Greg Abbott’s (and Ron DeSantis') liberal enablers

Greg Abbott (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

A giant vehicle with nearly unchecked power to destroy families was built largely by the Left.  Too bad it never occurred to a lot of my fellow liberals that, someday, someone like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott [or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis] would get the keys. 

UPDATE, JUNE 12: NBC News reports that another right-wing governor, Florida’s Ron DeSantis also wants to exploit power handed to him both by liberal politicians and by liberal media, particularly the Miami Herald, which has campaigned for years to make the state’s family policing agency ever more oppressive and more powerful. 

My fellow liberals are very upset – as they should be. 

Everywhere you turn, it seems, the liberal child welfare establishment is churning out statements “blasting” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for unleashing the state’s family policing agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare agency”) against transgender children and their families. 

The Children’s Defense Fund is doing what it does best, issuing a statement. Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago did the same and included endnotes. The American Civil Liberties Union is doing what it does best – suing.  The group that calls itself Children’s Rights is doing what it does best – exploiting the whole situation to collect email addresses for endless fundraising appeals. 

And it’s not just the usual suspects. The federal government’s Administration for Children and Families, which can take six months just to clear its throat, already has an entire “information memorandum” out.  Even President Biden weighed in, condemning Texas for “weaponizing child protective services against loving families.”  (Meanwhile, some of the same news organizations who are outraged by Abbott bought into the whole racist COVID “pandemic of child abuse” myth.) 

President Biden is right.  CDF is right. The ACLU is right. Chapin Hall is right. Even Children’s Rights is right.  Greg Abbott’s cynical, callous, breathtakingly cruel attack targeting transgender children deserves all the condemnation it is getting – and more.   (And while Abbott has systematized such attacks, they are not limited to Texas.  This case is from Michigan.) 

It’s just too bad all these groups didn’t think of consequences like this when, either by action or omission, they built the very system that Abbott is abusing.  Some of them continue to prop up that system.  It’s too bad all these groups and individuals didn’t notice that the family policing system has been “weaponizing child protective services against loving families” – in particular nonwhite families -- from its inception.  

As Prof. Shanta Trivedi of the University of Baltimore School of Law wrote in The Washington Post on Feb. 28: 

Though many are rightly outraged [by what Abbott has done], those familiar with the child welfare system are not surprised.  Vague definitions of abuse and neglect open the door to state-approved discrimination. These laws have historically been used to control Black and Native families, and these parents live in constant fear that their children could be removed. … Child welfare laws invite discrimination and have been used to regulate marginalized communities. 

How bad is this system that runs roughshod over families and was largely built by my fellow liberals? 

NCCPR’s Due Process Agenda, called Civil Liberties Without Exception, begins with this hypothetical: 

Suppose, when he was attorney general, William Barr had proposed anti-terrorism legislation with the following provisions: 

Special anti-terrorism police could search any home without a warrant – and stripsearch any occupant — based solely on an anonymous telephone tip.  Any occupant of the home could be detained for 24 hours to two weeks without so much as a hearing – and they’ll probably be detained far longer because, in the special anti-terrorism court set up by this legislation, all the judges are afraid to look soft on “terrorists.” 

At that first hearing the detainees may – or may not – get a lawyer just before the hearing begins, and they almost never get effective counsel. 

At almost every stage, the standard of proof is not “beyond a reasonable doubt” or even “clear and convincing” but merely “preponderance of the evidence,” the lowest standard in American jurisprudence, the same one used to determine which insurance company pays for a fender-bender. 

And in most states, all the hearings and all the records are secret. 

Had Barr proposed such legislation, it’s reasonable to expect that civil libertarians would have responded with fury. 

Yet this hypothetical anti-terrorism law already is the law governing the system we call “child welfare.”  And sadly, many who in other circumstances are quick to defend civil liberties either stand silent or support it. 

Now Greg Abbott has driven home the consequences of liberal silence and liberal support for a child welfare surveillance state that tramples on civil liberties. 

The Right bears responsibility, too 

The Right should not be let off the hook here.  This is an issue that creates unusual divisions and unusual alliances.  It was, after all, Newt Gingrich who called for putting poor people’s children into orphanages.  It was the Right that watered down the Family First Prevention Services Act to eliminate the kinds of help families need most – concrete help to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty.  (They’re still at it, blocking President Biden’s anti-poverty agenda – which is the ultimate anti-child abuse agenda.) And much of the backlash against racial justice in child welfare comes from right-wing ideologues, including one who proudly analogizes her work to that of Charles Murray. 

