News and commentary from the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
concerning child abuse, child welfare, foster care, and family preservation.
● Speaking of the present-day normal in family policing,
attorney Diane Redleaf, author of They
Took the Kids Last Nightwill be talking to Lenore Skenazy,
founder of Let Grow at
this webinar on February 17.The
topic: “Someone Called 911 Because My Kids Were Outside!”
● Family policing systems have a way of co-opting and
perverting good ideas.That’s what
they’ve done with the concept of “primary prevention” – turning it into another
excuse to load families down with meaningless “counseling” and “parenting
education.”But in this webinar, from the
University of Baltimore School of Law, you can see what primary prevention
should be all about.
● When families tried to tell their stories to a committee
of the Tennessee Legislature, the
Tennessee Tribune reports, the Speaker of the state House of
Representatives shut them down.So when
the state family policing agency claimed that 80 percent of foster children are
reunified with their parents, there was no one to set the record straight: The
real figure is more like 47%.
● And finally, this isn’t new, but the format is new – and
improved: The inaugural issue of Family Integrity and Justice Quarterly,
devoted to assessing the harm done to children and families by the so-called
Adoption and Safe Families Act, can now be downloaded
and printed.
● One might hope that those various “problem-solving courts”
that have sprung up across the country – to knee-jerk acclaim in hundreds of
gushy news stories – would actually know how to solve problems. But, particularly when it comes to substance
use, some of these courts exist where so much of the child welfare establishment
does, at the
intersection of ignorance and arrogance.
Because so many child welfare professionals, and judges, view drug use
as a moral failing, they often reject the safest and most effective approach
for many parents struggling with opioid abuse – medication-assisted treatment.
Now the Department of Justice has stepped in.DOJ has issued a letter ruling that when
judges ban such treatment they are violating the federal Americans with
Disabilities Act.Though the cases that
prompted DOJ to investigate arose in Pennsylvania, the DOJ position applies
everywhere.Here’s the full letter and a
story from the Legal Intelligencer.
And one thing more: The letter singled out one judge in
particular.Turns out he’s
the same judge who tried to separate a father from his children forever
because the father is overweight.
● Last week’s round-up included The Imprint’s careful, nuanced analysis of the use of predictive analytics in child
welfare, with ample room for all sides of the debate, along with some startling
revelations about the work of the nation’s foremost predictive analytics
evangelist, Emily
Putnam-Hornstein.
I explore those revelations, and what they mean for
California, for Pittsburgh and for anyplace else that may be tempted to embrace
what amounts to computerized racial profiling in a two-part
post to this blog.
● Putnam-Hornstein is part of child welfare’s “caucus of
denial” – the group that thinks child welfare is magically immune from the
racial bias that afflicts every other part of American life.So she probably hasn’t seen this great video primer on
the topic.It was organized by the
Los Angeles chapter of Court-Appointed Special Advocates – the one run by a
child welfare abolitionist.Unfortunately,
odds are all those other CASA chapters weren’t
listening either.
● The headline from Rewire News sums up the case: “Eating
Poppy Seed Cake Got This Pregnant Woman Reported to Child Services.” The
report was only the beginning of the family’s ordeal.It’s another consequence of the widespread
practice of hospitals testing mothers and newborns for drugs without consent –
well, not all mothers, of course.
● The Houston Chroniclehas
still another story on the harm sometimes done by “child abuse
pediatricians.”
● And at last: A group involved in oversight of Maine child
welfare that shows a real understanding of the problems.I
have a blog post on the report of the Maine Child Welfare Advisory Panel Citizen
Review Panel.
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.
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.
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:
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, keyimplementation 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? …
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?
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.
●
A “scholar” who insists there is little or no racial bias in child welfare
writes a “predictive analytics” algorithm for the State of California. Somehow, the contract to write a so-called “independent
ethics review” of the algorithm is given to another “scholar” who also insists
there is little or no racial bias in child welfare. In fact, they co-authored a screed on this
very topic.
●
So we shouldn’t be surprised when the ethics review says it’s just fine if an
algorithm says a parent is more likely to abuse a child based solely on the
parent’s race.
●
A document from the California Department of Social Services indicates the
agency was appropriately appalled by the “ethics review.” They scrapped the entire algorithm project.
●
But it looks like the same ethics review is about to be used to justify still
another algorithm created by the same team as the one the state scrapped. This latest algorithm already is being rolled
out, very quietly, in Los Angeles.
