Cranking up the foster care to prison pipeline in Missouri

 

In an interview, the new head of Missouri’s Children’s Division spewed out a gish-gallop of misinformation to try to justify her take-the-child-and-run approach.  We set the record straight.

In an interview with the Missouri Independent, the new head of the Missouri Children’s Division, one of the two agencies (notwithstanding its denials – see below) that take away children and hold them in foster care, said “she wants to bring the Children’s Division back to basics, which she defines as ensuring safety for children.”  

In just those few words, Sara Smith is already out to mislead us; it’s the start of a gish-gallop of misinformation.  So let’s parse the interview, starting with that claim. 

The claim implies that under Smith’s predecessor, Darrell Missey, the Children’s Division became part of a Vast Family Preservation Conspiracy, fanatically devoted to reducing foster care – indeed, she’s come close to saying it outright. 

Well, if that was Missey’s nefarious plan, he wasn’t able to execute it. Yes, foster care numbers declined, but they declined from obscene to merely outrageous. As of 2023, the most recent year for which data are available, Missouri tore apart families at a rate nearly 50% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.  

ENTRIES INTO FOSTER CARE 

PER THOUSAND IMPOVERISHED CHILDREN

And those are only the cases we know about. Missouri loves hidden foster care; placements in which families are, in effect, blackmailed into surrendering their children “voluntarily.” These “Temporary Alternative Placement Arrangements” have no court involvement – and they are not recorded as entries into foster care.  What little data are available suggest that if such placements were included, the total number of children the Children’s Division admits to taking would be at least 20% higher. 

But Smith says she wants even more of them. 

So Missouri is an extreme outlier not in keeping families together but in tearing them apart. The consequences can be seen in cases like this one, and this one, and this one, or this one. But Smith has made clear she wants to make Missouri a worse outlier still.  

This, even though study after study shows that in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better in later life even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. This in spite of the fact that, though Smith equates child safety with child removal, the rate of abuse in foster care itself is sky-high. 

Where do those children end up? Some will succeed in spite of everything the system does to them. But as the Kansas City Star pointed out, young people in foster care are more likely to end up in prison than in college. Darrell Missey couldn’t do much about it, but at least he understood it. Now Sara Smith is out to turn up the foster-care-to-prison pipeline to full blast. 

● It can be seen in one of her first acts upon taking the job. She handed out stickers that effectively equate child removal with child safety. Of course, she doesn’t use those words. But, the message to the frontlines is clear: I’m handing out stickers that say “centered on safety” because your old boss wasn’t. So if you want to please the new boss, take away more children! 

● It can be seen in her slick, subtle efforts to fearbomb a foundation-funded initiative to curb the confusion of poverty with neglect.  

● And it can be seen again in the facile, disingenuous way Smith ducked the question when asked flar-out if Missouri takes away too many children.  Here’s what she said: 

I think we’re lucky in Missouri to have what I would call kind of a bifurcated system. It’s something that a lot of other states don’t have. Children’s Division cannot remove a child. We would recommend removal to the juvenile office. So the juvenile office that’s receiving that referral, they’re making sure that it’s legally sufficient and that we should be recommending removal. 

And we have those [referrals] denied from Children’s Division where, Children’s Division might think that there’s a safety threat, the child can’t remain in the home. And the juvenile office might look at it and help us understand why that’s not a legally sufficient avenue. 

They’ve been really great partners to us in that space, but having that other look to make sure that you know whatever the concerns are, do meet legal standards, I think helps make me feel better, especially with our turnover rate, that the kids that are in care are actually there for a reason that is legally supported. 

Here are the facts: 

● First, of course, she never actually answers the question. She never explains why, apparently, she sees Missouri as such a cesspool of depravity that even tearing apart families at a rate 50% above the national average isn’t enough.  (Good news, Missouri: You’re not.) 

