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Maine's first child welfare ombudsman, Dean Crocker, understood
the lessons from the tragic death of Logan Marr, who was taken
when her family poverty was confused with "neglect" and killed
in foster care. The current ombudsman, Christine Alberi, does not. |
● In a classic example of trying to make policy-by-horror-story, her latest report uses a tiny, non-random sample of cases she chose herself to justify
sweeping conclusions that all boil down to: Take away more kids and don’t send
them back! That is making all Maine
children less safe.
● She is wrong about domestic violence,
she is wrong about truancy, she is wrong about “alternative response,” she is
wrong about false reports and she is wrong to call for more
institutionalization of children. Most
of all she is wrong to ignore the enormous harm of needless removal.
● At a time when the entire child welfare field finally is coming to grips with issues of poverty and race, she puts out a report that mentions neither. In the entire report the word "poverty" does not appear even once.
● For the sake of Maine's most vulnerable children, any legislation to give her more power
and staff should also include a requirement that she use objective evaluators and
base policy recommendations only on a statistically valid random sample of cases. The office also needs a more representative
Board of Directors.
● But ultimately, we all need to be the
ombudsman. In Maine and elsewhere, the
ombudsman’s power is fed by secrecy. For
starters, Maine should join the many states in which child welfare court
hearings are open.
How could a state
like Maine, a state that once almost got child welfare right,
keep careening full-speed backwards. How
is it that no one has stopped a foster-care panic
that has undone reforms that once were a national model; a panic that has made
all of the state’s children less safe?
There are many
reasons, and I have discussed them on this blog and elsewhere before. But one reason is the state’s child welfare “ombudsman,”
Christine Alberi. She issues reports with
shamefully shoddy methodology that throw gasoline on the fires of foster-care
panic. Judging from Alberi’s latest report, she has
never, ever encountered a case in which she believes a child was wrongfully
taken. At a time when almost everyone
else in the field is discussing the confusion of poverty with neglect, Alberi
has managed to issue a 20-page report that never once even uses the word
poverty. Also missing: The fact that
even in an overwhelmingly white state, there is evidence of racial bias
in Maine child welfare.
Unfortunately, Alberi’s
approach is not unusual. As in many
states, legislators in Maine effectively delegated responsibility to hold the
child welfare system accountable to one person – an “ombudsman” or “child
advocate.”
Back in 2007, on this blog, I wrote
about the typical behavior of people filling such posts: Investigate horror
stories and jump to conclusions based on those horror stories that boil down to:
Take away more kids.
Though ombudsmen generally
have no formal powers aside from the ability to investigate and report their
findings, their influence is enormous.
That’s because in systems more secret than the CIA, they get to see
everything – or at least a lot more than everyone else outside the child welfare
agency sees. (It doesn’t actually have
to be that way, as I’ll explain below.) So
almost the entire view of the system seen by journalists and lawmakers is
whatever the ombudsman wants them to see – and very little more. It’s like trying to figure out who and what
is in a large room by looking through a pinhole.
In report after
report Alberi zeros-in on what she views as poor decision-making at two key
stages of the process: The decision to remove children from the home and the
decision to return them home. But by
poor decision-making, she never seems to mean that it was a poor decision to
take away a child.
The ombudsman’s
report defies common sense
Common sense tells
us there will, in fact, be a lot of poor decision-making at these points. But common sense also tells us that, for
reasons noted above, the bad decisions will go in all directions. It is ludicrous to think that, in a system
filled with underprepared overloaded workers rushing from case to case all of
the errors would go in only one direction.
Yet any reader of
Alberi’s latest report who took it at face value would have to conclude just
that. Because, as Alberi tells it, the
only mistakes made by Maine child welfare caseworkers are to leave children in
dangerous homes and return them there.
She is dangerously
wrong.
The errors go in all
directions, and all of these errors harm children.
● Wrongful removal
inflicts profound psychological trauma. Although
DHHS caseworkers almost always mean well
- as does Alberi by the way – the trauma when a child is torn from
everyone loving and familiar in Maine is just as severe as when it happens on the Mexican border.
● Wrongful removal places
children at serious risk of abuse in foster care itself, where independent studies find
rates of abuse far higher than agencies such as DHHS admit in official
statistics.
