Maine’s child welfare ombudsman is dangerously wrong

Maine's first child welfare ombudsman, Dean Crocker, understood
the lessons from the tragic death of Logan Marr, who was taken
when her family poverty was confused with "neglect" and killed
in foster care.  The current ombudsman, Christine Alberi, does not.

● In a classic example of trying to make policy-by-horror-story, her latest report uses a tiny, non-random sample of cases she chose herself to justify sweeping conclusions that all boil down to: Take away more kids and don’t send them back!  That is making all Maine children less safe. 

● She is wrong about domestic violence, she is wrong about truancy, she is wrong about “alternative response,” she is wrong about false reports and she is wrong to call for more institutionalization of children.  Most of all she is wrong to ignore the enormous harm of needless removal. 

● At a time when the entire child welfare field finally is coming to grips with issues of poverty and race, she puts out a report that mentions neither. In the entire report the word "poverty" does not appear even once.

● For the sake of Maine's most vulnerable children, any legislation to give her more power and staff should also include a requirement that she use objective evaluators and base policy recommendations only on a statistically valid random sample of cases.  The office also needs a more representative Board of Directors. 

● But ultimately, we all need to be the ombudsman.  In Maine and elsewhere, the ombudsman’s power is fed by secrecy.  For starters, Maine should join the many states in which child welfare court hearings are open. 

How could a state like Maine, a state that once almost got child welfare right, keep careening full-speed backwards.  How is it that no one has stopped a foster-care panic that has undone reforms that once were a national model; a panic that has made all of the state’s children less safe? 

There are many reasons, and I have discussed them on this blog and elsewhere before.  But one reason is the state’s child welfare “ombudsman,” Christine Alberi.  She issues reports with shamefully shoddy methodology that throw gasoline on the fires of foster-care panic.  Judging from Alberi’s latest report, she has never, ever encountered a case in which she believes a child was wrongfully taken.  At a time when almost everyone else in the field is discussing the confusion of poverty with neglect, Alberi has managed to issue a 20-page report that never once even uses the word poverty.  Also missing: The fact that even in an overwhelmingly white state, there is evidence of racial bias in Maine child welfare. 

Unfortunately, Alberi’s approach is not unusual.  As in many states, legislators in Maine effectively delegated responsibility to hold the child welfare system accountable to one person – an “ombudsman” or “child advocate.” 

Back in 2007, on this blog, I wrote about the typical behavior of people filling such posts: Investigate horror stories and jump to conclusions based on those horror stories that boil down to: Take away more kids.  

Though ombudsmen generally have no formal powers aside from the ability to investigate and report their findings, their influence is enormous.  That’s because in systems more secret than the CIA, they get to see everything – or at least a lot more than everyone else outside the child welfare agency sees.  (It doesn’t actually have to be that way, as I’ll explain below.)  So almost the entire view of the system seen by journalists and lawmakers is whatever the ombudsman wants them to see – and very little more.  It’s like trying to figure out who and what is in a large room by looking through a pinhole. 

In report after report Alberi zeros-in on what she views as poor decision-making at two key stages of the process: The decision to remove children from the home and the decision to return them home.  But by poor decision-making, she never seems to mean that it was a poor decision to take away a child. 

The ombudsman’s report defies common sense 

Common sense tells us there will, in fact, be a lot of poor decision-making at these points.  But common sense also tells us that, for reasons noted above, the bad decisions will go in all directions.   It is ludicrous to think that, in a system filled with underprepared overloaded workers rushing from case to case all of the errors would go in only one direction. 

Yet any reader of Alberi’s latest report who took it at face value would have to conclude just that.  Because, as Alberi tells it, the only mistakes made by Maine child welfare caseworkers are to leave children in dangerous homes and return them there. 

She is dangerously wrong. 

The errors go in all directions, and all of these errors harm children.  

● Wrongful removal inflicts profound psychological trauma.  Although DHHS caseworkers almost always mean well  - as does Alberi by the way – the trauma when a child is torn from everyone loving and familiar in Maine is just as severe as when it happens on the Mexican border.  

● Wrongful removal places children at serious risk of abuse in foster care itself, where independent studies find rates of abuse far higher than agencies such as DHHS admit in official statistics.  

● And all the time, money and effort wasted on false allegations, trivial cases and poverty cases is, in effect stolen from finding children in real danger.  In short, the foster-care panic encouraged by Alberi’s whole approach actually makes more likely the very failings Alberi cites. 

Alberi’s latest report draws her sweeping conclusions from a tiny sample of cases – the 84 her office chose to accept in 2021.  But Maine caseworkers investigated nearly 12,000 cases in 2021.  While it is reasonable to draw conclusions based on a sample, 84 is a far smaller number than, say, the typical “case reading” done to assess agency performance when such agencies are the subjects of class-action lawsuits. 

Even worse, this is not a random sample.  Rather it is those cases Alberi and her assistant personally deemed worthy of investigation – and the criteria for choosing a case can be startlingly subjective.  They include, for example, “the demeanor and credibility of the caller.”  Really?  Suppose your child had just been torn from your arms and you were desperate for help.  How would you be doing demeanor-wise? 