But the disingenuousness meter goes off the scale when she suggests that Missouri’s notorious fifth wheel, the Juvenile Office, is a check on wrongful removal. 

● For starters, she does not claim that the Juvenile Office actually rejects removals because they are unnecessary – only if they can’t meet the extremely low standards for getting a judge to rubber-stamp what the Children’s Division wants.  Notice how Smith never says how often the Juvenile Office actually does that.  Smith then says she’s confident all that family destruction is “legally supported” – which is not the same thing as: good for the children. 

● Second, Smith never explains that, contrary to her claim, every state has some version of this. Every state either has its own in-house lawyers or relies on a state attorney general’s office or equivalent to check if a case is legally adequate and then decide whether to file it. 

● What makes the Juvenile Office different – and quite possibly unconstitutional – is that it is run by the courts itself.  As Prof. Josh Gupta-Kagan has written: 

By granting juvenile officers, who are subject to judges’ supervision, exclusive power to file child abuse and neglect and juvenile delinquency cases, Missouri law concentrates power into the hands of one branch of government.  Missouri law thus empowers individual judges to set child welfare and juvenile justice policy by managerial decree. Subordinate judicial branch officials face pressure to file and litigate cases to please their boss, the judge, who hired them, supervises them, and has power to fire them. 

● Just as the juvenile office can reject a Children’s Division recommendation to remove, it can proceed to court to take away a child even when the Children’s Division doesn’t think that’s necessary. That probably happens more often than the scenario Smith describes, and it’s probably one of the reasons for Missouri’s high rate of removal. In fact, the juvenile office doesn’t even have to wait for the Children’s Division because … 

● The Juvenile Office acts as, in effect, a second family police agency – and that is unique to Missouri. Anyone who calls the Children’s Division and doesn’t get them to investigate and/or seek to take away a child can simply call the Juvenile Office and try their luck there.  Or they can just call the Juvenile Office first. So the number of times this second front door leads to taking a child who, in other states, would have stayed home, likely far outstrips the number of cases in which they deny a Children’s Division request because it’s legally insufficient. 

Indeed, the Juvenile Office’s reputation long has been that of one more thumb tilting the scales of justice against families – as in this case, for example.  So it’s no wonder Sara Smith loves the Juvenile Office. 

● The claim that only a Juvenile Officer can take away children isn’t true either. You might need to call a juvenile officer if you actually plan to let the family have minimal due process by going to court. But remember those blackmail placements (Temporary Alternative Placement Arrangements)? For those, there’s no court, no Juvenile Office and no pesky due process for families. The Children’s Division can coerce the parent into surrendering the child and then, for Orwellian good measure, call it voluntary. No wonder Sara Smith loves this as well. 

● And finally, if the Juvenile Office is such a great check on needless removal, why do so many other states, none of which has a juvenile office, take proportionately fewer children? 

Hostility to families in every answer 

It’s not just when the topic is rates of removal that Smith’s profound hostility to families seeps through – though always, you have to look closely: 

Take a look at this exchange from the interview: 

[Q:]Do you see training as potentially helping remedy some of the federal issues outlined in the Performance Improvement Plan, such as family engagement? 

[A]: If you’re not meeting with families, how are you moving the needle towards permanence here, or identifying safety threats? I don’t think we can hang our hat there and not do any other work around things, but I do think solid training is going to set us up for a lot better success. 

Family engagement typically means working with the family so they can reunite with their children – because, in the overwhelming majority of cases, that’s what’s best for those children. But in Sara Smith’s world, “family engagement” seems to be just a means of surveillance –“identifying safety threats” – to build a case for termination of parental rights, which sounds like what she means by “moving the needle toward permanence.” 

Teeing up the veto of silence 

One of the reasons it's so hard for families to get attention to their stories is a tactic agencies use that should be called the veto of silence: A family complains that their children were needlessly taken by an agency like the Children’s Division. They tell their story to a reporter. The reporter calls the child welfare agency and is immediately referred to their flack who says: “Oh, well, there’s really so much more to the story and we wish we could tell you, truly we do, but we just can’t; confidentiality, you know.” 