● And all the time,
money and effort wasted on false allegations, trivial cases and poverty cases
is, in effect stolen from finding children in real danger. In short, the foster-care panic encouraged by
Alberi’s whole approach actually makes more likely the very failings Alberi
cites.
Alberi’s latest
report draws her sweeping conclusions from a tiny sample of cases – the 84 her
office chose to accept in 2021. But
Maine caseworkers investigated nearly 12,000 cases in 2021. While it is reasonable to draw conclusions
based on a sample, 84 is a far smaller number than, say, the typical “case reading”
done to assess agency performance when such agencies are the subjects of class-action
lawsuits.
Even worse, this is
not a random sample. Rather it is those
cases Alberi and her assistant personally deemed worthy of investigation – and the
criteria for choosing a case can be startlingly subjective. They include, for example, “the demeanor and
credibility of the caller.” Really? Suppose your child had just been torn from
your arms and you were desperate for help.
How would you be doing demeanor-wise?
Another criterion: “The
degree of harm alleged to the child.”
But an ombudsman who doesn’t even mention poverty is unlikely to
consider a case in which a child was taken because of poverty – such as Logan Marr
-- to be terribly harmful. Rather the
focus will be on the much smaller percentage of cases that allege sexual abuse
or serious physical abuse.
And so, based on
this tiny, skewed sample, Alberi offers broad, sweeping conclusions and examples
in which, in every single case, she concludes, the error was to leave a child in
the home or return a child to the home.
It should be clear that this is absurd on its face.
Alberi’s whole
approach is so absurd it leads me to write a sentence I never thought would
appear in this blog: In some respects, Todd Landry is right.
Landry runs the Office
of Child and Family Services within Maine’s Department of Health and Human
Services. His hiring is, frankly,
inexplicable. He had a horrible track record when he ran child welfare in Nebraska –
under his leadership that state was worse than Maine, tearing apart families at
one of the highest rates in America, and his callousness could be astounding.
But Alberi’s methodology
is so absurd even Landry sees through it.
In his office’s response to the Alberi,
he writes:
Rather than a random
sample, a case review begins with self-selected inquiries and is often
complaint driven. …
A source of
disagreement for a number of reports relates to the Ombudsman’s finding or
recommendation that involves bringing children into State care or keeping them
in care for a longer period of time. While OCFS recognizes the perception that
children are safer when removed, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that
removing a child from their home has the potential to inflict harm or trauma.
In addition, there is little research to support the belief that, in general,
children who enter state custody are safer than they would be if they had
remained in the home with efforts undertaken to address safety concerns. There
are numerous scholarly articles regarding the potential harm of removal.
As I said, on this Todd
Landry is right. When you look at the
typical cases OCFS and its counterparts across the country handle, not the tiny,
self-selected sample used by Alberi, the research shows
children typically fare better in their own homes, even when agencies don’t have
much help to offer.
Alberi’s examples
All of this still
gives Alberi a huge benefit of the doubt: It assumes that Alberi is right about
those 84 cases. But often we have no way
to know that. In summarizing 40 of the
42 cases (out of the 84) that Alberi says raised “substantial issues,” she
offers only a short paragraph on each one.
Sometimes that’s enough to make clear that in the specific case, Alberi
is right – the child should not have been left in the home. (If one believes, as I do, that the errors go
in all directions then of course there will be such cases.) Others are less clear. One summary, in its entirely states:
A parent had
significant mental health issues and the inability to protect the children from
domestic violence. Throughout the case, despite the fact that the parent was
engaged in treatment, the treatment was not effective. Providers were not
objective and recommendations in a psychological evaluation were not implemented.
After a significant period in state custody, trial placement began and then it
was discovered that the parent was still in a relationship with the
perpetrator. Trial placement was not ended. In general, the parent’s level of
treatment did not match the severity of the illness. The risk to the children
remained high.
Thus, an objective
ombudsman would have questioned why the children in this case were removed at
all.
Now, let's go
through this paragraph sentence-by-sentence.
Throughout the
case, despite the fact that the parent was engaged in treatment, the treatment
was not effective.
Alberi offers no
evidence for this, but even if true, there is more than one approach to therapy
– why not recommend trying another?
Providers were
not objective and recommendations in a psychological evaluation were not implemented.
