.

You have to opt out

The program automatically assumes you have given permission for this massive invasion of family privacy – it’s the equivalent of a “default setting” on an app you may download without realizing how much data you surrender in return. (Or just think of all the data you may have given to Facebook to share at will because you didn’t find the right button among the settings.)

The “Hello Baby” document is vague about the whole opt-out process.  But it appears you get very little chance to actually opt out. You get one notice – in the form of a postcard mailed to your home a few days after the child is born. Along with a reminder of the benefits of “Hello Baby” somewhere on that postcard will be a notification that you must specifically opt out of being run through the database – otherwise you and your child are slapped with that risk score whether you really wanted to participate or not. 

The material made available by Allegheny County does not mention how much time you have to opt out before your name is run through the database.  Nor does it say anything about expunging a risk score if you choose to opt out after the county has already done it.

And what, exactly, are you deemed at risk of doing?

According to the county:

The model was built to stratify families based on the likelihood that there may be future safety issues so significant that the courts require the County to remove the child from the home before the child has reached their 5^th birthday.

Think about that.  From the moment your child is born, you risk having that child labeled at high risk for being taken away and consigned to foster care. From the moment you say “hello, baby” you may be at greater risk of someday having to say “goodbye, baby.”  In effect, “Hello Baby” creates a ticking time bomb in the form of an electronic record that might go off if, say, an angry neighbor calls a child abuse hotline, or if you’re caught pot smoking while Black.

To avoid that risk you have to be alert to the chance to opt out, and if you opt out you risk losing out on what might be genuinely useful assistance.

We’ll never, ever misuse all that data we have on you – we promise!

County officials solemnly promise not to use the data that way – they say they’ll use it only to target help, and won’t make it a part of child abuse investigations. But even the promise has a loophole:

As the county’s “Hello Baby” overview puts it:

The County pledges that this Hello Baby analytic model will only be used to provide voluntary supportive services as described here and updated over time. [Emphasis added.]

Indeed, they will issue a signed document to that effect.  What could possibly go wrong?

I think Allegheny County really means it when they say they won’t pull away the football – sorry, misuse the algorithm – for now.  But there is no institutional safeguard in place. There is nothing to stop the leaders of the agency that created “Hello Baby” and crave having data on every child from birth from changing their minds whenever they damn well feel like it. 

When might that be? How about the first time there’s a child abuse tragedy and word leaks out that the family had been labeled “high risk” at the time of the child’s birth? That’s when the demands will come to make this information available immediately to child protective services and to use it to immediately trigger a CPS investigation – or worse.

That’s not the only problem.  The extra help families will get is likely to be provided by people who are “mandated reporters” of alleged child abuse and neglect.  There are penalties for failing to report and no penalty for mistakenly calling in a false report. So mandated reporters always are under pressure to make “CYA” referrals. Now, these mandated reporters will enter the home already knowing that a “scientific” algorithm has determined the family is “high risk” for abusing and/or neglecting their child. That’s bound to color the judgment of the helpers when deciding whether or not to phone in a report alleging child abuse or neglect.

It’s still poverty profiling

In order to counter the charge of poverty profiling, the county has tweaked the algorithm – slightly. But their claims are disingenuous at best.  Thus, they claim: “Unlike the Allegheny Family Screening Tool model, the Hello Baby model only relies on data where the County has the potential to have records for every family it only uses universal (rather than means tested) data sources.”

But the key weasel word there is potential.

Because right before making this claim, the county acknowledges that they probably will use “child protective services, homeless services and justice system data.” 

So unless Allegheny County’s jails are filled with wealthy white-collar corporate criminals, and its homeless shelters are filled with people spending the night because they misplaced the keys to their mansions in Sewickley and other wealthy Allegheny County suburbs, this is still poverty profiling.  And, of course, they include data from any previous encounters with child protective services – and CPS intervenes to a vastly disproportionate degree in the lives of poor people.  (As noted in many previous posts, CPS agencies often confuse poverty with neglect.  So if you use a previous “substantiated” allegation of child neglect to raise a risk score you are not countering bias, you are simply automating it.)

And, of course, both the justice system and the child welfare system are notorious for their racial bias – raising the risk that “Hello Baby” amounts to racial profiling as well.