Sadly, that’s often been enough to scare reporters off. But not always – those stories cited earlier by excellent Missouri journalists are examples of overriding the veto of silence.  But Smith makes clear she’ll be trying to invoke that veto whenever she can. Here’s how she tees it up: 

I think there’s a lot to Children’s Division. Being in it for so long, it’s complicated, and it’s a space that — we respect families’ privacy, and we can only share certain things, and there’s a lot that we can’t share about the work that happens. And that’s really hard sometimes, because you want to be able to share all the complicating factors that are happening and the ins and outs of different pieces. But we can only talk about how the process should work in a best case scenario. 

And I don’t think we should necessarily talk about case specifics, because that is a family’s right to privacy. A child’s right to his or her information being kept close to the vest for Children’s Division, but then having the opportunity to be transparent with our stakeholders about what’s happening, what the pain points are and using those systemic things and trends to be able to work with them to create some change. 

What that gobbledygook really means is: We love confidentiality laws, because they let us hide what we do to families and persuade you not to write about it!  Of course, some information is legitimately confidential, but when a family comes forward to tell its story, at least two states, New York and Arizona allow their equivalent of the Children’s Division to respond. The reason other states don’t is simple: Their child welfare agencies don’t want that right; it takes away their ability to invoke the veto of silence. 

And, of course, thanks to some outstanding reporting decades ago by the Springfield News-Leader,  most portions of court hearings themselves are open in Missouri. But the sky hasn’t fallen, because, just as in the case of adult victims of sexual assault, reporters are good about protecting the privacy of children – as opposed to the interests of agencies. 

This is why NCCPR favors a rebuttable presumption that all court hearings and almost all documents in these cases be open.  Lawyers for children and lawyers for parents could go to court to rebut the presumption and keep closed any records the disclosure of which might harm a child.  The Children’s Division and the Juvenile Office should not even be able to ask for secrecy  - because they have no interest in secrecy except to cover their failings and try to impose the veto of silence. 

One thing Smith got right 

Smith repeatedly invoked her long, long tenure at the Children’s Division as some kind of asset. I’m not sure why anyone would say being a lifer in an agency that has done such a lousy job for so long is a job qualification, but be that as it may, she did say one thing that’s right on the mark: 

I think I’ve had nine [directors] since I started Children’s Division. And I’ve heard this from Children’s Division team members: ‘We’re just going to wait it out. There’ll be somebody else coming in with a different philosophical view.’ 

That would certainly help explain why Darrell Missey had so little success.  As for long-timers waiting it out until someone comes along “with a different philosophical point of view” – I wonder who Smith had in mind?

Los Angeles CASA does the most CASA thing in the world

There are more than 900 chapters of Court-Appointed Special Advocates. Of that number, one was led by a Black woman with lived experience. Now that number is zero. 

On May 19, UCLA Blueprint published this story about Dr. Charity Chandler-Cole,
director of Los Angeles CASA. On June 18, she was fired.

Here’s how that most sacred cow in child welfare, Court-Appointed Special Advocates (CASA), works: 

Overwhelmingly white middle-class volunteers are given 30 hours of training, maybe 40, much of which can be taken online.* Then they’re sent into the homes of families that are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately nonwhite. The usually white, middle-class amateurs interview everyone, assess the families, spend what one study found to be an average of 12 minutes every working day investigating the case (less if the child was Black).

Then they can effectively decide if the child will go into foster care. They can effectively decide if the child stays in foster care.  They can effectively decide if the child will ever see his or her parents ever again. (Yes, judges do it officially, but CASA brags about how often judges do as they tell them to do.) 

What could possibly go wrong? 