●
This is only the latest in a long line of predictive analytics “ethics reviews”
that raise ethical questions.
In the history of efforts to target families for child abuse
investigations or otherwise harass them by using “predictive analytics”
algorithms, also called Predictive Risk Modeling (PRM), one of the more
spectacular failures was a system called AURA.
A product of a commercial software company, and a pet project of the
then head of the Los Angeles family policing agency, Philip Browning, it was
stopped during the testing phase after it was found to have one little flaw:
95% of the time, when the algorithm predicted something terrible would happen
to a child, it
didn’t.
After that, California decided to try its hand at building a
child welfare algorithm which could be used for a variety of purposes by the
state and by county family policing agencies. (In California, family police
agencies are county-run.)They gave the
job to a team led by Prof. Emily Putnam-Hornstein, the nation’s foremost
predictive analytics evangelist.She is
co-author of two algorithms used in Allegheny County, Pa. (metropolitan Pittsburgh).
One of those algorithms attempts to stamp an invisible “scarlet number” risk
score on
every child at birth.Putnam-Hornstein’s
own extremism is well-documented.
As far as I knew, the California algorithm was still in
development.
It’s not.
An
excellent story in The Imprint reveals that, after extensive
consultation with an impressive and diverse group of people, the California
Department of Social Services (CDSS) has pulled the plug.
CDSS concluded that Putnam-Hornstein’s team managed to
deliver the worst of both worlds: an algorithm that was overlooking real safety
threats and risked worsening racial bias in California child welfare.
It appears that an “independent ethics review” written in
2018 that claimed there were no ethical problems at all may have
backfired.It may have contributed to
alarm in CDSS and contributed to the agency’s wise decision to scrap the
algorithm project.
Unfortunately, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors
and the county family policing agency, the Department of Children and Family
Services, learned nothing from this.They commissioned Putnam-Hornstein’s group to write an algorithm to,
among other things, flag “complex risk” cases.Then, as the Imprint story makes clear, they sneaked it online
for three months in three regional DCFS offices, with no opportunity for the
community to object – presumably because the community might point out the
track record of predictive analytics and of Putnam-Hornstein.
When you go to the web
page where Hornstein’s group promotes the L.A. algorithm and click on
“ethics review” what do you find?The
same appalling ethical
review submitted to the state – with a promise that it will be “updated.”
So let’s take a close look at that document, and who wrote
it.
Race as a risk factor
Algorithms are not objective.Human beings decide what factors an algorithm
will consider when it coughs up a “risk score” concerning a child or
family.That risk score may determine
anything from whether a family receives “preventive services” to whether a
child is removed from the home.Predictive analytics evangelists hate it when critics say “determine” –
they say the scores are merely advice to give us humans a little help.But imagine what would happen if it became
known that a human ignored a high risk score and something went tragically
wrong.So while it is usually, though
not always, possible for a human to override the algorithm it’s not likely to
happen very often.
Most of the time, designers of predictive analytics algorithms
try to duck charges of racism by not explicitly including race as a
factor.Instead, they use lots and lots
of criteria related to poverty – is the family on public assistance?Was the family homeless?Are they on Medicaid? etc. – that
disproportionately include families of color.
But that wasn’t enough for the authors of the California
ethics review.They went out of their
way, apparently without even being asked, to say, in effect: It’s just fine if
you want to say children are at higher risk of abuse for no other reason than
the race of their parents!
This is fine, the authors say, because it will make the
algorithm more accurate.But their
measure of accuracy is not whether the algorithm predicts actual child abuse,
it’s whether the algorithm predicts future involvement in the family policing
system: Did the algorithm correctly predict that the family would be labeled
“substantiated” child abusers or the child would be placed in foster care?
But that’s not a prediction, that’s a self-fulfilling
prophecy.For example, in a system
permeated with racial bias, Black families are more likely to be reported, more
likely to be substantiated and more likely to have their children placed in
foster care.So when the algorithm looks
at which families are more likely to be “system involved” the algorithm
concludes that being Black makes you more likely to be a “child abuser” –
instead of concluding that being Black makes you more likely to be falsely
reported, wrongly substantiated and needlessly have your children taken.
Or, as CDSS put it in
a 2019 memo sharply critical of the ethics review
CDSS does not agree that it is ethical to include race in
the algorithm. Removing race from the algorithm does not eliminate bias, since
race is correlated with many variables. However, explicitly including race as a
variable simply provides an opportunity for more bias to seep into the
algorithm’s predictions.