There also are groups, on the Left and the Right who do understand this and have worked together to curb the family policing system. 

But when you look at the lawmakers who lead efforts to make state and local family policing systems even bigger and more powerful, they tend to come from the Left.  At the federal level, while right-wing Republican Tom DeLay was a prime mover behind the odious, racist Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, a law that passed almost unanimously, it had an even more powerful backer: Hillary Clinton. She was still bragging about it when she ran for president in 2016. 

So now, thanks to ASFA, if Greg Abbott’s family police take away transgender children and stall the process for 15 months, federal law actually requires the family police to seek termination of those children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights). Because under ASFA it doesn’t matter why a child was taken in the first place.  

Enablers in Texas 

It is much the same in Texas. 

For decades Texas media fawned over Scott McCown, first when he was a judge in Austin and then when he ran a liberal think tank, the Center for Public Policy Priorities.  For at least a decade McCown was the Godsource for Texas media – no story about Texas child welfare was complete without an obligatory Scott McCown quote.  His skill at portraying himself as the lone Voice of the Left fighting for children against the right-wing Texas political establishment enhanced his appeal. 

McCown was the personification of everything wrong with the liberal child welfare establishment.  He said there was no problem with wrongful removal, that families had all the due process they needed and he was explicit in demanding that Texas take away more children.  You can read all about him in NCCPR’s 2005 report on Texas child welfare. 

McCown’s legacy lives on.  Even as they write story after story about the hellscape that is Texas foster care, with rare exceptions, Texas media won’t even consider that the problem involves taking away too many children and the widespread confusion of poverty with neglect. 

Last year, the Texas legislature considered a bill to modestly narrow the grounds for coercive intervention into families and make it harder to confuse poverty with neglect. In a "news story" dripping with sarcasm, Dallas Morning News Austin Bureau Chief Robert T. Garrett almost brags about refusing to report himself on issues of wrongful removal and due process. He writes: 

GOP leaders want to put a tighter leash on [child protective services]; make it harder to remove children from their birth families … Some staunchly conservative Republican lawmakers have helped make individual families’ fights with CPS, covered by right-leaning news outlets, into causes célèbres.

In fact, in a legislature where Democrats are greatly outnumbered, they made up more than one-third of the bill’s sponsors and cosponsors.  The bill passed almost unanimously.  One of those apparently not too keen on it: Greg Abbott. He let it become law without his signature. 

So which is it, Dallas Morning News?  Is the vast right-wing conspiracy in Texas out to crush innocent families by misusing its vast power?  Or is the vast right-wing conspiracy in Texas tying the hands of noble caseworkers and turning a blind eye to child abuse by cutting back on that same power? 

It’s not just the Dallas Morning News.  On March 4, the Texas Tribune ran a very good story about parents of transgender children rushing to lawyer-up – as they should.  Because, as one expert said: “Once you're in the clutch of the child welfare system, you're very vulnerable.”   

But back when she was editor of the Tribune, and before that when she covered child welfare for that respected online news outlet, Emily Ramshaw (now CEO of The 19^th) wrote stories much like Garrett’s – and she, too, systematically shut out all dissent. 

Even now there’s a subtle bias.  Although the story about the rush to hire lawyers briefly mentions that some are working pro bono, it says no more about all the families who can’t afford to pay and aren't likely to find such a lawyer – which is most families “in the clutch of the child welfare system.”

UPDATE, MARCH 9: One Texas-based reporter does get it. In this excellent story for Slate, Roxanna Asgarian writes:

The child welfare system—decried as “family policing” by critics—is a particularly potent tool for transphobic politicians because it was set up to surveil families that fall outside of the white, middle class norm.

Not much of a learning curve 

Maybe all this would be excusable if these various organizations really learned anything.  We’ve seen that most Texas media have not.  At the national level, the ACLU has – they’re doing excellent work countering the use of predictive analytics (computerized racial profiling) in child welfare.  

But the Children’s Defense Fund, which has been fine with ASFA and opposed real child welfare finance reform is as regressive as ever.  Have you heard what they said about legislation to curb ASFA?  Neither have I. I haven't seen a word about it from Chapin Hall either.

And the award for chutzpah goes to Children’s Rights,  They have radically changed their rhetoric, especially their Twitter feed, but not their awful litigation – which repeatedly has made family policing systems bigger and more powerful.  CR even cites its own Texas McLawsuit – which does nothing to curb the power of the family policing system as somehow putting them “in a unique position” to recognize Greg Abbott’s hypocrisy!  (CR has an even worse settlement in Michigan, but they have leveraged none of their influence to do anything about what happened in the case cited above.) 

