What do you do when you’ve institutionalized children as young as age 7 in a place that was the subject of a “cascade of complaints” alleging abuse? If you’re New Hampshire, you give ‘em a $9.8 million contract, of course!

This excerpt from a report by the New Hampshire "Office of Child Advocate" describes, and illustrates,
the "quiet room" at the Nashua Children's Home.

On the surface, this story from New Hampshire may seem like just another example of children institutionalized in a place that has been the subject of multiple allegations of abuse.  In fact, it’s much more. 

● It’s a story about the willingness of regulators to bend over backwards to dismiss complaints against such places. 

● It’s a story of how a state “child advocate,” even as she wrote a report that offered tepid criticism of serious alleged abuses at the place, suggested changes that are almost meaningless. 

● It’s a story about how the same “child advocate” unintentionally pushed the state to rely on such institutions. 

● It’s a story about how institutional providers dismiss the overwhelming evidence that, even when there is no abuse, institutionalization harms children. 

● It’s a story about how the limits on such places supposedly imposed by the Family First Prevention Services Act are as toothless as some of us predicted. 

● It’s a story about an institution that says it’s going to change its practices to conform to a new contract but denies that there is anything wrong with the way it did things under the old contract.  As a report from the “Office of Child Advocate” (OCA) puts it: 

[T]he [institution] expressed skepticism of the provision of evidence-based care now included in contract expectations. They questioned the value of evidence-based practices and noted conversations … in which they suggest [their] “practice-based evidence” informed their own development of a practice model 

Yet the Office of Child Advocate seems to believe the new contract will be enough. 

● Most of all, it’s a story about foster-care panic – about what happens when a state family policing agency, in this case, the Division for Children, Youth and Families, responds to a high-profile tragedy with a sharp sudden increase in removals of children from their homes.  New Hampshire now tears away children at a rate double the national average - in part because of the “Child Advocate” herself.  DCYF created an artificial “shortage” of foster homes.  So DCYF  institutionalizes children as young as seven, responds to allegations of abuse with bureaucratic gobbledygook and agrees to pay the institution $71,050 per year per child! 

All of this (except the part about the foster-care panic) is made clear in the report noted above from New Hampshire’s “child advocate,” Moira O’Neill, and a subsequent news story from WMUR-TV. 

So let’s take a close look at the case of the Nashua Children’s Home 

The first thing to know about the Nashua Children’s Home is it’s not a home.  It has 37 residents and is licensed for 55. That makes it an institution.  Children as young as seven have been stuck there.  So let’s be clear: The state of New Hampshire is willing to institutionalize seven-year-olds. 

The second thing to know about the Nashua Children’s Home is that even had there never been an allegation of abuse, the place would be bad for children of any age.  That’s because institutions are inherently the most harmful form of care – and they are unnecessary.  As is discussed below, there is nothing an institution can do that can’t be done better with Wraparound programs.  Institutions are especially bad for young children, which is what makes New Hampshire’s willingness to institutionalize seven-year-olds particularly horrifying.  

The third thing to know is that between March, 2019 and October, 2020 this one institution, the Nashua Children’s Home, was the subject of what O’Neill describes as “a cascade of complaints” to her office, 17 in all. Below I discuss two of them.  (I only hope that readers who probably have read many accounts of institutional brutality that are even worse than anything alleged concerning the Nashua Children’s Home have not become jaded to the trauma allegedly inflicted by this institution’s staff.) 

● Dennis was subjected to 27 “restraints” and removal to what the institution calls its “quiet room” – which looks more like a cell.  Under state law, restraints are only supposed to be used when there is a “substantial and imminent risk of serious bodily harm” to the child or to others.   But Dennis was restrained and/or hauled off to the quiet room for things like hiding in a closet or under his bed.  Dennis was eight years old. 

● Anthony was older, he was all of 16.  When he tried to leave the “quiet room” he wound up restrained, prone, on the floor, by three adult male staff – for an hour and 20 minutes.  A complaint to the division of DCYF that investigates alleged abuse in foster homes and institutions said that these actions “inhibited [anthony’s] breathing.” 

But DCYF concluded there was no abuse because Anthony suffered no actual injury (after all, it’s not like he actually stopped breathing) and the restraint was being used for “behavior management purposes.”  They did refer the matter to a separate unit that handles licensing of institutions.  

The licensing unit initially thought there was a problem.  But then the institution explained how the whole thing was just a result of their deep concern for Anthony’s safety.  You see it was very cold outside that night, and if Anthony had left not only the quiet room but also the entire institution, he’d be really, really cold. 

Although the OCA reports no evidence of anyone at the institution making any such claim at the time, the licensing unit accepted the institution’s explanation. 

I’m sure all readers would agree that all of these various authorities would have reached exactly the same conclusion had birth parents “restrained” their own children that way. 

Are they “creaming”? 