Go ahead: Slap a risk score on every child!
The section on race only hints at the extremism of the
ethics review’s authors.
California never asked for an algorithm that would be
applied to every child at birth – an Orwellian concept known as
“universal-level risk stratification.” It is so extreme one might think no one would
ever do that – except that Putnam-Hornstein co-designed an algorithm that attempts
to do just that in Pittsburgh.
But even though this wasn’t on the table, the California
“ethics review” went out of its way to say, in effect: By the way, that would
be fine, too!
The California DSS appeared to be appalled, and said so,
sending a message that everyone in America, but especially in Pittsburgh, needs
to hear:
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.
No wonder California DSS seemed appalled. They were handed a
so-called ethics review that says it’s fine to slap a risk score on every child
at birth – and fine to label the child at higher risk of abuse just because of
the parents’ race.
The Charge of the White Brigade
Who in the world would take such an extreme position?
Someone who is a charter member of child welfare’s “caucus of denial” – someone
who insists that child welfare is magically
immune from the racial bias that permeates every other aspect of American
life.Someone who says that the
disproportionate rate at which the system intervenes in Black and Native
American families is only because past discrimination (racism is so
over, have you heard?) and the problems it caused has made Black people more
likely to be bad parents.In short,
someone with views just like those of Emily Putnam-Hornstein.
So now, meet the lead ethics reviewer for Putnam-Hornstein’s
California algorithm, Prof. Brett Drake of Washington University.
Not only does Drake hold the same views on all this as
Putnam-Hornstein, something he makes clear in the ethics review itself, he and Putnam-Hornstein
co-authored a
screed taking the same position on race, and denying even that poverty is
confused with neglect.Another co-author
is Sarah
Font of Penn State, who issued a report with a graphic labeling everyone
accused of child abuse as a “perpetrator” – even after they’ve been vindicated
in the courts.
The lead author of the screed is Naomi
Schaefer Riley, who proudly compares her own book attacking family
preservation to the work of her fellow American Enterprise Institute “scholar”
Charles Murray. Murray wrote The Bell Curve, a book maintaining that
Black people are genetically inferior.The Southern Poverty Law Center labels Murray a “white
nationalist extremist.”
In addition to the four authors, the screed has 13
co-signers.All of the authors and all
but two of the cosigners appear to be white.And that’s just the beginning.I
recommend taking a minute to Google them all.
This Charge of the White Brigade is nominally a critique of
the movement to abolish the family policing system.The white authors label this movement led by
Black scholars and Black activists “simple and misguided,” [emphasis
added].
But the screed isn’t only about abolition. It recycles the
same old attacks used for decades against any effort to curb the massive, unchecked
power of the family police. Their argument, in somewhat more genteel language, boils
down to: If you don’t let us do whatever we want, whenever we want to whomever
we want, you don’t care if children die!!!
So to review: An algorithm designed by someone who believes
there is little or no racial bias in child welfare gets a seal of approval from
an “ethics review” written by someone who believes there is little or no racial
bias in child welfare.
Though California DSS was not fooled, as noted above, Los
Angeles County has turned to Putnam-Hornstein to design still another
algorithm.As the Imprint story
revealed, it was rolled out on the sly for three months in three locations last
year.Presumably, this was done because
the communities in question might object to computerized racial profiling and try
to stop it in its tracks.So even as
predictive analytics proponents blather about consultation and transparency
their real approach is different.How
ethical is that?
As noted above, go to the webpage where Putnam-Hornstein and
her colleagues try to sell this latest algorithm and click on “ethical review”
and guess what turns up? The same review rejected by the California Department
of Social Services in 2019, but with a note promising an update.
If this latest experiment, using Los Angeles children and
families as guinea pigs, is allowed to continue, presumably, Putnam-Hornstein,
who does not believe there is racial bias in child welfare, will be in charge
of determining if this latest algorithm exacerbates racial bias in child
welfare.
All of which raises one question: How was Brett Drake chosen
to do the California ethics review in the first place?It
does not appear that he was chosen by California DSS.They say that the ethics review
was a required deliverable for a research grant that
supported exploration of whether a [predictive risk modeling] tool could
successfully assess risk of future [child welfare services]involvement.
If, when it comes to ethics reviewers Putnam-Hornstein has
had a remarkable run of luck.