How do we know
providers were not objective? Because they didn’t do what Alberi thinks they
should have done? As for “psychological
evaluations,” like so much else child welfare agencies and their subcontractors
do, they can be cookie-cutter and unreliable.
Maybe in this case the providers were right and whoever did the “psych
eval” was wrong. Maybe it’s Alberi who
is “not objective.” We don’t know, and
nothing in Alberi’s single paragraph tells us.
After a
significant period in state custody,
That should have
been the red flag here – why were the children taken, apparently for witnessing
domestic violence, when that is so enormously harmful to children?
trial placement
began and then it was discovered that the parent was still in a relationship
with the perpetrator.
This shows only Alberi’s
lack of understanding of the dynamics of domestic violence. There are all sorts of reasons this might
happen – including, by the way, poverty.
Why didn’t authorities act to remove the abuser by arresting him and jailing
him?
Trial placement
was not ended. In general, the parent’s level of treatment did not match the
severity of the illness. The risk to the children remained high.
Risk of what? Presumably witnessing domestic violence again. That is a serious and real problem. But removing children for that reason can be
even worse. One expert calls taking away
children under these circumstances “tantamount to pouring salt into an open wound.” But Alberi seems to want OCFS to adopt a
policy that boils down to: Please pass the salt.
It is possible that
there is a reasonable explanation for all of this, and a detailed look at the
case file and interviews with all involved would reveal that yes, in this case
there was no other option but removal.
But we don’t know that based on Alberi’s one-paragraph summary. And it would be a huge mistake for media and
lawmakers to simply take Alberi’s word for it.
A bizarre call to
institutionalize more children
Alberi also does not
seem to be up on the research about institutionalizing children in so-called
residential treatment centers. So I’ll
summarize it. It doesn’t work. Period. Full stop.
There is nothing
that residential treatment does that can’t be done better using Wraparond
programs that bring whatever help a child needs directly into his own home or,
when genuinely necessary, a foster home.
One of Maine’s biggest successes
was its significant reduction in the use of this worst possible option. Yet Alberi apparently wants to reverse course. At one point she writes:
There are not enough
therapeutic foster homes, not enough high-quality residential treatment facilities,
and a general lack of mental health resources for both young and old. [Emphasis added.]
But “high-quality residential
treatment” is an oxymoron – it doesn’t exist. Get the children who don’t need to be in
foster care back into their own homes, emphasize wraparound services and there
will be plenty of good, safe, therapeutic foster homes for the children who
really need them. Maine already has proven
it.
The differential
response obsession
Alberi seems oddly obsessed
with a program that barely exists in Maine and soon won’t exist at all. Differential response, known in Maine as “alternative
response” in Maine is one of the most-studied approaches in child welfare, it
involves diverting low-risk cases to agencies that offer voluntary help. At any time if that agency thinks the case is
too serious they can send it back to caseworkers for a full-scale
investigation. More than two-dozen studies
have found that this approach safely reduced foster care. But in state after state, it’s become a
convenient scapegoat after high profile fatalities. But generally, once the system caves in and
gets rid of differential response the bashing of the program stops.
But even though OCFS is phasing out the program; indeed it
barely exists, Alberi is still bashing it.
Here again, I’m sure
there are indeed high-risk cases that have been wrongly diverted to
differential response. But at noted study
after study shows this is far from the norm and that differential response
reduces the trauma of needless foster care with no compromise of safety.
The fact that Alberi
continues to beat this nearly dead horse is still another indication of how
profoundly she seems to believe that child welfare agencies must be police
forces, constantly harassing and surveilling families and taking away their
children.
Wrong about
truancy
At one point, Alberi writes that “truancy of children as a sign of risk is
underestimated.” That’s because truancy
generally isn’t a sign of risk. Oh, I’m
sure Alberi has horror stories, but she seems unaware of the comprehensive landmark study
by the highly-respected Vera Institute of Justice – a study that included yes,
a representative random sample of cases.
That study found that having agencies like OCFS pursue “educational
neglect” allegations – i.e. truancy – does far more harm than good. Truancy is not, in fact a “gateway allegation”
– some kind of sign of more serious evil afoot.
Indeed, the Vera report recommended that if truancy must be part of a
child protective agency’s portfolio it should be handled through – differential
response.