Another criterion: “The degree of harm alleged to the child.”  But an ombudsman who doesn’t even mention poverty is unlikely to consider a case in which a child was taken because of poverty – such as Logan Marr -- to be terribly harmful.  Rather the focus will be on the much smaller percentage of cases that allege sexual abuse or serious physical abuse. 

And so, based on this tiny, skewed sample, Alberi offers broad, sweeping conclusions and examples in which, in every single case, she concludes, the error was to leave a child in the home or return a child to the home.  It should be clear that this is absurd on its face.  

Alberi’s whole approach is so absurd it leads me to write a sentence I never thought would appear in this blog: In some respects, Todd Landry is right. 

Landry runs the Office of Child and Family Services within Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services.  His hiring is, frankly, inexplicable.  He had a horrible track record when he ran child welfare in Nebraska – under his leadership that state was worse than Maine, tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in America, and his callousness could be astounding. 

But Alberi’s methodology is so absurd even Landry sees through it.  In his office’s response to the Alberi, he writes:

 

Rather than a random sample, a case review begins with self-selected inquiries and is often complaint driven. … 

A source of disagreement for a number of reports relates to the Ombudsman’s finding or recommendation that involves bringing children into State care or keeping them in care for a longer period of time. While OCFS recognizes the perception that children are safer when removed, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that removing a child from their home has the potential to inflict harm or trauma. In addition, there is little research to support the belief that, in general, children who enter state custody are safer than they would be if they had remained in the home with efforts undertaken to address safety concerns. There are numerous scholarly articles regarding the potential harm of removal. 

As I said, on this Todd Landry is right.  When you look at the typical cases OCFS and its counterparts across the country handle, not the tiny, self-selected sample used by Alberi, the research shows children typically fare better in their own homes, even when agencies don’t have much help to offer.  

Alberi’s examples 

All of this still gives Alberi a huge benefit of the doubt: It assumes that Alberi is right about those 84 cases.  But often we have no way to know that.  In summarizing 40 of the 42 cases (out of the 84) that Alberi says raised “substantial issues,” she offers only a short paragraph on each one.  Sometimes that’s enough to make clear that in the specific case, Alberi is right – the child should not have been left in the home.  (If one believes, as I do, that the errors go in all directions then of course there will be such cases.)  Others are less clear.  One summary, in its entirely states: 

A parent had significant mental health issues and the inability to protect the children from domestic violence. Throughout the case, despite the fact that the parent was engaged in treatment, the treatment was not effective. Providers were not objective and recommendations in a psychological evaluation were not implemented. After a significant period in state custody, trial placement began and then it was discovered that the parent was still in a relationship with the perpetrator. Trial placement was not ended. In general, the parent’s level of treatment did not match the severity of the illness. The risk to the children remained high. 

Note first that there is no allegation that the children themselves were abused.  Rather they witnessed domestic violence.  When children are taken for that reason the trauma for the child is actually worse than other forms of removal. That’s why taking children for that reason is illegal in New York City as a result of a class-action lawsuit. (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs.)  One need only read the outstanding investigative journalism from USA Today to see how much such removals hurt children – and discourage battered women from leaving their abusers and seeking help. 

Thus, an objective ombudsman would have questioned why the children in this case were removed at all. 

Now, let's go through this paragraph sentence-by-sentence.  

Throughout the case, despite the fact that the parent was engaged in treatment, the treatment was not effective. 

Alberi offers no evidence for this, but even if true, there is more than one approach to therapy – why not recommend trying another? 

Providers were not objective and recommendations in a psychological evaluation were not implemented. 

How do we know providers were not objective? Because they didn’t do what Alberi thinks they should have done?  As for “psychological evaluations,” like so much else child welfare agencies and their subcontractors do, they can be cookie-cutter and unreliable.  Maybe in this case the providers were right and whoever did the “psych eval” was wrong.  Maybe it’s Alberi who is “not objective.”  We don’t know, and nothing in Alberi’s single paragraph tells us. 

After a significant period in state custody, 

That should have been the red flag here – why were the children taken, apparently for witnessing domestic violence, when that is so enormously harmful to children? 

trial placement began and then it was discovered that the parent was still in a relationship with the perpetrator. 

This shows only Alberi’s lack of understanding of the dynamics of domestic violence.  There are all sorts of reasons this might happen – including, by the way, poverty.  Why didn’t authorities act to remove the abuser by arresting him and jailing him? 

Trial placement was not ended. In general, the parent’s level of treatment did not match the severity of the illness. The risk to the children remained high. 

Risk of what?  Presumably witnessing domestic violence again.  That is a serious and real problem.  But removing children for that reason can be even worse.  One expert calls taking away children under these circumstances “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.”  But Alberi seems to want OCFS to adopt a policy that boils down to: Please pass the salt. 

It is possible that there is a reasonable explanation for all of this, and a detailed look at the case file and interviews with all involved would reveal that yes, in this case there was no other option but removal.  But we don’t know that based on Alberi’s one-paragraph summary.  And it would be a huge mistake for media and lawmakers to simply take Alberi’s word for it. 

