Justice by geography, and more evidence that mandatory reporting backfires: Notes about Missouri and Massachusetts.

Photo by Tori Rector

Missouri: Justice by geography 

The story, from a Springfield, Missouri, television station is typical fearmongering, parroting the discredited, and yes, racist line about COVID-19 and child abuse.  It begins: 

Child experts [sic] feared it at the start of the pandemic. Greene County has seen staggering numbers of kids going into foster care. Experts say there is a range of issues and there are signs of abuse everyone should know. 

But later in the story we learn this: 

The Missouri Children’s Division reports a very small jump in the number of children who entered foster care in 2020, less than a half of a percent. … Greene County had a 44% increase. 

So, is Greene County a cesspool of depravity with vastly more child abuse than the rest of the state?  Has COVID-19 mysteriously set off a pandemic of child abuse in Springfield while somehow skipping over St. Louis, Kansas City and Joplin? Seems unlikely. 

Rather it’s a continuation of a disturbing pattern.  

Way back in 2003, when NCCPR released its report on Missouri child welfare, we noted that Greene County was an extreme outlier, with the proportion of children in foster care nearly double the state average, even though the child poverty rate was actually below the state average.  We focused on Greene County in part because that’s where a little boy named Dominic James was taken needlessly from his parents, only to die in foster care. 

What the story from that Springfield television station really illustrates is what Judge Darrell Missey termed “justice by geography,” when he was a Juvenile Court Judge in Jefferson County.  And a major reason is the existence of the Juvenile Office, the fifth wheel of the Missouri family policing system, which corrupts the very nature of juvenile court in Missouri. 

In his outstanding 2013 law review article on why the Juvenile Office does so much harm (and, by the way, also is unconstitutional), Prof. Josh Gupta Kagan quotes Judge Missey at length – an essay within an essay – on pp. 37 and 38.  I hope everyone will read it, especially in Missouri: I will highlight just one sentence, in which Judge Missey describes what he saw before becoming a judge: 

In ten years of practicing in that Court, I never saw the Juvenile Office lose a case, hearing, motion, or even an objection. 

There are two possible lessons here. One is: The Juvenile Office has achieved perfection!  Just eliminate the judges and everyone else altogether and let them do what they want.  

There is, however, another possible conclusion … 

Massachusetts: More evidence that mandatory reporting backfires

 I have written before about the failure of mandatory child abuse reporting laws. I’ve cited research showing that they deter families from seeking help and so overload the system with false reports that workers have less time to find children in real danger. 

At a hearing of a commission “studying” the issue in Massachusetts (they’re not really studying mandatory reporting, mostly they’re looking for excuses to expand it) Dr. Mical Raz, who literally wrote the book on this topic, pointed out a new study, which includes this: 

Whereas most policy or practice changes [by legislatures or family policing agencies] resulted in increased reports, most changes served to decrease the number of substantiations. 

In some cases that is to be expected.  For example, in most states all that it takes to “substantiate” an allegation of abuse or, far more often, so-called “neglect,” is for a caseworker to check a box on a form saying s/he thinks it’s slightly more likely than not that the abuse or “neglect” occurred and was caused by the accused.  There is no impartial hearing of any kind beforehand. Caseworkers sometimes proclaim they base these decisions on “intuition” or “gut feeling” or, in Massachusetts “vibe.” 

When the standard of proof is raised slightly – though it’s still just a caseworker’s assessment – both reports and substantiation go down. 

But the researchers found something else they said was “unexpected” – though I can’t imagine why anyone who knows how the system really works would be surprised: 

Sixteen states (32%) made changes to the scope of maltreatment, such as adding new categories of maltreatment or requiring certain populations be referred or investigated; the most common change was to add infants born with positive drug screens. Broadening the scope of maltreatment was associated with increased reports (5%), as expected, providing empirical evidence that these policy changes do indeed widen the reach of child welfare involvement. However, broadening the scope was also associated with decreased substantiated reports, which was unexpected, given that these policy changes were also intended to expand the range of what defined substantiated maltreatment. It could be that broadening the scope of maltreatment may increase the number of reports for lower-risk families that are ultimately unsubstantiated. [Emphasis added.] 

Ya think?

Is Nebraska reducing foster care – or just hiding it?

For decades Nebraska was a national example of child welfare failure. Year after year the state took away children at one of the highest rates in the nation.  The state human services agency suffered from a succession of poor leaders, including one of the very worst, Todd Landry. Landry even made a sick joke at the expense of vulnerable families.   (Proving that no matter how big a failure you are, there’s always room for you in child welfare, Landry now is in charge of child welfare in Maine.)

Nebraska’s failings are outlined in detail in a report NCCPR released in 2012.

But then it looked like things were turning around.  When Matt Wallen was named Nebraska’s Director of Children and Family Services he took some constructive steps.  The new leader of the entire state health and human services agency, Dannette Smith, appears to want to continue the progress.  The rhetoric coming from her agency certainly has improved.  But do the numbers back up the words?

Officially, the number of children torn from their families in Nebraska dropped significantly in recent years.  Officially, as of 2018, Nebraska’s rate of child removal was “only” about 20 percent above the national average, when rates of child poverty are factored in.

But did removals really decline?

Hidden foster care

It seems that even as official entries into foster care have declined, another kind of foster-care has increased.  In an outstanding law review article on the topic, Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan of the University of South Carolina School of Law calls it “hidden foster care.”

It’s something I’ve been writing about for a decade now: Child protective services agencies go to a family and coerce them into surrendering their children “voluntarily.”  In fact, there’s usually nothing voluntary about it.  The agency says: Place your children with a relative “voluntarily” or we’ll go to court and place them with total strangers.

In Texas, nearly two-thirds of entries into care occur this way.  There are indications the number may be almost as high in Virginia – though the data are limited.  And now, some Nebraska advocates claim that, in the past couple of years there’s been as one put it “a huge increase” in such placements in Nebraska.

Although we read federal regulations as requiring states to report these entries into foster care in official statistics, typically they don’t – and the federal government has not cracked down on this evasion. Indeed, in an Orwellian twist, some states refer to this as “diversion” from foster care.

It is not. 

Kinship care is foster care

Though placement with a relative is almost always the least harmful form of foster care, kinship care is still foster care.

The issue actually got attention in Nebraska for the wrong reasons.  Whenever the Nebraska child  welfare agency tries to put its dismal past behind it, a fear-mongering chorus rises up, aided and abetted by an Omaha television station that specializes in hype and hysteria over child abuse – which is why I’m not linking to their story. So in this case, the concern is based on the false claim that these hidden foster care placements are less safe, because a court didn’t sign off on them.

In fact, multiple studies have found that kinship foster care – even informal kinship foster care - typically is better for children’s well-being, more stable, and, most important, safer than what should properly be called stranger care. 

The temptation to use hidden foster care in Nebraska is understandable. In Nebraska the courts tend to be even worse than the child welfare agency, particularly in metropolitan Omaha.  Here’s one example. There’s another on Page 41 or our Nebraska report.

So, one could argue, even if the “improvement” in Nebraska consists entirely of placing children with relatives who formerly would have been placed with strangers, that’s still an improvement.

But such placements are too easy to abuse. They deprive families of even the minimal due process protections available when a worker formally removes the child and then goes to court to rubber-stamp the removal.  In Nebraska, we don’t know if these are all cases in which the children otherwise would have been placed with strangers, or if they include cases in which the children would not have been removed at all if the agency had been required to go to court.

And these placements are too easy to hide. 

Because now we don’t know if Nebraska made progress in dealing with its obscene rate of removal, or just found a way to sweep it under the rug.