Wrong about
unsubstantiated reports
At one point Alberi
writes:
When [multiple
encounters with OCFS] result in unsubstantiated assessments or [alternative
response] referrals, the lack of child abuse and neglect findings is mistakenly
thought to be evidence of safety. … It is not well understood that the
existence of many reports and assessments alone elevates the risk to children.
No, what is not
understood by Alberi is that false reports almost always are just that – false. They are so flimsy they don’t even rise to
the minimal level required for an OCFS caseworker to check the “substantiated”
box on the form. By Alberi’s logic there
is no such thing as a false report: Call it in often enough, harass a family
with enough false allegations and, by the Alberi standard, you must assume the
child is at high risk.
Many reports do not
elevate the risk to the children (except to the extent that they may increase
stress on the family). Rather, they are
a form of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Precisely because Alberi and so many others encourage workers to believe
that “where there’s smoke there’s fire” workers become predisposed to check the
“substantiated” box. Multiple unfounded
reports elevate not the risk of child abuse but the risk of spurious
conclusions and system involvement.
In child welfare,
where there’s smoke there’s usually just smoke.
And nobody can see clearly through smoke.
But what about
that whole section – sorry, one paragraph – about prevention?
“But you don’t
understand,” I can imagine Alberi saying, “I’m for prevention.” Sure. Have
you ever known anyone to say they’re against prevention? And, after all, Alberi devoted one entire paragraph
of her report to saying prevention is a good thing. She even concludes the one
paragraph with: “The fact that services and resources for families are
minimally discussed in this report should not discount their importance.”
But, of course, that’s
precisely what devoting one token paragraph to some general concept of
prevention in a 20-page report does. All
the more so in a report that doesn’t mention poverty and portrays a system that
only errs by keeping families together.
Even the lip service
paid to prevention doesn’t say what kind of prevention she has in mind. But given that Alberi can’t even bring
herself to mention poverty it’s likely she has in mind only the kind of
prevention that makes the helpers feel good – lots of “counseling” and “parent
education,” instead of what’s needed most: Concrete help to deal with
problems like housing, childcare, and other issues of poverty.
It doesn’t look like
OCFS gets this either. Their response emphasizes the vastly overhyped
federal Families First Act – which allows federal funding for only a few, very
limited types of prevention – mostly of the counseling and parent education
variety.
What to do
instead
Unfortunately,
Alberi is treated with enormous deference by some lawmakers and media. So there has been one proposal after another
to give her office even more power.
There are better options:
● Ideally, everyone
should be the ombudsman – and yes, that can be done. Everyone should be able to see how the state
child welfare system really works in every case. For starters, Maine could open court hearings
in child welfare cases. More than 40% of
America’s foster children live in states where these hearings are open and none
of the fears offered by opponents – who also are the people who don’t want us
to see what really goes on -- has come to pass.
In addition, there should be a strong rebuttable presumption that most records
are open. There is a detailed discussion
of how this would work, without compromising children’s privacy in NCCPR’s
Due Process Agenda.
As soon as courtroom
doors open and legislators, journalists and citizens can sit in on the day-to-day
process, they will see for themselves what the typical cases are like. They will see how often the crucial issue is
poverty and how often that poverty is confused with neglect. They also will see the kind of mistakes Alberi
highlights. But once we see that the
errors go in all directions and those errors are related – wrongful removal
overloads systems so workers have less time to find children in real danger –
it changes completely our understanding of how to fix it.
It is within the
Legislature’s power to do this. Of all
the comments I’ve heard or read concerning Maine child welfare in more than 20
years, perhaps the weirdest was this from a Maine State Senator:
“By law,
the department can’t share a lot of information, so our ability to provide
oversight is limited.” [Emphasis added.]
By law, you
say? Hmmmm. And what is it that
legislators enact, repeal and amend?
Now, in fairness,
it’s possible that this lawmaker was referring to a federal law, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. Perhaps DHHS told him CAPTA made it
impossible for the agency to share information.
But there are two
problems with that:
-- CAPTA has lots of wiggle room. A state that passed a law allowing
legislators themselves to see records, for example, should have no problem with
CAPTA. And there is no question that
CAPTA allows open courts.