A bizarre call to institutionalize more children 

Alberi also does not seem to be up on the research about institutionalizing children in so-called residential treatment centers.  So I’ll summarize it.  It doesn’t work.  Period. Full stop. 

There is nothing that residential treatment does that can’t be done better using Wraparond programs that bring whatever help a child needs directly into his own home or, when genuinely necessary, a foster home. 

One of Maine’s biggest successes was its significant reduction in the use of this worst possible option.  Yet Alberi apparently wants to reverse course.  At one point she writes: 

There are not enough therapeutic foster homes, not enough high-quality residential treatment facilities, and a general lack of mental health resources for both young and old.  [Emphasis added.] 

But “high-quality residential treatment” is an oxymoron – it doesn’t exist.  Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back into their own homes, emphasize wraparound services and there will be plenty of good, safe, therapeutic foster homes for the children who really need them.  Maine already has proven it. 

The differential response obsession 

Alberi seems oddly obsessed with a program that barely exists in Maine and soon won’t exist at all.  Differential response, known in Maine as “alternative response” in Maine is one of the most-studied approaches in child welfare, it involves diverting low-risk cases to agencies that offer voluntary help.  At any time if that agency thinks the case is too serious they can send it back to caseworkers for a full-scale investigation.  More than two-dozen studies have found that this approach safely reduced foster care.  But in state after state, it’s become a convenient scapegoat after high profile fatalities.  But generally, once the system caves in and gets rid of differential response the bashing of the program stops. 

But even though  OCFS is phasing out the program; indeed it barely exists, Alberi is still bashing it. 

Here again, I’m sure there are indeed high-risk cases that have been wrongly diverted to differential response.  But at noted study after study shows this is far from the norm and that differential response reduces the trauma of needless foster care with no compromise of safety.  

The fact that Alberi continues to beat this nearly dead horse is still another indication of how profoundly she seems to believe that child welfare agencies must be police forces, constantly harassing and surveilling families and taking away their children. 

Wrong about truancy 

At one point,  Alberi writes that  “truancy of children as a sign of risk is underestimated.”  That’s because truancy generally isn’t a sign of risk.  Oh, I’m sure Alberi has horror stories, but she seems unaware of the comprehensive landmark study by the highly-respected Vera Institute of Justice – a study that included yes, a representative random sample of cases. 

That study found that having agencies like OCFS pursue “educational neglect” allegations – i.e. truancy – does far more harm than good.  Truancy is not, in fact a “gateway allegation” – some kind of sign of more serious evil afoot.  Indeed, the Vera report recommended that if truancy must be part of a child protective agency’s portfolio it should be handled through – differential response. 

Wrong about unsubstantiated reports 

At one point Alberi writes: 

When [multiple encounters with OCFS] result in unsubstantiated assessments or [alternative response] referrals, the lack of child abuse and neglect findings is mistakenly thought to be evidence of safety. … It is not well understood that the existence of many reports and assessments alone elevates the risk to children. 

No, what is not understood by Alberi is that false reports almost always are just that – false.  They are so flimsy they don’t even rise to the minimal level required for an OCFS caseworker to check the “substantiated” box on the form.  By Alberi’s logic there is no such thing as a false report: Call it in often enough, harass a family with enough false allegations and, by the Alberi standard, you must assume the child is at high risk. 

Many reports do not elevate the risk to the children (except to the extent that they may increase stress on the family).  Rather, they are a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.  Precisely because Alberi and so many others encourage workers to believe that “where there’s smoke there’s fire” workers become predisposed to check the “substantiated” box.  Multiple unfounded reports elevate not the risk of child abuse but the risk of spurious conclusions and system involvement. 

In child welfare, where there’s smoke there’s usually just smoke.  And nobody can see clearly through smoke. 

But what about that whole section – sorry, one paragraph – about prevention? 

“But you don’t understand,” I can imagine Alberi saying, “I’m for prevention.”  Sure.  Have you ever known anyone to say they’re against prevention?  And, after all, Alberi devoted one entire paragraph of her report to saying prevention is a good thing. She even concludes the one paragraph with: “The fact that services and resources for families are minimally discussed in this report should not discount their importance.” 

But, of course, that’s precisely what devoting one token paragraph to some general concept of prevention in a 20-page report does.  All the more so in a report that doesn’t mention poverty and portrays a system that only errs by keeping families together. 

Even the lip service paid to prevention doesn’t say what kind of prevention she has in mind.   But given that Alberi can’t even bring herself to mention poverty it’s likely she has in mind only the kind of prevention that makes the helpers feel good – lots of “counseling” and “parent education,” instead of what’s needed most: Concrete help to deal with problems like housing, childcare, and other issues of poverty. 

It doesn’t look like OCFS gets this either. Their response emphasizes the vastly overhyped federal Families First Act – which allows federal funding for only a few, very limited types of prevention – mostly of the counseling and parent education variety. 