Well, for starters, abundant research shows that it backfires. Studies find that CASA prolongs foster care, reduces the chances of reunification, increases the chances that children will “age out” with no home at all – and does nothing to improve child safety. (And by the way, though the amateurs also are volunteers, it turns out running all this costs taxpayers a fortune.) 

Second, no matter how well-meaning the volunteers, the program is so steeped in unfixable racial and class bias that runs so deep, two legal scholars called the entire program “an act of white supremacy.” 

But for a while there, it looked like one CASA program was serious about trying to do better, and it was a big one.  In 2021, the Los Angeles County CASA program hired as its director Dr. Charity Chandler-Cole. That was a shock. Charity Chandler-Cole is a Black woman with lived experience; someone who had risen above everything the system tried to do to her. And Los Angeles tears apart families at one of the highest rates among America’s largest cities. 

As The Imprint points out in this excellent story, among those who hailed her appointment was Karen Bass, then a Member of Congress with a strong interest in foster care issues, now mayor of Los Angeles. Said Bass: 

“Charity is the right leader at the perfect time for CASA/LA. She is a visionary who will be a tireless champion for the program and the children and families they serve.” 

But on June 18, the Board of Los Angeles County CASA fired Dr. Chandler-Cole.  That was not a shock.  That was the most CASA thing in the world. 

As The Imprint points out, it’s not like the Board didn’t know what it was getting: 

Her views were clearly stated upon her hiring. 

“If our CASAs don’t understand why these systems were created in the first place and that they weren’t created to really address the needs of our communities, then they can’t really go in understanding how to navigate this system that is not created to help young people from Black and brown communities,” Chandler-Cole said in a 2021 interview with this outlet. 

But, as the story also points out, that was 2021, the height of America’s short-lived racial justice reckoning.  Now, of course, there’s a lot less pressure for racial justice, and CASA can return to its comfort zone. 

In retrospect, a profile of Dr. Chandler-Cole and her work, published just last month, included a hint of what was to come: 

Not everyone was happy when Chandler-Cole got the job and began a series of monthly virtual fireside chats at which she talked about race and racism, immigration, and the particular needs of — and structural discrimination against — LGBTQ-plus kids and parents. Some volunteers and board members told her that her approach was scaring people. Some quit. One said she was triggered every time the new CEO used the words “social justice” or “racial justice.” [Emphasis added.] 

That article was published on May 19. One month later, Charity Chandler-Cole was out.  I guess too many CASAs were getting “triggered.” 

In one sense, the Los Angeles County CASA Board of Directors was absolutely right. Some board members told The Imprint: 

“The CASA Board determined that there was a fundamental misalignment between Dr. Chandler-Cole’s approach and CASA’s mission ..." 

That tells you all you need to know about CASA's real mission. 

*-Plus in-service – some CASAs get soooooo upset when you don’t mention the in-service.

Points of no return

Here are some of the other states with child welfare systems so rotten that the vast majority of foster children are never allowed to go home.

The previous post to this Blog highlighted Virginia’s dismal distinction: worst in America for allowing foster children ever to return to their own homes. In Virginia, if you’ve been taken away from your parents, odds are nearly three in four you will never be able to return to them – unless you find them again when you’re an adult. 

Virginia’s rate of reunifying families is 27%. The national average is 44% - which itself is dismal. Virginia children are more likely to be torn from their parents forever and handed over, usually to total strangers, to keep through adoption than they are to go back to their own homes.  And Virginia’s contempt for families runs so deep that child welfare agencies will let nearly one in five foster children “age out” with no home at all, rather than exert any real effort to reunify families. 

But while Virginia wins for worst record in the nation, there were plenty of other contenders. Here are some of them: 

● Virginia may not be #1 for long. North Carolina is nearly as bad – only 30% of foster children get to return home.  And right now, North Carolina lawmakers are patting themselves on the back for supposedly passing a major “reform” bill.  While some provisions may be marginally helpful, what may be the most significant will make it even harder to reunify families. 

