NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending December 13, 2023

● WBTV and The Assembly conclude their three-part series on the failure of family policing with a searing story about how the agency and the courts moved heaven and earth to keep a loving father away from his own son. 

And if you think this is a case in which a stranger foster parent is fighting the father – nope. On the contrary, the foster father was so supportive that when the family police tried to use housing as an excuse to keep father and son apart, the foster father bought a house so the birth father could rent it at a price he could afford. 

The true level of contempt for families is summed up by one incident. Remember, family police agencies are supposed to conduct intensive searches to find relatives to care for these children.  But here the family police give away what really happens.  When the agency sought to persuade the foster parents to adopt, here’s what the foster father says he was told: 

“Family will come out of the woodwork when we do this.  [But] We’ll handle them for you.” 

Meanwhile, the child has been moved to his fifth foster placement.  Caseworkers report that he’s regressing and he blames himself for not being with his father.  He is upset that he “could not be good long enough to go home.” 

● More than 20 years ago, in the landmark class-action lawsuit known as Nicholson v. Scoppetta, both state and federal courts told New York family police agencies that no, you are not allowed to tear apart families just because a mother is, herself, a victim of domestic violence.  (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs.)  

Among the reasons: 

--Research shows the trauma caused to children when they’re separated in these types of cases is even worse than the trauma in other situations.

--Research shows the trauma of removal in such situations is worse than any trauma that may be caused by witnessing domestic violence.

--Fear of family police coming to take away the children deters women from seeking help – and abusers know it. 

The practice was curbed, but never fully stopped.  And now, it seems, the family police in New York City (the main target of the original suit) have decided that, well, maybe we can’t take the children, but we sure can harass the mothers!  So now there’s a new lawsuit. There’s a good story about it in the Daily News and here’s the press release from the lawyers bringing the new suit. 

● Still, New York City is ahead of most states including California where, CalMatters reports, various officials and advocates wallow in ignorance concerning the research and continue to support inflicting this needless trauma on the children of battered mothers.  

● But New York is not ahead in every way.  New York’s governor decided that, when it comes to whether a judge should allow children any continued contact with their parents after their rights to those parents have been terminated, she knows better than the lawyers who represent children in these cases, the head of New York City’s family police agency, older adopted children themselves, and the judges themselves.  So, as The Imprint reports, she vetoed a bill to allow judges to make such decisions.  It’s the third time since 2019 that governors have caved-in to the state’s powerful middle-class adoptive and foster parent lobby and vetoed the bill. 

● WJBK-TV Detroit and Fox35 Orlando report on Detroit grandparents fighting for custody of their grandchildren in Florida.  At first, the grandmother says, Florida family police said yes, and the grandparents rushed to Florida.  Then, they say, the family police changed their minds – and offered no explanation.  Now the grandchildren are split among different stranger-care homes.  A seven-year-old even had his phone taken away because, the family police reportedly said, he was calling his family too often. 

● Here’s a shocker: A state family police agency is promising to obey the law!  The Arizona Republic reports that: 

The Arizona Department of Child Safety soon will no longer investigate reports of marijuana exposure in newborns — as long as the parent has a medical marijuana card and there are no other allegations of risk to the child. 

The shift in policy, scheduled for next month, could affect scores of pregnant women. It comes in the wake of a state Court of Appeals ruling that found Arizona's medical marijuana law protects such use because the patient is under a doctor's care. 

Of course, the agency can go right on harassing families where the marijuana use is recreational or where there is other drug use that poses no threat to the child.  

● When even Colorado’s child welfare “ombudsman” – whose many failings are discussed in NCCPR’s Colorado report – says a county family police agency is biased and the state’s investigation amounts to a whitewash, then you know the agency is biased and the state investigation is a whitewash.  KUSA-TV has the story. 