What to do instead 

Unfortunately, Alberi is treated with enormous deference by some lawmakers and media.  So there has been one proposal after another to give her office even more power.  There are better options: 

● Ideally, everyone should be the ombudsman – and yes, that can be done.  Everyone should be able to see how the state child welfare system really works in every case.  For starters, Maine could open court hearings in child welfare cases.  More than 40% of America’s foster children live in states where these hearings are open and none of the fears offered by opponents – who also are the people who don’t want us to see what really goes on -- has come to pass.  In addition, there should be a strong rebuttable presumption that most records are open.  There is a detailed discussion of how this would work, without compromising children’s privacy in NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda. 

As soon as courtroom doors open and legislators, journalists and citizens can sit in on the day-to-day process, they will see for themselves what the typical cases are like.  They will see how often the crucial issue is poverty and how often that poverty is confused with neglect.  They also will see the kind of mistakes Alberi highlights.   But once we see that the errors go in all directions and those errors are related – wrongful removal overloads systems so workers have less time to find children in real danger – it changes completely our understanding of how to fix it. 

It is within the Legislature’s power to do this.  Of all the comments I’ve heard or read concerning Maine child welfare in more than 20 years, perhaps the weirdest was this from a Maine State Senator: 

“By law, the department can’t share a lot of information, so our ability to provide oversight is limited.” [Emphasis added.] 

By law, you say?  Hmmmm. And what is it that legislators enact, repeal and amend? 

Now, in fairness, it’s possible that this lawmaker was referring to a federal law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act.  Perhaps DHHS told him CAPTA made it impossible for the agency to share information. 

But there are two problems with that: 

-- CAPTA has lots of wiggle room.  A state that passed a law allowing legislators themselves to see records, for example, should have no problem with CAPTA.  And there is no question that CAPTA allows open courts. 

-- The penalty for ignoring CAPTA is almost nil – the forfeiture of a very small amount of federal funding – so small that the costs of complying with CAPTA may be greater than the costs of ignoring it.  

● Failing that, at least reform the ombudsman’s office.  As I said, most ombudsmen operate like Alberi.  But there are exceptions. Maine’s first ombudsman, Dean Crocker, was one. He understood that the errors go in all directions and he supported the reforms that helped make Maine, briefly, a child welfare leader.  He even wrote a guest post for this blog.  Another was Kevin Ryan, who ran New Jersey’s Office of Child Advocate.  Even when dealing with horror stories, Ryan’s office turned out careful, nuanced reports.  But he also realized that just focusing on the horror stories was inherently distorting. 

So he decided to review a random sample of cases.  And to ensure objectivity he recruited reviewers from two groups, one with a mentality much like Alberi’s, the other more attuned to issues of poverty.  They then had to reach consensus:  That consensus – yes, the system errs, in all directions.  

The Maine Legislature should require that the Maine ombudsman’s office take the same approach – examine a random sample of cases each year and examine enough of them to be representative.  A panel of experts, diverse not only in race and class but in viewpoints, should be named to review the cases and issue reports. 

The ombudsman should be barred from drawing systemic conclusions based on self-selected individual cases. 

-- The Board of Directors for the ombudsman’s office should be reconstituted to include representatives from all of the groups that have a stake in keeping Maine’s children safe: The board should include one of the sate’s leading family defense attorneys, one its leading child abuse prosecutors, a parent who lost children to the system, a foster parent, a grandparent or other relative providing kinship foster care, a former OCFS caseworker, the director of a domestic violence shelter, leaders of civil rights organizations for Black, Latinx and Native American communities in Maine, at least one leader of an anti-poverty organization, and at least two current or former foster youth. 

-- Every member of the Board and every staff member should be required upon appointment/hiring to watch the PBS Frontline documentary “The Taking of Logan Marr” and to read the letter Logan’s mother Christy sent to the foster mother who ultimately would kill Logan. 

The context 

A retreat from reform is tragic anywhere, but especially in Maine since, as I noted at the outset, Maine is a state that almost got child welfare right. 

In 2001, After five-year-old Logan Marr was taken from her mother when the mother’s poverty was confused with neglect only to be killed by a foster mother who also had been a supervisor for OCFS, lawmakers and media refused to accept the usual pat answers about licensing, training, etc.  They zeroed-in on the appallingly high numbers of children the state routinely took away. 

A new governor, John Baldacci, brought in new leadership that rebuilt the system to emphasize safe, proven approaches to keeping families together.  Foster care numbers declined significantly.  When children had to be taken, as noted earlier, far fewer were institutionalized and far more were placed with relatives.  The reforms became a national model. 

But another new governor, Paul LePage, slashed the agency budget and demanded a return to the take-the-child-and-run approach.  He doubled down after two deaths of children known-to-the- system in rapid succession in 2018.  That started the foster-care panic – the sharp sudden increase in the number of children torn from their families. 

But the deaths didn’t stop.  Of course they didn’t.  A foster-care panic often is followed by more child abuse deaths because workers are so overloaded with false allegations, trivial cases and poverty cases that they don’t have time to investigate any case properly.  So they make terrible errors – yes, in all directions.  