So here’s a test for any individual or organization who claims to oppose “weaponizing child protective services against loving families.” Are you ready to acknowledge your own complicity in building the weapon?  Are you ready to sue to stop wrongful removal? Are you ready to seek to reopen old settlements that fail to address the issue?  Are you ready to demand repeal of ASFA, or at least support significant reform?  What about it ACLU?  Where do you stand CDF?  Are you willing to do more than exploit the issue to raise money, Children’s Rights? 

And what about you, Mr. President?  Are you ready to support repealing a law that doesn’t just weaponize the family police – it gives them the equivalent of a nuclear arsenal? 

A teachable moment? 

Perhaps this is another teachable moment in child welfare.  Just as what Donald Trump did to children at the Mexican border brought home to millions of Americans the trauma of needless family separation, perhaps Gregg Abbott’s behavior will help my fellow liberals understand the need for civil liberties – without exception. 

It all boils down to this: A whole lot of people and organizations whose politics are a whole lot like mine decided that everything they professed to believe in about civil liberties did not apply as soon as someone whispered the words “child abuse” in their ears.  So they built a monstrous vehicle – like a giant tank - with the power to crush almost any family. 

But they never expected that, someday, someone like Greg Abbott would get the keys.

NCCPR in Youth Today: In child welfare, if the solution is money, the problem is poverty

 In the beginning, the builders of what would become a system of massive intrusion into families, and, ultimately, the separation of millions of children from their parents, all in the name of “child welfare,” insisted that poverty had nothing at all to do with what they labeled “child abuse” and “child neglect.”

“Child abuse crosses class lines” was the mantra in the 1970s and 1980s. In the effort to pass the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), discussion of poverty was suppressed. Unless parents — and not economic inequality — could be blamed, there was no way CAPTA was going to pass. Not surprisingly, the result was a law that has led us in the wrong direction for decades.

But then, when people noticed that nonwhite families were surveilled and had their children removed at vastly disproportionate rates, the child welfare establishment had a problem. There was no way they were going to admit to racial bias, so they said: It’s because those families are poor! (Spoiler alert: it’s actually both.)

Read the full column in Youth Today

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

 ● As almost everyone reading this probably knows, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act which The Imprint calls “a bedrock law passed in the 1970s to combat cultural genocide committed against Indigenous families.” 

● With ICWA in danger, states, which haven’t done nearly enough even with ICWA, are going to have to step up. Alaska Public Media reports on a study suggesting better approaches in Alaska – where two-thirds of foster children are Alaska Native or American Indian. 

● As almost everyone reading this probably also knows, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has unleashed the state family policing agency against transgender children and their parents.  But in a letter to The Washington Post, Prof. Shanta Trivedi points out that there’s nothing really new here: 

Vague definitions of abuse and neglect open the door to state-approved discrimination. These laws have historically been used to control Black and Native families, and these parents live in constant fear that their children could be removed. … What’s happening in Texas simply shines a light on a much larger problem: Child welfare laws invite discrimination and have been used to regulate marginalized communities. 

● The researchers who wrote the article for JAMA Pediatrics debunking the whole “pandemic of child abuse” myth discuss their findings in this interview.  They explain why the predicted explosion of child abuse never happened: 

We know that many people had more time on their hands due to work disruptions or remote work. They were less rushed; their kids were less rushed. During that period, state, local, federal government and neighbors stepped in. So while unemployment skyrocketed, there was eviction protection, stimulus checks, direct supports for food and utility services, and increased unemployment insurance. … We think that during the pandemic families were given enough support that they never got to that edge [of lashing out at their children]. 

Also: You know all those stories claiming there was an increase in hospital admissions for abusive head trauma? That wasn’t true either. 

● Every state has one: The grandstanding state legislator quick to exploit a child abuse tragedy and demand that more children be taken away. Soon, no story is considered complete without the obligatory quote from that lawmaker.   But things have taken a strange turn in Maine.  I have a blog post about it.

● Among the most dangerous words in the child welfare lexicon – for children – are “best interests of the child.”  They are an invitation for a largely white, middle-class power structure to impose its vision of “best” on children and families who, disproportionately are neither.  So it was encouraging to see the Washington State Supreme Court warn of “the danger of improper biases about ‘best interests’ contaminating the decision-making process.”  Those words came in a decision reversing a lower court which allowed a Black child to be taken from his loving extended family and placed with white strangers who tried to adopt him.  The Imprint has a story about it all. 