● There have been years of court hearings, orders and, in one case, even a settlement and a declaration of victory.  But things in Texas and Tennessee are as bad, or worse, than ever. I have a two-part Blog post about the failure of the McLawsuits brought by Children’s Rights and A Better Childhood. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories go in All Directions: 

● From the Altoona Mirror: 

Clearfield County has asked a federal judge to block a subpoena for child welfare records involving three young adults who were placed in a Clearfield County foster home 15 years ago but who are now contending their placement unlawfully deprived them of their familial relationships while growing up. 

The young adults include Matthew, Rebecca and Isaac Krause, who, in a civil complaint, say they were removed from their Altoona home in 2008 by police as a way to pressure their parents into cooperating with an ongoing drug investigation. 

The now-adult children state they were never returned to their Altoona family and noted they were subject to severe physical and mental abuse by the foster parents, Barbara and Timothy Krause. 

● From The Imprint: 

A jury in Northern California has awarded nearly $25 million to three siblings who were sexually abused by a foster parent, compensation that attorneys for the children describe as some measure of accountability for the assaults they suffered. 

And from Law and Crime, the headline says it all: 

Foster mother indicted — again — for allegedly ignoring dying, disabled teenager coughing up blood after first murder charge dismissed.

The failure of the child welfare McLawsuits, Part Two

The group that calls itself "Children's Rights" touts its Tennessee McLawsuit 
as a huge success.  The 12-year-old in this photo, obtained by
Nashville television station WTVF, might disagree. You can watch their story here.

By the time the group that calls itself “Children’s Rights” was done with Tennessee, the state was taking away 24% more children than it was when the suit was filed.

 Now the system is in chaos, a family was torn apart for “driving while Black” and a 12-year-old was hogtied in a new makeshift institution.  If this is success, what does it take for CR to declare one of its McLawsuits a failure?

Part one of this post deals with the failure of the massive McLawsuit brought in Texas by the groups calling themselves “Children’s Rights” and “A Better Childhood.”  This part deals with a similar failure by Children’s Rights in Tennessee.

In 2000, the group that calls itself “Children’s Rights” filed one of its McLawsuits -- massive, similar class actions the group has brought across the country for decades -- in Tennessee.  Court supervision didn’t fully end for 19 years.  To read the account on CR’s website you’d think their suit turned a dreadful, failing “child welfare” system into a shining success story.  According to CR: 

In 2017 Jim Henry, former DCS Commissioner, reflected, on the lawsuit’s success: “…[W]e deserved to get a lawsuit. The fact is, we’re a much better system now. We’re better off for it, the kids are better off and I think the taxpayers are better off.” 

I can think of one 12-year-old who might disagree with CR’s glowing assessment.  He’s the boy you can see in the photo at the top of this post, which comes from some outstanding investigative reporting by Nashville television station WTVF; the boy who was hogtied.  You can watch the full story here. 

CR claims that, thanks to its McLawsuit “The use of grossly inadequate emergency shelters and large orphanage-style institutions has ended.”  But just four years later, the Tennessee Department of Child Services, their family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) has opened a bunch of new ones. 

It was in one such place that the 12-year-old was held face down, handcuffed and hogtied – after DCS specifically changed its policy to allow the handcuffing of children in these places. 

Of course, any system can have an isolated failure.  But what’s happening in Tennessee is not isolated.  Just four years after CR declared final victory and got out, story after story after story after story documents a system is in chaos. 

The institution where that 12-year-old boy was hogtied is one of an entire network of new institutions the state opened – because (don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before) children were sleeping in state offices and DCS was getting bad press about it. 

WTVF reports on what DCS’ own inspector, Brenda Myers, found – and what happened to her:  She wrote a memo documenting the horrible conditions.  She says her boss, the DCS commissioner told her to rewrite it to cover up the truth.  She reluctantly did it – and immediately quit.  Watch the story here. 

As the story notes, DCS came up with a solution to the problem of embarrassing inspections of hideous facilities – they stopped the inspections. 

And remember how, in Texas, Texas public radio reported this about kids in makeshift placements? 

if parents behaved the way [the Texas family police agency] does with [these] kids … multiple judges TPR spoke to said they would remove its kids.” 