You would think that the institution wouldn’t be having so much trouble since it also appears to engage in a common industry practice known as “creaming” – as in skimming the cream.  They get to pick and choose who they’ll accept – and they get to kick them out when things get tough. 

Consider the case of 16-year-old Jake, also the subject of an allegation of excessive use of restraint.  Jake apparently was a juvenile justice placement.  (We should pause here to note that the OCA report expresses no concern – indeed, does not even mention, that 16-year-olds placed through the juvenile justice system are in the same institution as seven and eight-year-olds placed through the “child welfare system.”) Jake was restrained in a prone position for a mere 15 minutes – because he’d been sitting in the doorway of his room and yelling after his DVD player was confiscated.  That happened because his mother had given him R-rated videos.  Yes, really. 

The day after the incident, the director of the institution made clear he’d had it up to here with Jake.  He sent a slew of emails to Jake’s juvenile probation and parole officer, one of which said: 

"...I want this kid OUT on Monday...send him back to SYSC...convince a judge to make it happen. You know our reluctance in taking him. Especially during this time, can't have this kid endangering my staff like this.” 

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what SYSC is – it’s the Sununu Youth Services Center, which as one news account last year put it, has seen 

recent abuse allegations made by more than 300 men and women who say they were physically or sexually abused as children by 150 staffers at the state’s facility from 1960 to 2018. Eleven former workers have been arrested since April …   

Family First won’t fix this 

Back when the Family First Prevention Services Act first was introduced in Congress in 2016 we wrote that no one should believe the hype about how it would curb institutionalization.  On the contrary, we said, it institutionalizes institutions.  As we said at the time: 

If the bill becomes law, the federal government would stop reimbursing states for part of the cost of group home and institutional placement after two weeks. But it creates a giant loophole: funding would continue for something called a “Qualified Residential Treatment Program.” 

What does it take to become a QRTP?  Very little: 

● Write lots and lots of plans filled with appropriate buzzwords. (Drop the word “trauma-informed” into every third paragraph and you should be fine.)

● Hire nurses during working hours and have them on call the rest of the time.

● Get a rubber-stamp seal-of-approval from an accrediting agency.

Now flash forward to 2022, and the case of the Nashua Children’s Home. 

The Office of Child Advocate recommendations all boil down to: blah blah blah trauma-informed, blah, blah, blah, trauma-informed.  So basically, everything should be fine if the institution follows through on a new contract with the state that is filled with all the buzzwords needed for the state to keep collecting federal aid for institutionalizing children at the Nashua Children’s Home.  The contract is for $9.8 million over three years for 46 beds – or $71,050 per child per year. 

I suppose we’ll never know if children would be better off if the state just gave the $71,050 to the children’s families so they could buy whatever help they or their children need – but I think we can guess. 

As for accreditation, accrediting agencies are generally dominated by providers and make their money by accrediting fellow providers.  That’s not exactly an incentive to get tough.  The institution gets to choose its accreditor from a list of several. 

And sure enough, in its response to the Child Advocate, the Nashua Children’s Home reprinted nearly two single-spaced pages of gushing praise from the accreditor they chose. 

This behavior by the institution is crucial for another reason.  The Child Advocate is counting on the institution to obey all the terms, and all the blah-blah-blah trauma-informed in the new contract from the state.  But the institution has made abundantly clear it doesn’t really believe in all that blah-blah-blah.  Again, as the Office of Child Advocate report notes: 

[T]he [institution] expressed skepticism of the provision of evidence-based care now included in contract expectations. They questioned the value of evidence-based practices and noted conversations … in which they suggest [their] “practice-based evidence” informed their own development of a practice model. 

The institution’s rebuttal to OCA makes clear they think there is absolutely nothing wrong with the way they did things before the new contract – and they know better than a bunch of ivory-tower regulators anyway!  Indeed, the institution’s director, David Villiotti, told WMUR: 

“We think our staff should get a lot more kudos and recognition and congratulations than they do, rather than be criticized by somebody sitting up on Pleasant Street in an office or sitting at home.” 

Perhaps all this explains why, even though staff at the institution began getting “trauma-informed care training” in September, 2020, the OCA report concluded the training has had “no demonstrated effect yet.”

As for the quiet room, Villiotti said: 

“Our response is most of the people critical of it have never been in the position of having to deal with an out-of-control child.” 

But the gentleman in the video below has. His name is Karl Dennis.  He’s a pioneer in replacing not just “quiet rooms” but entire institutions with Wraparound programs that bring whatever help a child needs into the child’s own home or foster home.  Listen as Dennis describes how Wraparound deals with youth who are far more out-of-control than an eight-year-old hiding under a bed. 

Once again, the price of panic 

The other problem with the new contract is that, as a practical matter, it’s unenforceable.  DCYF wasn’t exactly aggressive about problems under the old contract.  Why should anyone think that would change? 