Three different stories from across the country focus on the enormous trauma inflicted on children misdiagnosed by doctors as abused.  

● In Arizona, KNXV-TV links a tragic case to a system so racially biased that, in Phoenix, 63% of Black children will have to endure a child abuse investigation. 

● In Missouri, after seeing stories like this from KSHB-TV, a legislator is introducing a bill to bolster protections for the falsely accused. 

● And in Illinois, a family is suing after their children were thrown into foster care for more than a year, all because of a false allegation from a doctor who allegedly was retaliating because she felt offended and embarrassed by the father. 

● New Mexico is moving to do a better job providing representation for families in child welfare cases.  Youth Today reports on creation of an independent Office of Family Representation and Advocacy. 

­● In Virginia, write Valerie L’Herrou of the Virginia Poverty Law Center  and consultant Esther Sherrard are urging the state and county-run child welfare systems to adopt a high-quality interdisciplinary defense model.   In a column for the Richmond Times-Dispatch they write that under the current system 

Usually, parents are assigned an attorney who has little or no training in parent defense, has no support to manage the case and is paid a flat fee of $120 — equal to a half-hour for most attorneys. In court, they face well-paid and well-resourced agency attorneys. 

Please keep that in mind whenever a family policing agency says they must be right because “a judge has to approve everything we do.” 

● After decades, people finally realize that family policing systems confuse poverty with “neglect.”  But how much of that can actually be seen in state laws.  Child Trends set out to find out “To what degree do child welfare agencies include income-related factors in their definitions of child maltreatment?”  They’ve produced a handy chart.  Of course in some states family policing agencies point to some provision of the law that makes an exception if, say, the lack of adequate food clothing and shelter is “only” due to poverty.  But this is largely ignored – the exception exists only on paper.  And, as Child Trends points out in a second chart, nearly half the states don’t even make the exception on paper.

Maine’s “Senator Soundbite” styles himself a crusader against child abuse. He also was “Director of Government Relations” and “Superintendent of Schools” for one of the most notorious “troubled teen industry” institutions in America.

State Sen. Bill Diamond says he thought any problems at the Elan School were resolved before he got there. Some survivors disagree.  

Maine State Sen. Bill Diamond

Every state legislature has one: the lawmaker who rushes to “blast” the state or local “child welfare” agency after a child “known to the system” dies.  Either overtly or by implication the attacks demand that the state move more quickly to take away children and move more slowly, if at all, to reunite foster children with their families. 

Local media love it.  Soon no story is complete without the obligatory quote from Senator Soundbite.  But while they’re making themselves media stars, their statements fan the flames of foster-care panic, encouraging more needless removal, doing enormous harm to the children needlessly removed, and overloading the system – making it even more likely that the next child in real danger will be missed.  

That’s not their intent.  Senator Soundbite typically believes what s/he says will “save” children. But these crusades have a way of backfiring.  Nevertheless, if you’re good enough at it, you can become a national media star – as happened in Oregon. 

But I’ve never seen anything quite like what’s happening now in Maine. 

In part, this is, once again, a function of the loss of institutional memory in Maine.  It is likely that most of the reporters who now rush to quote Maine’s Senator Soundbite – Bill Diamond – don’t know that he once worked for a notorious institution known as Elan School.  More important, they may never have heard of the Elan School – it closed in 2011.  If they knew, would they be as eager to anoint him their “Godsource”? (That’s the term I use for that one public official or “child advocate” who is quoted in almost every news story and whose words are treated as holy writ.) 

So let’s talk about what many Maine journalists may not know. 

A brief recap 

For most of the past 25 years, Maine embraced a take-the-child-and-run approach to child welfare. That changed for a few years after a little girl named Logan Marr was taken from her mother because the family’s poverty was confused with neglect and killed by her foster mother, who also was a caseworker for the state “child welfare” agency. A new governor, John Baldacci, demanded a new approach. Maine embraced family preservation and became a national leader in keeping children together safely. 

But it was all undermined by another governor - the state’s Trump-before-Trump governor, Paul LePage.  He demanded a return to the take-the-child-and-run approach.  And when two children died in rapid succession at the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, he doubled down.  Removals of children into foster care skyrocketed.  Of course, that didn’t stop the deaths.  On the contrary, there were more, again in rapid succession, in 2021. 

But instead of thinking: OK, maybe rushing to tear apart families doesn’t work, the state’s “Child Advocate” Christine Alberi and others are demanding even more steps to tear apart families and keep them apart.  They’re getting their way – Maine is taking away children at the highest rate since 1999 – a rate even higher than before Logan Marr died. 