A co-author of an ethics review of the Allegheny Family
Screening Tool (AFST), the first algorithm Putnam-Hornstein co-authored for
Pittsburgh is
a faculty colleague of Putnam-Hornstein’s partner in creating that
algorithm.They coauthored papers
together.But even those reviewers said
that one reason AFST was ethical is that it would not be used on every child at
birth.
Needless to say, this caused a problem when Allegheny County
decided it wanted to use another algorithm co-authored by Putnam-Hornstein to
do just that.So they commissioned two
more ethics reviews – including one from another ideological
soulmate ofPutnam-Hornstein.
But oddly, the county didn’t rush to publish them.In 2019, county officials just declared
that they’d gotten a seal of approval from the ethics reviewers. That is true. But the story is a little more
complex than that. It’s a story for part two, which you can read here.
At last: A group involved in oversight of Maine child
welfare that shows a real understanding of the problems.The Maine Child Welfare Advisory Panel
(MCWAP) Citizen Review Panel has
produced a report with six recommendations.None of them is a dud and three have the potential for significant
improvement.The only problem is that
the recommendations are too timid, often suggesting pilot programs for ideas
that have already been proven all over the country.
Unfortunately, when it comes to the most important
recommendations, the Maine Office of Children and Family Services, while not
opposing them outright, showed no enthusiasm. The OCFS response boils down to:
Hey Legislature, it’s up to you, we don’t care.That is to be expected from an agency led by Todd Landry whose callousness was on display back when he was running child welfare in Nebraska - and taking away children at what was then the highest rate in the country. He even made a
sick joke at the expense of vulnerable families.
The existence of this report also calls into question a
claim made by Alberi at a recent legislative hearing.Alberi claimed that all the various oversight
organizations concerned with child welfare in Maine are essentially on the same
page.
But even though Alberi is listed as a member of MCWAP, their
full report is not on the same page as Alberi – they’re not even using the same
playbook.And while Alberi’s approach
will make all Maine children less safe, if the state enacts the MCWAP
recommendations it will be a first step toward making all children safer.
Most important: High-quality legal representation
The most important recommendation, in keeping with evidence-based
best practice across the country, is for Maine to pilot legal
representation as soon as OCFS starts to investigate – as opposed to only after
a child has been taken away.The
recommendation is too tepid, calling only for some form of legal representation,
largely just so families know what OCFS will do to them – as opposed to
representation that lets families fight for their children and counter needless
removal.
What is actually needed, and what has been demonstrated to
significantly reduce foster care with no compromise of safety is high-quality
interdisciplinary representation, in which the family gets a defense team – a
lawyer and a social worker, not to get “bad parents” off, but to offer
alternatives to the cookie-cutter service plans forced on families by agencies
like OCFS, plans that often make everything worse. The team also may include a
parent advocate who’s been through the system herself.This also would free up caseworkers to spend
more time investigating cases, increasing the chance that they will find the
very few children in real danger.And,
by the way, because foster care is so expensive and because, in many cases, the
federal government will pay half the cost, this approach also saves money. Casey
Family Programs has some excellent resources on this.
Note that often these programs have the full support of
state or local child welfare agencies.But then those states and localities don’t have agencies run by Todd
Landry.
Flex-funds
The term used in the MCWAP report is “discretionary funds”
but in Alabama, where the idea came from, they’re called “flex-funds” The idea
is that service providers can spend $1,000 per family on pretty much anything
that family needs.It might mean rental
assistance, or a security deposit so a family can move to better housing.It might mean funds for car repairs so a
parent can get to a job.It might mean
emergency food aid, or repairs to a furnace or a refrigerator.This is crucial for preventing families from
being torn apart because of poverty.
In Alabama this was part of a comprehensive approach to
keeping families together that, unlikely as it may sound, has made this state –
a poor state with serious drug use issues (sound familiar?) a
national leader, relatively speaking in keeping children safe by keeping
families together. Maine would do well to take a close look at all the Alabama
reforms.
Once again, however, Todd Landry’s response to “flex funds”
is the equivalent of shrugging his shoulders.
Domestic violence
This recommendation is a fine example of how MCWAP
understands concepts Alberi can’t seem to grasp: In this case the issue is the
enormous harm done to children when they are taken from parents, usually
mothers, accused of “failure to protect” their children from “witnessing
domestic violence.” In other words, they
couldn’t get away when a husband or boyfriend started hitting them in front of
the children.When children are taken
under these circumstances the trauma of removal is magnified.One expert described such removals as “tantamount
to pouring salt into an open wound.”