 

Another ethically-challenged ethics review

As noted earlier, even the “ethics review” for AFST commissioned by the county itself – the one co-authored by a faculty colleague of one of the designers of AFST – emphasized that one reason AFST was ethical is that it was not triggered until someone actually phoned in a call alleging child abuse and neglect.  It was deemed ethical in part precisely because it did not seek to slap a risk score onto every child at birth.

How do you get around this little detail? Simple. Commission another ethics review from someone who is likely to tell you what you want to hear. 

So Allegheny County turned to Deborah Daro.  Like most people in child welfare, Daro really wants to help children, and she’s devoted her life to the cause.  But Daro spent much of her time at the group that now calls itself Prevent Child Abuse America – and she did so at a time when PCAA was fomenting hype and hysteria about child abuse, and taking data out of context.  They were particularly keen on minimizing the role of poverty in what we label abuse and neglect. I discuss this in detail in the section of this 2010 blog post called “PCAA’s record of extremism.” But don’t take my word for it – back in 2003, PCAA came startlingly close to admitting as much, declaring:

While the establishment of a certain degree of public horror relative to the issue of child abuse and neglect was probably necessary in the early years to create public awareness of the issue, the resulting conceptual model adopted by the public has almost certainly become one of the largest barriers to advancing the issue further in terms of individual behavior change, societal solutions and policy priorities.

Then Daro moved to the Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago.  The same 2010 blog post documents Chapin Hall’s bias, and some of Daro’s work there. 

More recently, Chapin Hall has been a leader in minimizing the role of racial bias in child welfare, and in fueling foster-care panic in Illinois.

And nearly a decade ago, Daro herself wrote a paper advocating for something very much like “Hello Baby.”  She called for:

Universal assessments of all new parents that carry the dual mission of assessing parental capacity to provide for a child's safety, and linking families with services commensurate with their needs.

So, in effect, Allegheny County asked Deborah Daro to offer an opinion as to whether using an algorithm for the kind of intervention she herself has been promoting for decades is ethical.  Apparently, she said yes. 

I say “apparently” because the actual document does not appear to be available on the Allegheny County DHS website.  Neither is a second ethics review done by Michael Veale a “Digital Center Fellow” at the Alan Turing Institute in London.  In fairness, I am aware of no biases on Veale’s part concerning child welfare. But his biography reveals no knowledge of or experience in the field.  So he was at the mercy of those who commissioned him to understand how child protective services agencies really work.

An intellectually honest ethics review would require bringing together a panel of experts who have strongly divergent views on child welfare and predictive analytics and seeing if they could formulate an ethical framework for using such an algorithm in child welfare.  But of course if Allegheny County tried that they would risk getting answers they don’t want to hear.

 
You don’t need an algorithm to target help

A crucial false premise behind efforts such as “Hello Baby” goes like this: Funds are limited, so we need this kind of algorithm to target help to the families who need it most.  But no such algorithm is necessary.  That’s because the families that need the most help have one thing in common: They’re poor.  So all you have to do is offer the high-end “Hello Baby” services to families of infants born in hospitals that serve the county’s poorest communities.  And, while you’re at it, make sure the help addresses concrete needs of poor families instead of just forcing them to run a gauntlet of counseling sessions and parent education classes.

The “Hello Baby” overview paper claims this won’t work because it’s “based on the incorrect assumption that poverty is the singular driver for abuse.”  But that is setting up a straw man.  No one says poverty is the singular driver for abuse.  But poverty is, by far, the most important driver of what we deem to be abuse and, especially, neglect. 

The “Hello Baby” document goes on to claim that other causes are “untreated mental illness, substance use disorder and intimate partner violence.”  But if you’re middle class your mental illness probably won’t go untreated – because you have the money to treat it.  Your substance use won’t be deemed a disorder, because middle-class parents can use substances pretty much with impunity. And an algorithm that checks criminal justice and homelessness records to determine risk isn’t likely to catch wealthy drug users, now is it?)

Most important, there is now a wealth of research documenting the simple fact that what we deem to be child maltreatment can be fixed primarily by transferring just a little more wealth to poor people.

So why do we need a giant Orwellian child welfare surveillance state to “help” these families? We don’t.  We only need it to target them, control them, and quite possibly, take away their children.