Senator Soundbite steps up 

But that’s not enough for Alberi - or for Maine’s Senator Soundbite, Bill Diamond. 

For example, while proposing to give the take-the-child-and-run crowd everything it wanted – more money and power for Alberi’s office and still another caseworker hiring binge, the state’s current governor, Janet Mills, also proposed spending a few million dollars on programs to help families stay together.  Diamond responded by invoking the false claim that family preservation and child safety are at odds.  He said the state Office of Children and Family Services – which, again, already is tearing apart families in record numbers 

“should be placing the child in the safest place, not necessarily pushing the envelope so it ends up being a reunification.  The first priority, it’s been proven time and time again, needs to be where the child will at least be safe.” 

This is the mentality that contributed to the death of Logan Marr.  It’s been “proven time and time again” to make all children less safe. 

Diamond says he’s been in the fight to change Maine’s child welfare system for decades.  Maine media have accepted this without question.  Story after story has some version of “Sen. Bill Diamond has pushed for reforms to the child welfare agency for the past 20 years.” Or “Diamond has worked on child welfare problems for years, under four different governors.” 

But when I checked NCCPR’s comprehensive archive of child welfare system news coverage since 1997, I could find no story mentioning Bill Diamond – until child abuse deaths made headlines in 2018.  Of course, it’s possible that during all those previous years, Diamond was working quietly behind the scenes – but that doesn’t seem like his style. 

Diamond did write what is apparently a lurid self-published book about child sexual abuse, in which he courageously took a stand firmly against adults raping two-year-olds.  The blurb for the book repeatedly emphasizes that he’s going to tell you all the details: 

The book may startle and sicken you because of the cold, hard, facts that until now have been hidden from you. Why? to protect you. Real life suffering must be brought to the light of day so the collective "you" demands that it stop - no matter the cost. 

But that does not qualify one as an expert in a system in which, in Maine, 96% of children thrown into foster care are placed there in cases where there is no allegation of sexual abuse of any kind. 

But perhaps Diamond’s absence from the larger debate all these years is because, for much of the time, he had two other jobs – jobs which you won’t find mentioned in his official biography: Director of Government Relations and Superintendent of Schools for the Elan School. 

One might think that someone claiming expertise in child welfare would brag about holding jobs like that.  Unless, that is, you know about the Elan School. 

Not your average hellhole 

There have been a lot of news stories lately about the “troubled teen industry,” the collection of barely-regulated private institutions for children who are supposedly too difficult to handle any other way.  Sometimes desperate parents send their children voluntarily, other times they may be sent by state or local juvenile justice or child welfare agencies. 

Most of the stories deal with undertrained underprepared overwhelmed staff using excessive force on residents – sometimes with fatal results.  Occasionally, there are stories about “fight clubs” in which staff force residents to beat each other up. 

But Elan went beyond any of this.  At Elan the abuse was not a byproduct of overcrowding or cost-cutting.  At Elan abuse was intentional.  The torment wasn’t a byproduct of the therapy the torment was the therapy. 

Elan started out as a drug treatment facility – modeled on the notorious Synanon (Google it.)  Elan adapted the program to the troubled teen market. 

Former residents – a better term would be inmates, since there was no escape - repeatedly describe a “Lord of the Flies culture” in which bullying students of lower “rank” was part of the program. Young people would be surrounded by peers and screamed at for hours at a time.  Or, as a New York Times story explained: “At Elan, smiling without permission can lead to a session of cleaning urinals with a toothbrush that can last for hours.” 

What is mind-boggling is the lengths to which Elan would go to custom-tailor the humiliation to the “offense” – whether or not there really was an offense.  Tears stream down the face of a girl wearing a dunce cap as an adult tells her: “99 and nine/tenths percent of the people in this room told you they think you suck as a person, and if they had their way, they’d cut your throat, put you out of your misery, and relieve the human race of having to deal with an ingrate like you!”  

When inmates acted "like babies" they were made to wear a diaper and bonnet and carry around a rattle.  One girl was forced to wear a ring of tampons around her head.  Other inmates were forced to live in a dumpster for two weeks. 

Or consider what happened to the youth who simply said it would be a good idea if the unit where he lived could have a dog.  For some reason, this was an offense. The punishment: He would be the dog. For days he was forced to wear a dog costume, walk on all fours, eat from a dog dish and speak only by barking - one bark for yes, two for no. 