● Like Virginia, Michigan is triply dismal.  Only 35% of foster children are reunified, while 41% are adopted. And Michigan is another state where the proportion of children who age out with no home at all is nearly double the national average. 

● Much the same can be said for Ohio – except that the adoption percentage is lower. 

● Connecticut did good work in past years in reducing entries into foster care. But lately, there’s been backsliding. In 2023, Connecticut was one of the few states where the number of children taken from their parents over the course of a year increased over the previous year, and it was the second-highest increase in the nation. A huge proportion of the children Connecticut took – more than two-thirds -- probably are never going home. Connecticut is another state where the proportion of children exiting to adoption, usually by strangers, is higher than the percentage reunified. 

● There is a similar pattern, though not as bad, in Alabama, another state that saw great progress in past years, but now is backsliding. 

● Texas has made ongoing commendable progress curbing entries.  But here, too, nearly two-thirds of those taken will never go home. And in Texas, nearly as many are adopted as reunified. 

Guardianship is no excuse 

Some of these states, such as Connecticut, may claim their rates of reunification are low because they supposedly place a lot of children in guardianship arrangements with relatives.  Yes, that’s better than adoption by strangers, but: 

● It is not the same thing as being allowed to go home to your own parents.

● The fact that many of these states use formal adoption – which usually means strangers – at a rate nearly as high or higher than reunification suggests they’re not doing enough with guardianships either.

Virginia’s shame: When children are torn from their parents here, nearly three in four may never go home.

If the family police take your children in Virginia, odds are nearly 3 in 4
they're never coming home

● While other states celebrate June as Family Unification Month, in Virginia, every month is family destruction month.

● North Carolina, Connecticut, Texas and Michigan are almost as bad

Think back for a moment to that time when the first Trump Administration was tearing thousands of children from the arms of their parents at the Mexican border. Listen again to their anguished cries.

It’s likely that 70% of those children eventually were reunited – after enduring unspeakable trauma. But when it comes to reuniting families separated by government, there’s a place with a far worse record: the Commonwealth of Virginia and its county child protective services agencies.

Unlike the Trump Administration, the caseworkers who take children in Virginia almost always mean well; but the children cry out the same way for the same reasons.  And for the Virginia children, nearly three out of four (73%) will never get to live with their parents again, at least for the remainder of their childhoods. Virginia reunifies children with their own parents at the lowest rate in the country, a rate nearly 40% below the national average. North Carolina, Connecticut, Texas and Michigan are almost as bad.

In Virginia, a child torn from his parents is more likely to wind up adopted by total strangers than reunified. And Virginia child welfare authorities hold families in so much contempt that they allow nearly one in five foster children to age out of the system with no home at all – well over double the national average – rather than help their families reunify.

So while other states celebrate June as Family Uunification Month, in Virginia every month is family destruction month.

 Some officials might argue that Virginia supposedly takes proportionately fewer children in the first place than most states, so those they take must be severely harmed. But any such claim doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: 

● Of all the children torn from their families in Virginia in 2023, 82% were in cases that did not involve even an allegation of sexual abuse or any form of physical abuse. In 60% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  These figures are almost identical to the national average. 

In contrast, multiple studies find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes, and the rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse. So on top of the lifelong emotional trauma, Virginia is putting children at risk of abuse by taking them needlessly, often when family poverty is confused with neglect. 

● At least four places whose official rates of taking away children are as low or lower than Virginia reunite a significantly larger proportion of the children they take. 

But perhaps most important: 

● Virginia doesn’t really have a low rate of removal at all. It’s a shell game, involving various ways of keeping placements off the books, by coercing families into giving up children “voluntarily.” It’s commonly known as hidden foster care. Lawmakers shamefully legitimized some of these coerced placements last year when they slapped the euphemism “Parental Child Safety Placement” on them – but they’re not reported as entries into foster care. If they were, they alone would add 30% to Virginia’s rate of removal.  