Yet with another new governor in office, Janet Mills, and four more deaths in rapid succession in 2021, lawmakers and Maine’s child welfare establishment still didn’t learn.  They doubled down again.  

Partly that’s because the Mills administration chose Landry to run child welfare.  Partly it’s because, between term limits for lawmakers and consolidation in the news media, a lot of institutional memory has been lost.  Maine has largely forgotten the lessons from the death of Logan Marr and the time when, relatively speaking, Maine was a child welfare leader. 

Nevertheless, it puzzled me that even in Maine, lawmakers could so easily be taken-in by an approach that had so demonstrably failed over and over.  Now I understand. 

Everyone is paying way too much attention to Christine Alberi.

And here’s the thing: Had Alberi and her office been around when Logan Marr first was taken, and had her mother, Christy, called looking for help, I’ll bet Alberi would have turned her down. 

She probably wouldn’t have liked Christy’s demeanor.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, weeks ending January 4, 2022

The end of 2021 brought more outstanding reporting on various dark corners of the “child welfare” system. 

● If you tear a child from a parent’s arms, then demand money to give the child back, what’s the right word for the payment?  If you said “child support” you must work for a family policing agency – since almost anyone else would call it what it is: Ransom.  Yes, family policing agencies really do this. NPR has an outstanding in-depth report on how this hurts children. 

● If you take money from a federal program meant to help poor people become self-sufficient and spend it instead on investigating those families when their poverty is confused with neglect – and on paying middle-class foster parents – what do you call it?  How about TANF as a child welfare slush fund.  ProPublica has an in-depth story on that one. 

● Combine these two stories with earlier excellent work by the same reporters on family policing agencies diverting some foster youth’s Social Security payments to help run their bureaucracies and you see a pattern, discussed in this NCCPR blog post about foster care as a shakedown scheme.  Also: In one state, The Imprint reports, foster youth have won a partial victory on the Social Security issue. 

● But the biggest failure of family policing is the heart of its mission: putting families under onerous needless surveillance and taking away the children.  That was encouraged by an odious federal law, the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  The PBS Newshour has an in-depth, finely-nuanced look at ASFA and the harm it has done.  For more about ASFA, check out the new ASFA resource page at nccpr.org. 

● ASFA aptly illustrates another pervasive problem in family policing: racial bias.  But is that only a problem among people who work in the system?  Since March of 2020, we’ve been bombarded with news stories about the so-called “pandemic of child abuse” that was supposedly inevitable once all those overwhelmingly middle-class disproportionately white “mandated reporters” no longer had their “eyes” constantly on children who are neither.  

There were a few notable exceptions, but much of the media marched in lockstep on this one.  Now, even that bastion of the child welfare establishment JAMA Pediatrics has called b.s.  Their somewhat more formal title: “Child Physical Abuse Did Not Increase During the Pandemic.” Unfortunately, it’s a typical, overpriced journal article – but NCCPR’s comprehensive round-up debunking the myth is free. 

So, when will all those reporters take a hard look at their own unconscious biases – and correct their stories? 

● Canada has basically the same family policing system we have – same rates of removal same discrimination against nonwhite families – especially Native (First Nations) families. But there’s one big difference: Though they don’t use the R word, CBC News reports that Canada has agreed to pay billions in reparations to First Nations children wrongly placed in foster care.

● More than two decades ago, NCCPR published a simple comparison of the “statement of principles” in two child welfare class action lawsuit settlements.  We compared the statement in the innovative family-focused settlement in Alabama (A member of NCCPR’s Board was co-counsel for the plaintiffs) to the one in one of the typically dreary, desultory McLawsuit settlements won by the group that calls itself “Children’s Rights” – in this case, the one in Tennessee.  We posed a simple question: “If these principles can indeed become reality, which would be the better reality for vulnerable children?”  Twenty years later the Tennessee Tribune compared how things have gone in both states.  No spoilers here, but you really should read the story if you’re thinking of responding affirmatively to one of those endless fundraising emails from Children’s Rights.

● We know that high-quality interdisciplinary legal representation for families reduces time in foster care with no compromise in safety – it’s the model that has made New York City a national leader.  But officials in New York’s family policing agency have resisted taking it to the next level: providing this intervention before the family police actually take the case to court so there’s no need to place the family under supervision or take the children in the first place.  Several other localities are piloting such efforts.  The latest is Springfield, Massachusetts. CommonWealth Magazine explains how it works. 

● And finally, on this Blog, we look back at a Christmas miracle: The Tampa Bay Times discovers that yes, Florida, children are needlessly torn from their homes.

Foster care as a shakedown scheme

The notices from family policing agencies demanding that parents help pay
the costs of foster care in order to get their children back don't really look like this
(which comes courtesy of ransomizer.com) but when you tear a child from
a parent's arms and demand money from that parent to get the child back,
 the only proper term for the payment is "ransom."

Even if you don’t think the family policing system was designed as a way to squeeze every last dollar out of poor families and perpetuate their poverty, these three stories show that’s how it works.