WTVF put the same question to the whistleblower in Tennessee: 

NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked, "If you went to a private home and saw conditions like what would you do?"  Myers responded, "We would recommend removal." 

As noted above, these hellhole institutions were created because Tennessee children were forced to sleep in offices.  They were held in offices because there was no place else to put them.  Why is there no place else to put them?  A clue can be found in the case of that hogtied 12-year-old. He was not taken away because he was beaten or tortured or sexually abused.  WTVF obtained an internal DCF memo that said the boy was institutionalized because "mom was unable to care for him and did not have the resources to do so." 

Also in Tennessee, in the midst of having no place to put kids, the Tennessee family police agency rushed to take away the children of parents whose only crime could be boiled down to Driving While Black. 

No surprises here 

You could see it all coming decades ago when CR first brought its Tennessee McLawsuit.  At the time, we simply compared the “Statement of Principles” in the Tennessee settlement to the one in one of the few relatively successful class-action lawsuits against a “child welfare” system, the one in Alabama, and posed a simple question: “If these principles can indeed become reality, which would be the better reality for vulnerable children?” 

CR didn’t just ignore the problem of wrongful removal, CR stepped in and successfully sued to prevent the Tennessee Legislature from acting to curb it in the county where the problem was worst.  And they used some pretty disturbing tactics to do it. 

So it should be no surprise that in 2019, when the lawsuit and the court monitoring ended,  Tennessee took away 24% more children than it did when the lawsuit was filed in 2000.  So it’s no wonder CR’s claims of success don’t always hold up well. 

According to CR: 

DCS has dramatically reduced its historical over-reliance on non-family institutional placements … The percentage of Tennessee children in foster care placed with families has risen and has been maintained at approximately 88 percent. 

Not anymore.  While the national average has gotten better, Tennessee has gotten worse.  As of 2021, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, and just two years after CR declared final victory, 16% of Tennessee foster children were institutionalized – a rate nearly 80% above the national average.  That was before DCS opened institutions like the ones exposed by WTVF.  And Tennessee uses the least harmful form of foster care, kinship foster care, at a rate barely more than one-third the national average. That’s probably one of the worst records in the country. 

Tennessee also illustrates the ongoing disconnect between CR’s excellent public policy work and its lousy McLawsuits.  The public policy arm has done outstanding work questioning things like the mad rush to terminate children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than termination of parental rights) to push them into adoptive homes.  But in Tennessee CR brags that, thanks to its litigation, 

DCS is consistently providing more and faster permanent adoptive homes for children in foster care. 

Yes, there’s always backsliding 

Even in those rare cases where good lawsuits lead to real accomplishments, some backsliding is probably inevitable once the court-appointed monitors pack up and leave and the courts let the family police agency off the hook. 

For decades, we’ve cited the lawsuit and subsequent settlement in Alabama as a model. (A member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors was co-counsel for plaintiffs.)  We’ve pointed to a front-page story in The New York Times – but that was 2005.  More recent news stories still show a system that is far less bad than most.  (To be clear: There are no good systems; the continuum runs from bad, to worse, to horrible, to hellscape.)  But there has been backsliding in Alabama.  There’s even another lawsuit – brought by, among others, Children’s Rights – specific to children held in the worst placements of all “residential treatment centers.” 

In New York City we often cite the lawsuit that stopped the city from taking children from parents, almost always their mothers, just because the mothers are survivors of domestic violence.  (NCCPR’s Vice President was co-counsel for plaintiffs in that one.)  That suit never completely stopped the practice – but it curbed it.  What it did not do was stop the New York City family police agency from putting these mothers under onerous, sometimes crippling surveillance.  That’s why anotherlawsuit has just been filed to stop that practice. 

But Alabama remains a significantly less bad system than it was before the lawsuit.  And, battered women in New York City are far less likely to have their children torn from their arms than they were before that lawsuit. 