But when Virginia created this new category it didn’t stop counties from continuing to do it the old way – with even less accountability.  So it’s likely that Virginia still tears apart more families using various forms of hidden foster care than the number it officially reports. That means the real rate of removal in Virginia may be well above the national average.

So no, there is no excuse for inflicting the lifelong trauma of permanent separation – and even aging out with no home at all – on so many children. It reflects the contempt that the system has for the overwhelmingly poor disproportionately nonwhite families who get caught up in its net. 

What can be done? At a bare minimum, the Legislature should revisit its legitimization of hidden foster care. It should demand that any time any child is placed out-of-home because a county CPS agency “asked” that it happen, it be counted as an entry into foster care and reported in a public database. 

More important, every family needs high-quality legal representation – from the moment it comes under any form of scrutiny from a child protective services agency. No, that’s not to get “bad parents” off. It’s to protect children from being forced needlessly into any form of foster care, open or hidden, and finding alternatives to the cookie-cutter “service plans” often churned out by CPS. This approach has been proven to safely reduce needless foster care. The federal government will pay half the cost in many cases, and the rest can be made up through savings from reduced foster care. 

One would hope that when it comes to permanent family separation, Virginia could at least do better than Donald Trump.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending June 25, 2025

● Maine lawmakers are considering a bill that would impose a “balance of harms” test in child welfare cases. Judges would have to balance the alleged harm of leaving a child at home with the inherent trauma of tearing the child from her or his family. And the state family police agency would have to show it “exhausted the options” to mitigate the risk of harm and avoid removal. It would be hard to find a better example of the need for such a law than the case examined in this story from The Maine Monitor. I have a blog post about some lessons from the story. 

● ProPublica has a good story on the New York State bill, which, if signed by the Governor, will replace anonymous child abuse reporting with confidential reporting. 

● The New York City Family Policy Project has a new data brief showing what progress the city has made so far in curbing needless reports and the trauma such reports inflict on children and families. 

● Also from the New York City Family Project: An interview with Prof. Kelley Fong, author of the landmark study Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services.  Prof. Fong discusses what she found when she embedded with child protective services agencies in two states – including the perceptions of the investigators themselves: 

For investigators, one of the things that came through was their belief that many of the cases that come their way don’t necessarily need a child protection intervention. And by that I mean an intervention that is, essentially, focused on identifying candidates for foster care—identifying families whose children may need to be removed for extreme safety reasons. 

Oftentimes, they would get reports and say, “I don’t know why this was called in. This was clearly a misunderstanding.” Or, “This teacher could have handled this in some other way.” Instead, they had to go out and do a full surveillance treatment, asking a ton of questions about all aspects of families’ lives and calling teachers and doctors and others. They have to do a quite intensive intervention even when that initial call might have just been a teacher making a judgment about a family or misunderstanding what CPS might be able to do. 

● “Last time I checked, it wasn’t illegal for a kid to walk to the store,” said Georgia mother Brittany Patterson – as she was being arrested for letting her kid walk to the store.  Well, it’s not illegal now. The Imprint reports on Georgia’s new “Reasonable Childhood Independence” law.  From the story: 

While Georgia parents seeking freedom to parent as they choose drove the legislation, it has implications for those more typically ensnared by neglect allegations in the child welfare system — low-income families with little voice or resources. For those parents, leaving kids unsupervised can be the only option. 

“If you’re a single mom and you’re working two jobs to keep the electricity on, you’re going to let your kid come home with a latchkey,” said Lenore Skenazy, president of the national nonprofit Let Grow. “To me, that’s not neglect. We’re talking about regular life.” 

● Remember how Donald Trump said he’s build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. He couldn’t do it. But when it comes to cruelty, even Trump is no match for America’s history of family policing. Because, as The Imprint reports, when America did something far worse to Native American children – tearing them from their homes and imprisoning them in hideous “boarding schools” – they made the tribes pay for it.  (And of course, many modern family police agencies still make parents pay what amounts to ransom to get their children back from foster care.) Now, a class action lawsuit brought by several tribes demands that the federal government literally, as the story says, “show its receipts.” 