 The biggest problem with the so-called “child welfare” system is that it has nothing to do with the welfare of children.  The biggest problem with what should properly be called the family policing system is it does enormous harm to children by tearing them needlessly from everyone they know and love and/or putting their families under an onerous regime of surveillance.

But while they’re at it, Congress, state legislatures and family policing agencies have found a breathtaking array of ways to pour salt into the wounds they open.  Three examples of excellent investigative reporting, published in 202,1 serve as a guided tour of some of these dark alleys of family policing, from the start of a case until after it’s over.

 Each individually paints a deeply disturbing picture.  Taken together, they reveal a hellscape which, even if it is not designed to squeeze every last dollar out of poor families, perpetuate their poverty and prolong the trauma of foster care nevertheless does exactly that.

1.  At the start of a case: Take poor people’s money to investigate poor people.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) replaced welfare as we knew it.  By ruthlessly cutting people from welfare roles, states built up surpluses that are supposed to be used to help those same impoverished families become self-sufficient.  Instead, in a process that is legal, but morally is theft, a process we first flagged more than a decade ago, many states take the money and use it as a child welfare slush fund, to fund family police investigations and foster care.  

So, for example, because she couldn’t get TANF funds, a mother in Arizona had to work from sunrise until 10 p.m.  So she wasn’t home when a babysitter allegedly sexually abused her child.  That led to the child being thrown into foster care.  

But let Eli Hager explain, in his story for ProPublica: 

Arizona spends only 13% of its welfare funding on welfare itself, and none on child care or pre-K. Meanwhile, it diverts 61% of the dollars to the state’s child protective services system, which amounts to more than $150 million repurposed in this way every year, a ProPublica review of budget documents shows. 

In other words, welfare in Arizona largely goes not to helping poor parents financially but rather to the state’s Department of Child Safety — an agency that investigates many of these same parents, and that sometimes takes their kids away for reasons arising from the poverty that they were seeking help with in the first place. … 

“It all connects,” [the mother] said. “If I’d gotten just a little bit more help, I wouldn’t have had to work until 10 p.m. every night, and I could have been with my child, and this never would have happened.” 

It doesn’t end there.  Arizona and other states also take this money that’s supposed to help impoverished parents raise their own children and hands it to middle-class foster parents to do it instead.  And, by the way, Arizona lavishes money on foster parents at one of the highest rates in the country. As of 2015, the state paid anywhere from $670 to $1,392 per month per child – tax-free -- plus health insurance for the foster children. 

By the way, in at least one state, Georgia, TANF funds were diverted to the family policing system in order to fund a settlement of one of those class-action McLawsuits brought by the group that calls itself "Children's Rights."  CR is making a lot of noise suggesting that they're changed - but so far, they have not reopened any of their odious consent decrees - something to keep in mind before accepting at face value their endless fundraising pitches.

2. While we’re at it, let’s steal the kids’ money, too! 

Now, suppose that an impoverished family was getting by in part on a Social Security program that helps pay expenses for some disabled children, such as keeping a roof over everyone’s heads.  When the children are taken, the family police often rush to take away that money too. (Benefits paid under another Social Security program, survivors’ benefits, also are vulnerable.)  So now, that income is gone and the family is more likely to lose their home – which, of course, prolongs foster care for the child. 

Even if you think: “Well, we can’t trust those parents with the money, (after all, we all know what they are like, right?) it has to be held for the children!” that’s not what happens.  With rare exceptions, family policing agencies aren’t holding it for the children. They’re keeping it for themselves to run their bureaucracies, as Hager, then at The Marshall Project, and Joe Shapiro of NPR explain in these stories.  And to see how it all plays out in one city, check out Steve Volk’s story in the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Once again, technically it’s legal, morally it’s theft. 

3. The coup de grace: Make parents pay ransom.  

Well, no, of course the family police don’t call it ransom.  But, again as we’ve been pointing out for some time, if you tear a child away from a parent and make the parent pay money to get the child back, clearly, the proper term for that payment is ransom. 

And that’s exactly what happens.  Having had the children taken, often because of their poverty, parents often are billed for part of the cost of the care.  In some cases, they can’t get their child back until the ransom is paid.  So the foster care is prolonged. 

As NPR’s Shapiro and Teresa Wiltz, now at Politico, report, this policy is as stupid as it is cruel.  Not only does it extend the time that children are kept away from their families, it actually increases the cost to states, since no parent can pay the full amount.  Between that and the amount spent on enforcement, the whole deal costs states money.  

But that doesn’t stop states from trying. Collections went up in 2020 – because it was easy for states to grab COVID relief checks and use them to fund foster care, instead of letting families use the money in their time of greatest need.  As NPR explains: 

Billing parents for foster care undercuts the efforts of child welfare agencies to help parents and children reunite, according to the limited research on the subject. The added debt extends the time children spend in foster care and then keeps families in the impoverished conditions that put children at risk for going into foster care in the first place. 