In contrast, what little progress there may have been in Tennessee – if any - collapsed with breathtaking speed.  

So the real lesson here is: Bring better lawsuits to begin with – so when the backsliding happens it will be slower and take longer to erode the progress.  And every year that progress is maintained is one year that children are safer, both from abuse inflicted by their own families and abuse inflicted by the family police. 

Lessons from other McLawsuits 

There are four CR McLawsuits that have been followed by system improvements.  But correlation is not causation.  In two of the four locations, the McLawsuits got in the way of progress for decades.  

In all four locations, New York City, New Jersey, Connecticut and Washington, D.C. the key to improvement (not success, these are less bad systems) was the same: Sooner or later, sometimes after decades, leaders were named to the family police agencies who said, in effect, to hell with the micromanaging b.s. from Children’s Rights: I’m going to be laser-focused on safely keeping families together.  That shrank these systems to the point that they could make other improvements. 

All four jurisdictions now tear apart families at rates well below the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. (Tennessee, on the other hand, takes children at a rate 20% above the national average.)  So imagine how much progress could be made if CR started negotiating settlements that emphasized reducing needless foster care in the first place.

The failure of the child welfare McLawsuits, Part One

There have been years of court hearings, orders and, in one case, even a settlement and a declaration of victory.  But things in Texas and Tennessee are as bad, or worse, than ever. 

Instead of making the dreadful Texas "child welfare" system better,
"Children's Rights" and "A Better Childhood" set off what amounts to
a giant game of whack-a-mole.

News from Texas and Tennessee in recent weeks illustrate the futility – or worse – of those massive McLawsuits brought against “child welfare” systems, mostly by two groups, the one founded by Marcia Lowry (with a lot of help from corporate raider Carl Icahn) called “Children’s Rights” (CR) and the one founded by Marcia Lowry when she split from Children’s Rights and formed a group called “A Better Childhood.” 

I call them McLawsuits because they’re like fast food franchises – nearly identical massive class-action lawsuits that say pretty much the same things, call for the same micromanaging remedies, and, most important, ignore the problem at the root of all the others – the needless removal of children, often when poverty is confused with neglect. 

That’s why, in most cases, they accomplish nothing, and in some cases they make things worse.  In Michigan, where CR has a consent decree, Prof. Vivek Sankaran, director of the Child Advocacy Law Clinic and the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic at the University of Michigan School of Law says the best thing CR could do would be to get out. 

With Lowry’s departure, CR changed a lot and for the better.  They now have an outstanding public policy arm that has joined groups like NCCPR in calling for progressive changes such as radically curbing the use of institutions and facing up to the racism that permeates family policing.  But that can actually put the public policy arm of CR at odds with the litigation arm. 

For example: The public policy side has wisely joined NCCPR and other family advocacy organizations in condemning the so-called Adoption and Safe Families Act - putting it way ahead of other big, mainstream “child welfare” groups.  But CR’s lawsuit complaints in Texas and in Michigan call for stricter enforcement of ASFA! 

So let’s see how that’s all been working out lately.  In part two, we look at Tennessee.  We’ll start today with Texas: 

When Lowry “divorced” CR to create A Better Childhood each group got custody of some of the McLawsuits underway at the time of the split, with one exception.  They share custody of the one in Texas. 

The one thing the McLawsuits do well is offer thorough, vivid descriptions of how awful “child welfare” systems typically are.  In January 2016, I described federal judge Janis Jack’s first decision in favor of CR as a guided tour of the hellscape of Texas foster care.  Not that this was a surprise.  Nearly 12 years earlier, NCCPR documented the same hellscape in a comprehensive report on Texas “child welfare” – and that report relied on the work of  Texas journalists and advocates who had come before us.  

There are two differences between our report and CR’s McLawsuit: 

● We proposed better solutions.

● We didn’t have a court to enforce those solutions. 