● We don’t hear very much about Asian children in foster care, but as Documented explains in this story, they can go through their own kind of hell. Asian children may lose not only the right to live with their parents but, ultimately the ability to speak to them – literally.  Among the examples in the story: A father whose daughter 

now 17, cannot communicate with him directly, because she has lost her Chinese language after she was placed in a non-Asian foster family. And she is no longer his daughter by legal means. And his wife, fighting to get their daughter back from New York City’s foster care system, died in the middle of the long battle from cancer. … 

“I had never thought that one day my daughter and us won’t be able to directly communicate,” said [the father] … 

And finally ...  

● Another example of how, when it comes to doing things that invoke Orwell, child welfare always seems to get there first: THE CITY reports that 

Two members of Congress were refused entry to Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention areas inside 26 Federal Plaza Wednesday morning, despite rules laid out by Congress allowing members to conduct unannounced visits for oversight purposes. 

ICE’s explanation: Those staying at the facility, some for nights at a time, are “in transit” and not actually in federal detention. 

Oh, ICE, you’re so late to the game! In Kansas for decades, the state family police agency has been holding children in foster care while saying: Oh, no! They’re not in foster care, they’re in “police protective custody”!  And that’s on top of hundreds of thousands of children trapped every day, all over America, in hidden foster care using a series of euphemisms that would make Orwell’s Big Brother proud – and ICE envious.

In Maine “child welfare” it’s more like 1001 clowns – and there’s nothing funny about them

Tragic life imitating comic art illustrates why Maine – and every other state – needs a “balance of harms” law.

 Art … 

The movie has a happier ending. A case it echoes does not.

My earliest introduction to how child protective services works came all the way back in 1965 – at the movies. It was the film version of Herb Gardber’s play, A Thousand Clowns.  Wikipedia sums up the plot this way – including the ending, so there are MAJOR SPOILERS IN THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS: 

Unemployed television writer Murray Burns (Jason Robards) lives in a cluttered New York City studio apartment with his 12-year-old nephew, Nick (Barry Gordon). Murray has been unemployed for five months after quitting his previous job writing jokes for a children's television show called Chuckles the Chipmunk. Nick, the son of Murray's unwed sister, was left with Murray seven years earlier. When Nick writes a school essay on the benefits of unemployment insurance, his school requests that New York State [sic] send social workers to investigate his living conditions. 

In the end, Murray “is forced to conform to society to retain legal custody of his nephew.” By the end Murray is back in a business suit, carrying a briefcase, returning to the job he hated. That’s the price for Nick to be allowed to keep living with him.

 …And life

 A Thousand Clowns is a comedy – and a very good one.  But the real-life version playing out in Maine right now is deadly serious. The story is told in still another excellent story from Josh Keefe of the Maine Monitor.  It’s a long read – and worth every word. 

The real-life Murray is Mica Adler, a woman with a three-year-old son and a dream of living close to nature and off the grid, in a tiny house that some Amish neighbors helped her build. As the story explains: 

Her goal was to build a homestead there, where she could be self-sufficient. She had a well for water and solar panels for electricity, with plans to build a geothermal heating system for warmth. 

But that doesn’t mean she never drove to the supermarket. One day, 15 months ago, in a supermarket parking lot, the boy ran right out toward the path of an oncoming car. He turned around just as Mica was reaching for him, but she wanted to make sure he never did that again.  So she spanked him – on top of his snowsuit and another layer of clothing. 

But the driver of the car into whose path the boy almost ran claimed Mica punched the boy “in the back/butt” – something she said she could see through the side view mirror of her car. 

That was what brought the Maine family police – with their well-known hair trigger – into the family’s life. Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services tears apart families and holds children in foster care at one of the highest rates in the nation. 