-- The penalty for
ignoring CAPTA is almost nil – the forfeiture of a very small amount of federal
funding – so small that the costs of complying with CAPTA may be greater than
the costs of ignoring it.
● Failing that,
at least reform the ombudsman’s office.
As I said, most ombudsmen operate like Alberi. But there are exceptions. Maine’s first
ombudsman, Dean Crocker, was one. He understood that the errors go in all directions
and he supported the reforms that helped make Maine, briefly, a child welfare leader.
He even wrote a guest post
for this blog. Another was Kevin Ryan,
who ran New Jersey’s Office of Child Advocate.
Even when dealing with horror stories, Ryan’s office turned out careful,
nuanced reports. But he also realized
that just focusing on the horror stories was inherently distorting.
So he decided to
review a random sample of cases. And to
ensure objectivity he recruited reviewers from two groups, one with a mentality
much like Alberi’s, the other more attuned to issues of poverty. They then had to reach consensus: That consensus – yes, the system errs, in all
directions.
The Maine
Legislature should require that the Maine ombudsman’s office take the same
approach – examine a random sample of cases each year and examine enough of
them to be representative. A panel of
experts, diverse not only in race and class but in viewpoints, should be named
to review the cases and issue reports.
The ombudsman should
be barred from drawing systemic conclusions based on self-selected individual
cases.
-- The Board of
Directors for the ombudsman’s office should be reconstituted to include
representatives from all of the groups that have a stake in keeping Maine’s children
safe: The board should include one of the sate’s leading family defense
attorneys, one its leading child abuse prosecutors, a parent who lost children to
the system, a foster parent, a grandparent or other relative providing kinship
foster care, a former OCFS caseworker, the director of a domestic violence
shelter, leaders of civil rights organizations for Black, Latinx and Native
American communities in Maine, at least one leader of an anti-poverty
organization, and at least two current or former foster youth.
-- Every member of
the Board and every staff member should be required upon appointment/hiring to watch
the PBS Frontline documentary “The Taking of Logan Marr”
and to read the letter Logan’s
mother Christy sent to the foster mother who ultimately would kill Logan.
The context
A retreat from reform
is tragic anywhere, but especially in Maine since, as I noted at the outset,
Maine is a state that almost got child welfare right.
In 2001, After five-year-old
Logan Marr was taken from her mother when the mother’s poverty was confused
with neglect only to be killed by a foster mother who also had been a supervisor
for OCFS, lawmakers and media refused to accept the usual pat answers about licensing,
training, etc. They zeroed-in on the
appallingly high numbers of children the state routinely took away.
A new governor, John
Baldacci, brought in new leadership that rebuilt the system to emphasize safe,
proven approaches to keeping families together.
Foster care numbers declined significantly. When children had to be taken, as noted
earlier, far fewer were institutionalized and far more were placed with
relatives. The reforms became a national
model.
But another new
governor, Paul LePage, slashed the agency budget and demanded a return to the
take-the-child-and-run approach. He
doubled down after two deaths of children known-to-the- system in rapid
succession in 2018. That started the
foster-care panic – the sharp sudden increase in the number of children torn
from their families.
But the deaths didn’t
stop. Of course they didn’t. A foster-care panic often is followed by more
child abuse deaths because workers are so overloaded with false allegations,
trivial cases and poverty cases that they don’t have time to investigate any case
properly. So they make terrible errors –
yes, in all directions.
Yet with another new
governor in office, Janet Mills, and four more deaths in rapid succession in 2021,
lawmakers and Maine’s child welfare establishment still didn’t learn. They doubled down again.
Partly that’s because
the Mills administration chose Landry to run child welfare. Partly it’s because, between term limits for
lawmakers and consolidation in the news media, a lot of institutional memory
has been lost. Maine has largely forgotten
the lessons from the death of Logan Marr and the time when, relatively
speaking, Maine was a child welfare leader.
Nevertheless, it
puzzled me that even in Maine, lawmakers could so easily be taken-in by an
approach that had so demonstrably failed over and over. Now I understand.
Everyone is paying
way too much attention to Christine Alberi.
And here’s the
thing: Had Alberi and her office been around when Logan Marr first was taken,
and had her mother, Christy, called looking for help, I’ll bet Alberi would
have turned her down.
She probably wouldn’t
have liked Christy’s demeanor.