CR and A Better Childhood have no such excuse.  Despite all the might of these two organizations, their high-powered law firm partners and a sympathetic judge, Texas “child welfare” is still a hellscape – as we predicted it would be in 2016. 

In fact, what CR and A Better Childhood set in motion in Texas is a giant game of whack-a-mole.  The lawsuit demanded that hellacious institutions be fixed up or shut down.  Since institutions are largely unfixable, some of them shut down.   But, because the lawsuit did not demand that fewer children be taken away, there was no place to put the kids who used to be consigned to those horrible institutions. 

So they were housed in state family policing agency offices. 

There followed demands to stop stashing the children in offices. 

So they were forced into hotels – including hotels known to be centers of sex trafficking. 

These children are known as “children without placements” and, as Texas Public Radio explained, 

“… children have died, they were sex trafficked and they were impregnated while under [that] status. … if parents behaved the way [the Texas family police agency] does with [these] kids … multiple judges TPR spoke to said they would remove its kids.” 

So surely it should be obvious by now to Children’s Rights and A Better Childhood that they need to go back to the drawing board and seek a settlement to their McLawsuit built around safe, proven ways for Texas to stop taking so many of them in the first place.  

And yes, Texas takes a lot of kids.  Officially the state’s rate-of-removal is low, but that’s only because Texas may make more use than any other state of “hidden foster care” – off-the-books placements that are not reported in official figures.  If they were, odds are the number of children reported as entering foster care would nearly triple. 

The Legislature steps in 

One group gets this -- albeit not the one you might expect: The Texas Legislature.  They passed a series of bills to curb the vast nearly unchecked power of the family police to needlessly tear apart families.  If those new laws are allowed to remain on the books unchanged, they, alone, won’t solve all the problems.  But their enforcement is an essential prerequisite to solving all the problems – since that will open up spaces in actual family foster homes for the children who really need them.  

Opening those spaces alone won’t be enough.  Those foster families, and birth families whose children can safely remain at home or be reunited, are going to need far more support in order to care for children, some of whom were damaged by actual abuse, almost all of whom were damaged by the abuse inflicted on them by being forced into the hellscape of Texas foster care. 

Instead, of course, there is a media-fueled campaign against the new laws. They are being scapegoated for every horror story – even horror stories that took place before the new laws took effect.  Apparently, those wedded to the take-the-child-and-run status quo want Texans to believe that, before the new laws, there were no horror stories.  No child ever died of abuse because they all were rescued and lived happily ever after in the rainbows and unicorns land of Texas foster care.  

Unfortunately, a lot of media seem to be buying it – especially in San Antonio, which always has been the most trigger-happy city in Texas when it comes to taking away children. 

The attacks against the new laws are spearheaded by exactly whom you would expect: the Texas chapter of Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA).  Study after study has shown that CASA makes outcomes for children worse – and one of those studies was commissioned by Texas CASA itself.  

That study found that when Texas CASA gets involved:

“Overall, children appointed a CASA have significantly lower odds than children without a CASA of achieving permanency.” [Emphasis added.]

Compared to children not burdened with a CASA on the case, Texas foster children with CASAs were:

● Less likely to be reunified with their own parents.

● Less likely to find permanence in the form of guardianship by a relative.

● More likely to “age out” of foster care with no home at all.

Yet now, when Texas CASA – a group that should have the least credibility of any organization in Texas – leads a smear campaign against the first changes in decades that offer real hope to children many media buy their snake oil and beg for more. 

Wouldn’t it be great if there were some other big organization, also beloved by Texas media, that could step in and set the record straight; say, an organization that is on record as supporting reforms much like those passed by the Texas Legislature?  An organization that is revered by the same Texas media who smear the Legislature’s reforms – almost all passed with strong bipartisan majorities – as part of some vast right-wing conspiracy? 

Oh, wait, there is such a group: It’s called Children’s Rights.  But they’re still too busy playing whack-a-mole.