But you have to see Elan to believe it.  And you can.  Because over the years its co-founder, the late Joe Ricci, welcomed documentary crews. Some of their film is interwoven into a 2017 documentary, The Last Stop, in which survivors tell their stories.  It’s available on Amazon Prime, including a free version.  Here’s the trailer:

 

What Elan called “treatment” looks more like emotional waterboarding. 

The torment wasn’t only emotional.  Ricci admitted that therapy included requiring inmates to beat rule violators with paddles.  Ricci called it spanking.  The documentary suggests that was an understatement.  One survivor says that, over and over, she was spanked until she was black and blue and couldn’t sit down. 

Oh, and yes, Elan had its own version of a fight club – but only in the name of therapy. It may have contributed to one resident’s death, though authorities ultimately decided not to press charges. 

The fight club, known at Elan as “the ring,” reportedly ended in 2000.  But survivors of the program say the emotional torments and punishments continued right up until Elan closed in 2011. 

If you’re wondering why parents didn’t simply pull children out – they didn’t know.  All mail and all phone calls were censored.  Inmates even were forced to write letters telling their parents they were having a wonderful time. 

Diamond’s employment at Elan 

Maura Curley once worked for Ricci and went on to write a scathing biography of the man – and a scathing expose of Elan.  Curley writes that from 1997 until the school closed in 2011 its “Director of Governmental Relations” was Bill Diamond.  Its “Superintendent of Schools” also was Bill Diamond.  The Lewiston Sun Journal also reports that he held those jobs at Elan. A website that apparently hasn’t been updated for a while still lists Elan and still  lists Diamond as its “superintendent of schools.” 

Just before taking these jobs, Diamond had been Maine’s Secretary of State.  Then, in 2004, he was elected to the State Senate.  He’s been there ever since, except for 2012-2014 when term limits prevented him from seeking re-election. 

For at least six years while he served in the State Senate, from 2006 through 2011,
Diamond’s financial disclosure forms list the Elan School as one of his employers. (The forms don’t require legislators to disclose much, they don’t state his job titles or his salary.)  

As far as I can tell, the only journalist who’s ever asked Diamond about this is Curley. 

In that interview Diamond said he knew nothing about abuses at Elan while he was there – and he was barely even there!

 From Curley’s book: 

[A]ccording to Diamond, he “never had an office at Elan” and was “never on campus.” 

 Diamond characterized his decade and a half working for Elan as being a liaison with the Department of Education regarding Elan’s licensing. 

As to how one can be Superintendent of Schools and never be on campus, Diamond told Curley it was 

…primarily a title. “They needed a superintendent and I was certified as a superintendent.” Diamond said he dealt with [Ricci’s widow and successor] Sharon Terry and Elan’s lawyer, Robert MacColl via the phone.  He said they’d ask for his help with the Department of Education and he would “put them in touch with the right officials so they could talk with them.” 

Curley also asked Diamond about a passage in his book in which Diamond says that book 

“is about courage and determination, how kids learned to survive, even under the most terrible of conditions.  Facts need to be known, so there will be outrage. If not nothing will change.” 

Curley then writes: 

I observed … that the same … could be written about the residents of Elan and the school’s abusive practices.  I asked if he had any misgivings about promoting Elan…Diamond said he believed Elan’s problems were in the past, before he became involved in 1997.  He cited how Maine’s Department of Education actually produced some favorable reports about Elan… 

The Last Stop explained how that came about: According to author and journalist Maia Szalavitz, Maine officials always gave advance warning about their inspections.  In contrast,  in 2007, even as Diamond was getting paychecks from Elan, New York authorities, who had been sending youth to Elan, took a different approach. They had read a disturbing op-ed column by Szalavitz in The New York Times that included a discussion of Elan.  So they didn’t tell Elan they were coming.  Their inspection was a surprise. They were appalled. Their report was damning – and they stopped sending young people to Elan. 

A page from Maine State Sen. Bill Diamond's financial disclosure statement for 2007, the year New York decided to stop sending youth to Elan.

Curley asked Diamond about that: 

Diamond told me he heard from Sharon Terry and attorney Ed MacColl that ‘there was another whole side other than what was reported’ concerning New York’s allegations.  He recalled that Ed MacColl talked with the Elan Staff and seemed comfortable because Elan was meeting the guidelines from the state Department of Education. 

When I noted that New York’s Department of Education didn’t agree it was meeting its guidelines, Diamond again commented that he was not on site, had no knowledge of Elan’s daily operations. 