Charlie Borrell, a county commissioner in rural Minnesota who describes himself as being “as conservative as they come” told NPR that forcing parents to pay ransom (again, our term, not his): 

"sets them up for failure"… He's seen mothers, often single mothers, work overtime or take on a second job to pay off the debt – "and then the kids are left alone and unattended and do not get the parental guidance that they need." 

And, of course we know what else can happen when the kids are left alone unattended.  

Our annual holiday reminder

 

It’s a Christmas miracle! Tampa Bay Times discovers wrongful removal

Anybody see any ghosts around here?

I don’t know how it happened.  Maybe three ghosts paid a recent visit to some reporters and editors one night.  But whatever the reason, after years of marching in lockstep with the Miami Herald – ignoring wrongful removal and sometimes fomenting foster-care panic -- the Tampa Bay Times has discovered that maybe all those children don’t need to be in foster care after all! 

Of course, the discovery comes way too late for all the children whose lives were destroyed by needless foster care – and the story fails to acknowledge the Times’ own role in making the Tampa Bay area such an outlier.  But it’s a start. 

● The story calls out the hypocrisy of Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri. She sheriff has launched a criminal investigation of the former “lead agency” overseeing foster care in the region, Eckerd Connects, because of appalling conditions in foster care.  But all the while, Gualtieri’s office continues to shovel kids into those very conditions by tearing apart families at one of the highest rates in the state.  Where have I heard that before? 

● There’s a story, albeit buried toward the end, about children torn from their mother just because the mother was a victim of domestic violence. Where have I heard that before? 

● And, again at the very end, there’s a good discussion of how the Broward County Sheriff’s office reformed to keep children safe while taking proportionately far fewer than Pinellas and Hillsborough.  Broward used to be an outlier, too, taking many children needlessly. But then, according to the story, 

In an unusual step, then-Broward Sheriff Scott Israel hired former Department of Children and Families deputy regional director Kim Gorsuch to run his child protective division. In Pinellas and Hillsborough, that position is handled by officers at the rank of major or captain. 

Gorsuch found that investigators were too often equating poverty with neglect, they didn’t understand addiction and might remove a child because one household member was using drugs even when another relative in the home could care for the child. 

She also found that Black children were disproportionately being removed from two high-poverty ZIP codes. 

When investigators told her they were trying to keep children safe, she posed a simple question: Are Broward kids really more unsafe than kids in the rest of Florida? 

The limits of miracles 

Even miracles have their limits, though.  

High up in the story, Robin Rosenberg of Florida Children First – a group which, itself, has long been a big part of the problem, is allowed to frame the issue as, in essence: Poverty makes those people bad parents who neglect their kids.  She tells us, in effect: Well yes, the kids could remain home but only with lots of “social services” and “monitoring” – in other words, constant, onerous surveillance and pointless hoops to jump through.  Only much farther down, in that section about Broward County, do we learn that poverty itself often is confused with neglect, and that is mentioned only in passing. 

Then Rosenberg tells us the high rate of removal “is particularly frustrating in a region where millions are spent on child abuse prevention programs.” Because her mindset  – that the parents may not be evil but they sure are sick, sick, sick! – runs so deep, it apparently never occurs to Rosenberg (or the Times) that the problem might be that a lot of prevention money goes to the wrong places: largely help that makes the helpers feel good, such as “counseling” and “parent education,” instead of concrete help to deal with poverty. 

And while Gualtieri blames “inadequate social services,” for why his office supposedly has to tear apart families at one of the highest rates in the state, he is not asked why he doesn’t use some of his own budget to provide those services.  As we pointed out in a previous post,  Gualtieri himself said: 

“You don’t whine about it. … You figure out a way to make it happen."

 So why can’t the Pinellas County Sheriff’s office take some of its budget and use it for emergency cash assistance, and rent subsidies, and housing repairs, and childcare subsidies.  Or at least follow the example of this police officer in Kansas City, Missouri. 

Across the bay in Hillsborough County, their sheriff’s office blames high rates of removal on substance use.  But only much farther down, again in that short section about Broward County, is there a hint that the knee-jerk response to substance use among poor people should not be to traumatize their children with needless foster care.  (That is almost never the knee-jerk response to substance use among rich people). 

We also don’t know if this story signals real change at the Tampa Bay Times – or if it’s more like: Oh alright, we’ll cover this angle once and then go back to business as usual. 

We know only that it’s a start.  And that it’s still not too late for three ghosts to drop in on some journalists at the Miami Herald.  But, come to think of it, maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea. Knowing the Herald, they'd probably just write an editorial urging DCF to take away Tiny Tim because the Cratchits are so poor.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending December 21, 2021

December is the month when editors rush to publish big projects, so they’ll be eligible for awards competitions.  That helps explain why there’s so much this week – though probably not the first item:

● As we prepare for another surge in COVID cases, this seems a good time for a reminder of the massive amount of media malpractice that took place at the start of the pandemic, when almost every news organization in America accepted the myth that, in the absence of overwhelmingly middle class, disproportionately white “eyes” constantly on overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite kids, their parents would unleash upon them a “pandemic of child abuse.”  