Click here for part two, in which we discuss CR's failure in Tennessee

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending December 5, 2023

● Take a step back, see – and hear – how the family policing system really works in this report from NPR, featuring perspectives from JMAC for Families and NCCPR: 

● You know how defenders of computerized racial profiling in family policing (more accurate terms than “predictive analytics” in “child welfare”) defend their biased algorithms by a. claiming they’re not biased and b. claiming the algorithms are just advisory and humans still make the decisions?  Well, the U.S. Dept. of Justice is investigating claim a.  As for claim b – check out this post to this Blog based on a story from the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal. 

● Whether the decisions are made by humans or machines, in most of the country, the power of family policing agencies is nearly absolute.  For the latest massive debunking of claims that the courts serve as a check on this nearly absolute power, check out part two of a three-part series from WBTV and The Assembly in Charlotte, N.C.  

● Last week theBoston Globe exposed the state family police agency’s bias against Latino Families The story begins this way: 

Growing up Latino in Massachusetts carries a greater risk of entering the foster system than anywhere else in the nation, and for those who end up in foster homes — as well as those who are the subject of child welfare investigations — the consequences can be devastating. 

Then the Globe editorial page added additional reporting in this excellent commentary. 

● Although family police agencies call it “child support,” when you take someone’s child and make the parents pay money to get the child back, the proper term for that money is – ransom.  Yes, states actually do that.  Thanks to some excellent reporting by NPR two years ago, some states and localities are curbing the practice.  Now, The Imprint reports, California has taken the biggest step of all, not only abolishing ransom but wiping out the debt of parents who owe it. 

­● For The Conversation, Prof. Ashley Landers discusses her research on the enormous trauma endured by generations of Native American families, thanks to the massive needless termination of Native American children’s rights to their parents (a more accurate term than “termination of parental rights”).  Any claim that rushing to tear apart these families regularly leads to happy endings is belied by one fact from Prof. Landers’ research: “more than 80% of Native American people who were fostered or adopted eventually reunify.” 

● In New York, a bill that would allow children continued contact with their parents even after their legal rights to those parents have been terminated has – again – been passed by the State Legislature.  Two New York governors have pandered to the middle-class foster and adoptive parent lobby and vetoed it in the past.  Theresa Moser, a staff attorney with the Legal Aid Society of New York’s juvenile rights practice - which represents children in these cases -- told The Imprint why such a law is needed. 

Without such protections, Moser said, “relationships with the biological parent, extended family members and sometimes the siblings” can be disrupted, as well as “an understanding of their culture and history.” 

And Professors Abigail Williams-Butler and Frank Edwards explained the need for the legislation in the Albany Times Union: 

Given the vastly disparate impact and harm that Black children and children of color experience within this system, it is important that the law allow for every opportunity for children to maintain relationships with their families of origin, including being able to have access to their racial, ethnic, religious and cultural histories, which are critical to developing a sense of self.

● The Imprint reports on how family police in Minnesota – long one of the most fanatical states in the nation when it comes to tearing part families – are responding to legalization of marijuana. The answer seems to be: by finding every excuse possible to keep right on harassing families where someone smokes pot. 

MedPage Today has an update on the scandal over a child abuse pediatrician in Pennsylvania – and how one prominent politician is trying to thwart accountability. 

Upcoming event

Check out the Preventive Legal Advocacy Virtual Summit on December 15:

By providing legal guidance, social services, and resources to at-risk families, early legal advocacy programs across the country are working to promote family integrity, protect against the trauma of child welfare interventions, and reduce entries into foster care.

There's more information about the event, and about preventive legal advocacy here.

New resources

● I have previously written about how parents of older children somehow must be better than parents of newborns and infants.  This must be true, since why else would children be far more likely to be taken from their parents forever just because those children are really, really young? 

Since we know there is absolutely no racial or class bias in family policing, it can’t possibly be because poor people’s children are a market, and the data reflect supply and demand. It can’t be because caseworkers are more likely to have their own rescue fantasies triggered by a “kiddo” (they love to say “kiddo,” have you noticed?) about whom they can gush, “Awwww, he’s so cute!” so they rush those “kiddos” into homes with parents who have more money and lighter skin.  Nah, that can’t be it. 