In the end, it wasn’t the state of Maine that shut down Elan – it was the internet.  Accounts of survivors went viral and that made it harder to get parents to voluntarily fork over the $54,000 in tuition to send their children to Elan. 

Again from Curley’s book: 

When I asked Diamond what he thought, reading negative comments by former Elan inmates on the Internet, he said: “I haven’t read any of them. Ed MacColl told me about them, Sharon as well, but they indicated it was about problems primarily in the past." 

Diamond made that comment in December, 2012.  Should Diamond watch The Last Stop he will hear at least three survivors recount the torment they endured during the years Diamond was employed by Elan. 

UPDATE: After reading this post, Maia Szalavitz shared her thoughts on Twitter:

& btw, how can you lobby for an organization that has been known to be abusive for many decades & not even visit to see for yourself? If you didn't visit unannounced, it's negligent; if you did & didn't report it, it's condoning abuse & also illegal.

— Maia Szalavitz (@maiasz) February 28, 2022

A matter of judgment 

As I said at the outset, though I believe Bill Diamond’s approach to fixing child welfare is wrong  - dangerously wrong, in fact - I believe he sincerely wants to help abused children. 

But all of this begs the question: Has Bill Diamond shown the judgment necessary to be considered an expert on child abuse?  Should Maine media treat him as their “Godsource” when he was unaware of what former inmates say they endured at the Elan School even as he was on the school’s payroll? 

At a minimum, instead of preceding every quote with some version of “Diamond has worked on child welfare problems for years, under four different governors” how about “Diamond was the former governmental relations manager and superintendent of schools for the notorious Elan School, but he maintains he was unaware of the abuses former residents say they endured there.” 

I used to say that any reporter covering child welfare in Maine has a moral obligation to watch one documentary: The PBS Frontline documentary, “The Taking of Logan Marr.”  Now I would add that anyone who wants to quote Bill Diamond should watch two.  

Because, as Bill Diamond might say: 

Facts need to be known, so there will be outrage. If not, nothing will change.

NCCPR News and commentary round-up, week ending February 22, 2022

The previous round-up began by comparing a real-life case to the depiction of a dystopian child welfare surveillance state portrayed in Jessamine Chan’s novel The School for Good Mothers  Now, Let Grow has a comprehensive comparison between the novel and the real world of family policing.  It is not reassuring. 

● One of the cases Let Grow cites is among the two discussed in this NCCPR Blog Post: Two almost identical “child welfare” cases. Same state. One mother’s treatment is “respectful and understanding” the other is arrested, hogtied and jailed. You’ll never guess the difference. (OK, you probably will.) 

● Often families are harassed when they have to go to work or to an urgent appointment, don’t have child care and so leave the children alone or with a sibling deemed by the family police to be insufficiently old to watch them. That’s what happened to Keyna Franklin, who wrote about it in Rise. 

● In North Carolina, an eight-year-old boy is taken, probably needlessly, from his mother.  He is institutionalized in a “group home” and sexually assaulted.  He discloses the assault to his mother during a visit, but then no one will even have the decency to tell her anything – until she reached out to Charlotte television station WBTV. They reported on the endless buck-passing in January and followed up last week. 

● Speaking of problematic institutions: There is no concept so good that the family policing system can’t mess it up.  Case in point, requiring that providers of services be “trauma-informed.”  It’s quickly turned into nothing but a hyphenated buzzword that allows “providers” to avoid real accountability.  

Case in point: A New Hampshire institution that holds children as young as seven – yes, even younger than the one in North Carolina. The New Hampshire institution was the subject of a “cascade of complaints.”  Their punishment: A brand new three-year $9.8 million contract – that’s $71,050 per child per year.  But the new contract says “trauma-informed” a lot.  I have a blog post about it. 

● To get a sense of what “trauma-informed” should mean, check out Vivek Sankaran’s latest column for The Imprint. 

● The abuses aren’t limited to group homes.  The York Daily Record has a timely reminder. 

● The abuses aren’t limited to the United States either.  For decades governments in the United Kingdom, both Labor and Conservative, imported some of America’s wost ideas and practices.  In this BBC interview, Taliah Drayak of the Parents, Families and Allies Network describes what it’s done to children and families – including her own.  The report she discusses is available here: 

The Way Forward from Andy Bilson on Vimeo.

● Speaking of really awful laws and policies, The Imprint has an overview of efforts to repeal, or at least amend, one of the worst: the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act.  Of course, the story includes some of the myths used by proponents to justify the horrors ASFA has inflicted on children and families – including the claim that ASFA reduced the time children typically spend in foster care.  In fact, as I wrote for The Imprint last year, it probably did nothing of the kind, and may actually have impeded any such decrease. 