The latest to debunk this myth is the ultimate medical and child welfare establishment source: JAMA Pediatrics.  Unfortunately, it’s one of those overpriced journal articles – but every reporter who bought into, and spread, the myth, has an obligation to pay up and read it.  The title explains it all: "Child Physical Abuse Did Not Increase During the Pandemic." 

● A handful of news organizations already had figured that out; but they were drowned out by those which, even in the midst of a racial justice reckoning, bought into a “master narrative” that is racist at its core.  Still more evidence that there was no pandemic can be found in a landmark study from New York City by Prof. Anna Arons of New York University School of Law.  She recently discussed her findings.  There’s video and a summary on this blog. 

● As we learn more about the horrors inflicted on Native American children in “boarding schools” it’s tempting to dismiss that as mere history.  That will be a lot harder if you read this story from The Fuller Project and Mother Jones about the horrors family policing is inflicting on children right now.  From the story: 

“For the families that we work with, it’s constantly living in a state of fear,” says [Teresa Nord of the Indian Child Welfare Act Law Center]. “Grandma was in the system and now Mom is in the system and now the child is in the system… How can we expect our community members to even start healing? … “I live with this constant fear,” says Nord. “I call it child protection PTSD, that they’re just gonna one day knock on my door.” 

The story zeroes in on the state with the worst record in the country – right now – for tearing apart Native families: Minnesota.  As one expert put it: 

“There’s such a weird disconnect in Minnesota between this progressive rhetoric and this really racist structural system.  We’ve seen that with police brutality in Minnesota, but it’s also true in the child welfare system.”  

Although Minnesota is worst, it’s far from alone.  For some context, consider revisiting the outstanding NPR stories from 2011 on these same issues in South Dakota. 

The next three stories have a common thread: If you do not conform to the child welfare establishment’s straight, white, middle-class version of exactly what a parent should be and how children should be raised, then the family police are gunning for you. 

● A mother tries to support her child as he explores his gender identity – just as experts suggest.  She raises her children with love and care even though she is herself a victim of domestic violence.  Then an anonymous caller turns her in to the family police.  Roxanna Asgarian tells the story of what happened to the children in New York Magazine.  I have a blog post about some of the key takeaways. 

● Remember the Pennsylvania judge who took away a father’s children because he deemed the father too obese?  The York Daily Record has an excellent story about that case. 

● And in New Jersey, NJ.com takes an in-depth look at racial and class bias in the New Jersey family policing system.  (Though it’s billed as a subscriber exclusive, if you give them your email address, they’ll let you read it for free.) 

● At least the children in the stories above are still alive. Tragically, things turned out differently in a case in Tennessee.  As the Tennessee Tribune reports, the state’s family policing agency 

forced itself into [the mother’s] home to “rescue” two toddlers and a ten-year-old who didn’t need their help at all. They suffered months of trauma; the youngest child died.  

In this case the hospital involved got it right – but it didn’t matter, the family police took the child anyway. In another case, also reported by the Tennessee Tribune, the same hospital got it terribly wrong. 

● It’s a Christmas miracle!  After years of ignoring, and sometimes fomenting, foster-care panic, even the Tampa Bay Times admits a lot of children are being needlessly torn from everyone they know and love in that part of Florida. 

● Alas, no ghosts have visited the journalists at the Miami Herald yet.  I have a new column in Florida Today on what the foster-care panic started by the Herald (and encouraged by the Times, at least until now) has done to children in that state. 

● How far there remains to go can be seen in the fact that, as The Imprint reports, a bill that simply would require the New York City family police agency to tell families their rights did not get a vote in the City Council – in large part because the family police in New York City don’t want families to know their rights.  But, of course, if you don’t know your rights, you don’t have those rights – which is how the family police want it. 

● Shortly before giving birth, one mother ate a poppyseed bagel; another a salad with poppyseed dressing.  A hospital in Upstate New York drug tested them without their consent – and turned them in to the family police, which conducted traumatic investigations.  Now, WTEN-TV reports, both mothers are suing, with the help of National Advocates for Pregnant Women and the New York Civil Liberties Union.  According to the story: 

“By drug testing me without my consent and reporting a false presumptive positive result to child welfare authorities,” one mother said, the hospital “turned what should have been the most meaningful moment of my life into the most traumatic one. …they treated me like an unfit mother, told me I wasn’t allowed to breastfeed, repeatedly denied my requests for a confirmatory test, and ensured my name would be on the [state central registry of alleged child abusers].” 

● These kinds of policies are fueled whenever the hype and hysteria over drug use meets the hype and hysteria over child abuse.  Though not touching directly on child welfare, this column by Jay Caspian Kang in The New York Times illustrates, once again, how desperate we are to find another Worst Drug Plague Ever so we can keep on blaming poverty on poor people. 

● Remember those excellent NPR/Marshall Project stories about how family policing agencies grab foster children’s social security benefits to fund their agencies?  No one should be surprised that Philadelphia is among the prime offenders.  And now the Philadelphia Inquirer reports on how they do it, and what it does to families.