Whatever the mysterious reasons for this phenomenon, the New York City Family Policy Project has new details on the extent of it nationally and in New York – and excellent ideas about what to do about it.

● While we continue to wait for the federal government to put out the annual AFCARS report, its official foster care statistics for the year ending September 30, 2022, The Imprint has released its own survey, covering the year ending March 31, 2023.  Though answering The Imprint’s questions is voluntary, their data tend to closely track the official AFCARS figures, so they are probably roughly equally accurate.  But The Imprint does not ask about entries and exits over the course of a year, and both databases don’t track hidden foster care. 

The Imprint survey does ask some questions AFCARS doesn’t.  And, as I read it, it confirms NCCPR’s longstanding suspicion that it’s ridiculously easy to evade the federal Family First Act restrictions on paying to institutionalize youth by simply getting your cruddy old “residential treatment center” relabeled a “Qualified Residential Treatment Program.” 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions 

From The Indianapolis Star and ProPublica: 

…It was the third time since 2019 that police or child protective services formally accused a female staffer at Pierceton Woods of sexual abuse or misconduct involving male residents.  In response, the state’s Department of Child Services temporarily stopped referring children to Pierceton Woods, a nonprofit residential facility which treats boys for substance use disorders and sexually harmful behaviors. 

That lasted 11 days…. 

From the Detroit News: 

Attorney General Dana Nessel charged two Lansing area couples Monday with 36 criminal child abuse charges, months after other similar charges against the foster and adoption families were dismissed.

 The DeWitt couples are being charged in relation to eight of the 30 children who have been in their charge since 2007. Nessel alleged the couples' collected more than $1 million tax free through the adoption subsidy program.

“The machine has labeled you as high-risk”

Is Pittsburgh’s “child welfare” predictive analytics algorithm running amok? Inquiring minds (at the US Dept. of Justice) want to know! 

The Allegheny Family Screening Tool slaps an invisible scarlet number "risk score"
on every child whose parents or other caretakers have been accused of neglect.

(For a comprehensive examination of the dangers of this kind of computerized racial profiling, see our publication Big Data Is Watching You.)

 The most highly touted, most far-reaching example of computerized racial profiling in family policing (more accurate terms than “predictive analytics” in “child welfare”) is the one in Pittsburgh.  Called the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) it slaps an invisible scarlet number “risk score” between 1 and 20 on any child who is the subject of a hotline call alleging neglect.*

 In response to allegations of bias, the designers and supporters of AFST offer three defenses:  1. The algorithm is used only at the screening stage, to decide which allegations are most in need of investigation.  2. The investigators can’t be biased by this because they don’t even know the risk score.  3. The algorithm doesn’t tell investigators when to tear children from the arms of their families and consign them to foster care; that’s left to humans. 

We’ve always known that the claim about workers not knowing the risk score was b.s.  They may not know the precise risk number but if they’re told to rush out and investigate a particular family, they know the predictive analytics algorithm, known as the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), has labeled the family “high risk.”  So of course that’s going to bias the investigator.

But now we know about a case in Pittsburgh that is calling into question all the claims about AFST’s supposed lack of bias, and about who -- or what -- makes the decisions.  And the U.S. Department of Justice is doing some of the questioning.  These revelations come in a story from the American Bar Association’s ABA Journal.  That story builds on outstanding reporting by the Associated Press. 

Both stories center on Andrew and Lauren Hackney, who followed their doctor’s advice and took their infant to the ER when the baby wasn’t eating enough.  They believe the hospital called the Allegheny County family police agency, which immediately took away the child.  

Here’s where we find out who’s really calling the shots, the humans or the algorithm.   According to the Hackneys’ lawyer 

when the Hackneys asked their caseworker what they could do to get their daughter back, “the caseworker said, ‘I’m sorry. Your case is high-risk. The machine has labeled you as high-risk.’” [Emphasis added.] 