● Canada’s CTV Network newsmagazine, W5, examined the harm done by some so-called “child abuse pediatricians.”  The good news: W5 found that a Texas law passed last year that requires second opinions in disputed cases already may be deterring such doctors from jumping to conclusions that destroy families.  The bad news: 49 other states (and Canada) still need such laws. 

● Among the many failings of the vastly overhyped Family First Act: A law meant to help counter the racial bias that causes so much needless destruction of families has racial bias built into it – in the way programs are evaluated to determine if they qualify for funding under the law.  The Imprint explains the impact on Native Americans. 

● ProPublica summarizes its series on the failings of TANF – the program that ended welfare as we knew it, including what happens in Arizona, which diverts a large portion of its TANF funds to child abuse investigations and foster care. 

● And New Mexico may take a small step toward improving legal representation for families.

Two almost identical “child welfare” cases. Same state. One mother’s treatment is “respectful and understanding” the other is arrested, hogtied and jailed. You’ll never guess the difference. (OK, you probably will.)

Geographically, Castle Rock and Aurora are less than 30 miles away.
But when it comes to what happens to those investigated for "child neglect"
they can be worlds apart.

All over the country, there are efforts to pass what should be called “right to childhood laws” – that is, very good laws specifying that, no, it is not “neglect” if you use your common sense to decide when your child is old enough play by himself in a playground, or walk to or from school by herself, or watch younger siblings while you work late on evening, etc. – in other words, all the things children did routinely before the days of fearmongering, helicopter parenting and endless messages to call child protective services about anything and everything. 

In Colorado, news accounts have focused on the story of Brinley Sheffield, who took a solo run around her neighborhood in the affluent community of Castle Rock when she was seven years old.  She’d previously run the same route with her mother, Christa. Brinley did have a scary experience -- she thought she was being followed.  And she was.  But not by a kidnapper.  She was being tailed by a local busybody who was apparently horrified by the sight of a child getting some exercise in the neighborhood, and then walking into her own home – by herself!!! 

But that was only the first scare for Brinley.  The busybody, no doubt proud to be performing her civic duty, called the police.  That, of course, was even scarier.  The prospect of being under police investigation is enough to scare any seven-year-old – and to make any parent second-guess her or his every move.   Both are inherently harmful to children.  As Brinley said: “I started to cry because I was scared. I thought I was going to get in big trouble.” 

But that is as bad as it got. 

Christa Sheffield said the police officer was “respectful and understanding.”  So the case was closed – in fact, no case was ever even opened. 

Meanwhile, in Aurora… 

Now, let's go less than 30 miles north of Castle Rock, to Aurora.  Vanessa Peoples was at a family gathering in a park when her two-year-old son wandered away.  He was gone for all of a minute, but by then another woman and found him – and called the police. 

One month later, police entered Peoples’ home – guns drawn – along with child protective services caseworkers.  As family defense attorney Diane Redleaf writes in Reason magazine, (I’ll link to it below) by the time they were done 

police had hauled Peoples out of her home and hog-tied her: wrists handcuffed behind her back and tied to her legs, which were in shackles.  “You know how you tie a pig upside down and his feet are hanging from the stick?” Peoples tells Reason. “That’s how they carried me.” 

But you don’t have to take Ms. Peoples’ word for it.  Watch the bodycam footage – but don’t watch it quite yet, since it might prompt you to jump to a conclusion that some of America’s leading child welfare “scholars” want you to know couldn’t possibly correct. 

It concerns what could possibly account for why these two families, living in towns less than 30 miles apart in the same state facing remarkably similar allegations, were treated so differently. 

Because, you see, if you do look at the photo of Brinley Sheffield and her mother in one of the news stories, and then if you watch the bodycam footage in the Reason story about Ms. Peoples, (OK, you can look now) you might be tempted to conclude that there is racial bias in child welfare. 

But of course, that can’t possibly be.  Notwithstanding cases such as these, and notwithstanding a wealth of data, we have been assured by everyone from Emily Putnam-Hornstein, America’s foremost evangelist for using “predictive analytics” – or, as it should be called, computerized racial profiling -- in child welfare, to Dean Richard Barth of the University of Maryland School of Social Work, that child welfare practitioners are so vastly superior to their counterparts in every other walk of life that they have eradicated racial bias in their field. 

So I guess we’ll never know why Christa Sheffield and Vanessa Peoples were treated so differently.