In fact, it can’t change.  That’s thanks to DCYF -- and the “Child Advocate” herself. 

Because right now in New Hampshire, it’s a sellers’ market for residential treatment “providers.” 

The video version of WMUR’s story ends with the statement that the state has 662 family foster homes but says it “needs” 1,000 such homes.  The implication is that this is why DCYF has no choice but to institutionalize young children. 

But the “shortage” is only because New Hampshire tears apart families at one of the highest rates in America, double the national average even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

It wasn’t always so.  Entries into care in New Hampshire began to skyrocket in 2015.  And though, of course, DCYF and other foster care apologists will blame opioids, plenty of states with serious opioid abuse problems don’t tear apart families at such an obscene rate.  More important, as has been documented over and over, the problem isn’t opioids as much as it is child welfare’s knee-jerk take-the-child-and-run response to opioids. 

No, what happened in New Hampshire was a classic foster-care panic – a rush to tear apart more families in the wake of high-profile child abuse tragedies, such as one that occurred in New Hampshire at the end of 2014.  Such tragedies often lead to bad “solutions” including creating “child advocate” offices which almost always throw gasoline on the fire.  Maine is a recent case in point, there have been many others. 

That includes New Hampshire, where the panicky response to tragedy included creation of O’Neill’s office.  O’Neill’s very first report annual report, in 2018, in the midst of skyrocketing removals, embraced the Big Lie of American child welfare – that children are endangered because lawmakers and courts supposedly are making the “best interests of the child” subordinate to “parents rights.” The data, of course, tell a different story. 

So O’Neill herself helped create an artificial “shortage” of foster parents which, in turn, means the state will keep on relying on institutionalizing children as young as age seven.  (It doesn’t help that, according to O’Neill’s report, on at least two occasions, the Nashua Children’s Home allegedly behaved in ways that helped undermine the transition of children into family foster homes – charges the institution denies.) 

All this is why all O’Neill’s blah-blah-blah about “trauma-informed” this and “trauma-informed,” that has such a hollow ring.  The problem isn’t that it’s wrong to be “trauma-informed” the problem is that people like O’Neill effectively stip the concept of all meaning.  Because, like so many others who invoke the phrase, O’Neill seems to be startlingly ill-informed about one of the worst traumas one can inflict on a child: Taking that child needlessly from her or his parents.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up update, week ending February 13, 2022

I may not be posting later this week, so here are some quick additions to the news round-up: 

● A couple of weeks ago, I linked to a review of Jessamine Chan’s novel The School for Good Mothers  The reviewer noted the novel’s “closeness to reality.” In fact, current reality isn’t always as bad as what is depicted in the novel – sometimes it’s worse.  If you doubt it, please read this story from Mother Jones.

● Speaking of the present-day normal in family policing, attorney Diane Redleaf, author of They Took the Kids Last Night will 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.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending February 8, 2022

● 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. 

● The Imprint’s weekly podcast features a fascinating interview with Andrea Elliott, author of Invisible Child. 

● 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. 

● There’s more about the failure of the current system, the racial and class bias that are built into it, and the case for abolition in this Youth Today interview with University of Pennsylvania Prof. Dorothy Roberts, author of Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare and the forthcoming Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families--and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. Prof. Roberts also is a member of the NCCPR Board of Directors.

● 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 Chronicle has 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.

Cutting through the spin about predictive analytics in child welfare

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

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

Second of two parts.  Read part one here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selling Hello Baby 

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

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

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

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

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

Veale suggests that the county come up with 

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

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

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

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

At that point three things happen: 

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

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

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

A pinky swear is not enough. 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining “voluntary” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allegheny County does not have an institutional review board.

In child welfare, where do ethics reviews come from?

KEY POINTS 

● 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.

First of two parts. Read part two here.

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 of  Putnam-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.

Maine Child Welfare Advisory Panel charts a better way forward

There's some good stuff in this report.

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. 

It speaks volumes about the failure of Maine’s child welfare “ombudsman,” Christine Alberi, that even Landry thinks Alberi goes too far in recommending the removal of children from their homes. 

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: 

Don’t. 

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending Feb. 1, 2022

● 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 Quarterly devoted 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 is a right way and a wrong way to cover the release of the federal government's annual Child Maltreatment report.  I have a blog post about how the Associated Press got it wrong. In contrast, The Imprint got it right. 

● 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]Justice The 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’s still another example of the price of foster-care panic in Illinois: The state is warehousing children at one of those awful parking place “shelters” for an average of 107 days.  Oddly, some of the children don’t want to stay there. As Beth Hundsdorfer of Capitol News  Illinois reports: 

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. 

● Remember that “child abuse pediatrician” who quit her job in Wisconsin under fire, then turned up in Alaska. She just quit her job in Alaska, under fire. 

● 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.