That was the first the Hackneys knew about AFST.  

As for why the machine labeled them high-risk – nobody knows.  Allegheny County brags that the data elements in AFST are public, but they don’t say how much weight they give to each factor or even if it counts for or against a family.  And they don’t say what led to the risk score in a given case. 

The Hackneys and their lawyer suspect that the algorithm, and the humans who may be slavishly following it, discriminated against them because of disabilities.  As the ABA Journal story explains: 

Lauren Hackney has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder that can cause memory loss, and Andrew Hackney has some resultant damage from a stroke. 

That’s why the Justice Department is involved. In this case, and at least two others, they are investigating whether, in Pittsburgh, humans and machines alike violated the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. 

The ABA Journal article quotes two experts on disability law and family policing, Prof. Robyn Powell of the University of Oklahoma School of Law and Prof. Sarah Lorr, co-director of the Disability and Civil Rights Clinic at Brooklyn Law School.  They say that 

Not only are some of the criteria [used in the AFST algorithm] explicitly disallowed … pointing to disability-related factors, but long-standing racial biases also are implicitly included. 

“The ADA explicitly says that state and local government entities cannot discriminate based on disability, and within that requirement is the idea that you cannot use screening tools or eligibility criteria that would [point to] people with disabilities,” Powell says. 

And in Colorado, where at least one county is using a similar algorithm, family defender Sarah Morris says 

“All this does is launder human biases through the mirage of some kind of transparent nonbiased machine calculation.” 

Notwithstanding the specific comments allegedly made by the caseworker in the Hackney case, a co-designer of AFST, Emily Putnam-Hornstein still claims that the risk score is just one of many tools and it’s “advisory only.” 

But even if that’s true, should we trust the “advice” of an algorithm designed by someone who denies the field has a racism problem, demeans Black activists, and takes pride in being part of a group that defends a self-described "race realist" law professor who hangs out with Tucker Carlson. 

She has said: "I think it is possible we don’t place enough children in foster care or early enough" and signed onto an extremist agenda that proposes requiring anyone reapplying for public benefits, and not otherwise seen by "mandatory reporters," to produce their children for a child abuse inspection.  And she helped design another algorithm that explicitly uses race as a risk factor.  (Designers of that one say it’s only supposed to be used to target “prevention.”) 

It's been almost two years since the machine said the Hackneys’ infant was “high risk.” She’s still in foster care.

*-In Pennsylvania, the state runs the child abuse hotline but counties do everything else.  Counties are allowed to screen most “neglect” allegations but not allegations of abuse or “severe neglect.”

NCCPR in the Kentucky Lantern: The only way to end abuse in children’s institutions is to end the institutions

Recent news stories illustrate both the terrible harm Kentucky’s “child welfare” system inflicts upon its most vulnerable children and the root cause. Until the findings in these stories are examined together the harm will never stop. 

The ultimate harm can be seen in the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting’s expose of how the state systematically ignores abuse of children institutionalized in “residential treatment.”  Over and over children’s stories of vicious abuse were not believed. In more than half the “unsubstantiated” cases the children were not even interviewed before the cases were closed and their claims dismissed. The story also revealed that, remarkably often, the places where young people alleged abuse occurred were places where video cameras were not present or mysteriously didn’t work. 

The reason for this is no mystery. … 

Read the full column in the Kentucky Lantern

NCCPR in the Albany Times Union: Yes, for most children, there is a 'better alternative' to foster care

Imagine that you run a small software firm. One of your engineers just stopped by for his annual performance review. You ask what he accomplished in the past year and he says: “My new software crashed the systems of half our clients. They lost millions and they’re considering suing us! But you can’t fire me because anyone else you hire would be worse. So you have to keep me. What is the better alternative?” 

Now consider what happened during a New York State Senate hearing on the child welfare system and Family Court. … 

Read the full column in the Albany Times Union