The Western New England Law Review has an excellent –
and concise summary
of the research in this area, and a response to all the straw-man arguments
offered by those who want to continue this barbaric practice.
Fortunately, unlike Alberi, whose own report seems to
encourage this practice, MCWAP recommends that OCFS
prioritize efforts to decrease children from being
removed, or threatened to be removed, from non-offending parents for “failure
to protect” the child from exposure to domestic violence committed against the
non-offending parent by the offending parent.
This is the one recommendation of the three that OCFS does
not appear to be blowing off, but they still don’t get the urgency. Their response boils down to: This is one
piece of the work of a great big committee that’s working on revising stuff.
But it’s not that hard.
The right policy concerning tearing children from battered mothers because the
children “witnessed domestic violence” can be boiled down to a single word:
● I’ve never before led with a review of a novel, but
Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers is no ordinary novel. Some
might say it depicts a dystopian future child welfare surveillance state. Dystopian yes – but it’s only 20 minutes into
the future (10 if you live in Pittsburgh).
As
Kate Knibbs puts it in her review for Wired:
“This closeness to reality is what turns the book’s
emotional gut punch into a full knockout wallop. A mother reading it doesn’t
close the book, sigh, and think, Thank god the world’s not really like this.
No, she closes it and knows she must be very careful.”
Read it and you’ll find yourself thinking about it almost
every time you read about how the system functions right now.
● You might think of The School for Good Mothers when
you read this column in The Imprint from Former Juvenile Court Judge Karen Baynes-Dunning. It’s called “Stop
Blaming the Uncooperative Mother.” It’s part of the special issue of Family Integrity and
Justice Quarterlydevoted to the harm done by the so-called Adoption
and Safe Families Act.
● You might think of The School for Good Mothers
again when a child’s legal, state-approved use of medical marijuana to control
seizures leads to the child being dragged
from her home screaming by the family police in Oklahoma.
● There’s also a right way and a wrong way to report on the
use of “predictive analytics” in child welfare.
The
Imprint offers a careful, nuanced analysis
with ample room for all sides of the debate, along with some startling
revelations about the work of the nation’s foremost predictive analytics
evangelist, Emily
Putnam-Hornstein. Compare this to
how the Los Angeles Times contributor Garrett Therolf, systematically excluded
dissent from Putnam-Hornstein’s point of view when
writing about the same topic. (And, yet again, you may find yourself thinking about a certain novel.)
● The American University Law Review is sponsoring this
online event on Feb. 4: The
Impact of Race on Youth [in]JusticeThe last panel is on Issues in
the Family Regulation/Child Welfare System with an impressive group of
speakers.
● Along similar lines, Prof. Shanta Trivedi of the University
of Baltimore School of Law discusses “Why is America so Keen on Separating
Families?” on the
ACLU At Liberty podcast. The link goes to the recording and a
transcript.
There is no public transportation nearby. Its closest neighbor
is a business that rents heavy equipment. Children from Cook County … are
nearly a five-hour drive away from home.
“Illinois does not utilize locked residential facilities, and in
spite of the best efforts to provide care for children living in these
facilities, some youth choose to try to return home to their families
and familiar living situations,” McCaffrey, the DCFS spokesman, said
in an email. “In these cases, DCFS works with local law enforcement to help
return the children to a safe space where they can get the care and services
needed.” [Emphasis added].
So, instead of thinking: Hey, maybe those young people are
trying to tell us something and we should make their own homes “a safe space,”
we’ll just bitch and moan about the fact that we can’t lock ‘em up – and, as
the story also reports, give this horrible place and extra $647,000 to keep on
harming children.
● It began with needless removal of a child. Everyone stalls
and stalls until the foster parents can play the bonding card.Then the foster parents themselves go to
court to try to terminate the child’s rights to his own parents (a more
accurate term than “termination of parental rights.”)Apparently, you can do that in Tennessee, according
to this story from the Tennessee Tribune.
It’s easy to fix a failing child welfare system like the one
in New Mexico: just listen to your gut instinct – and do the opposite.
Gut instinct says: Children have been dying, as a Journal
editorial put it, “seemingly … under the noses” of workers for the Children,
Youth and Families Department – so we should rush to tear more children from
their parents at the slightest sign of abuse or neglect.
That is always the knee-jerk response to child abuse
tragedies, whether because lawmakers explicitly demand it or because workers
are terrified about what will happen to them if the next high-profile tragedy
is on their caseload. The result is a foster-care panic, a sudden spike in
removals of children from their homes.