And when DHHS caseworkers visited the home it became clear that what really upset them was less the spanking than Mica’s unorthodox lifestyle: minimal modern amenities, not bathing often enough to meet unwritten DHHS standards, often not wearing clothes around the house, and, the only thing in all of this that could be considered harm to the boy: tooth decay; due, Mica says, to a missed appointment because of car trouble. 

But that was enough for DHHS to take the child on the spot and not even ask a judge until afterward. And the parking lot incident led to criminal charges. The boy was moved to four different foster homes – and allegedly abused in one of them.  

At times the allegations bordered on paranoia – on the part of the workers – and may have said more about the mental health of the caseworkers than anyone else’s. From the story: 

At one point early in the case, a police report noted that a DHHS caseworker supervising the visits had concerns about the fact that Adler and her son had often been naked, and that he seemed familiar with anatomical terms for private body parts. (Adler said she taught her child these terms because sexual abuse prevention specialists recommend doing so.) 

The department referred the boy to a forensic interview, which are used to gather information about possible sexual abuse. There are no details about this interview in the DHHS files reviewed by The Monitor, and there were no formal allegations made. (Adler’s lawyer later said that had there been any findings, the department would have introduced them into the case.)[Emphasis added.] 

It took a jury only an hour to find Mica not guilty of the criminal charges.  DHHS ultimately dropped its child abuse case.  Even the “guardian ad litem” named to represent the child’s “best interests” (and who, in this case, happened to be a former Maine Attorney General) wrote in one report: 

“While I might have my own view of Ms. Adler’s lifestyle, she was the only parent to [the boy] for several years, to cut [the boy] off significantly from his mother would not be in his best interest.” 

Yet Mica still doesn’t have her son back. That’s because, after four foster home placements, DHHS placed the child with his father, with whom he had not lived before, and now there are ongoing acrimonious negotiations over custody. 

Balance of harms 

Legislation introduced in Maine would require courts to apply a balance-of-harms test; that is, to weigh the enormous inherent emotional trauma of removal against the harm to the child of remaining in her or his own home. And it would require DHHS to show it did everything it could to mitigate any alleged harm that might occur by keeping the family together (something the director of the agency recently effectively admitted it does not do). 

So let’s balance the harms in this case: 

● If the child remained at home he might suffer further tooth decay (unless, of course, DHHS mitigated that harm by doing something bold and creative like, uh, taking him to a dentist). 

● By removing the child he was subjected to the trauma of separation at an age when he could not possibly understand it. Indeed, he might process it as further punishment for running toward the path of that car.  He was subjected to an astounding number of traumatic interrogations.  (And, though one of the lifestyle concerns was too much nudity in the home, I wonder if total strangers from DHHS stripsearched the boy. Given the nature of the allegation it almost certainly happened at least once.)  Then he was allegedly abused in foster care. 

It doesn’t seem too hard to see where the balance of harms falls here. 

The real-life ending 

Mica’s son goes through far more than Murray’s had to endure in A Thousand Clowns.  Murray’s son was never taken from his uncle, and Murray didn’t have to conform to one “service plan” condition after another, almost none of them related to the actual allegations. 

But Mica and Murray have one thing in common: giving up their dreams. In the end, Mica learns the same lesson as Murray: Conform precisely to middle-class, white-picket-fence child-rearing norms or lose your child. 

As the story explains, Adler now has 

a more traditional living situation. She had moved into a modest ranch house with a roommate, who had just become a grandmother. The house was clean and organized, cavernous in comparison to the tiny home. ...

She explained that she has essentially abandoned her tiny home, and all it represented — at least for now. She has a job tutoring at the Academic Resource Center at Northern Maine Community College. In the fall, she will begin studying electrical construction and maintenance. It’s possible she’ll eventually get a job working on the grid she once tried to escape.

 She is afraid that bringing her son to the small piece of Maine she owns, where she dreamed of raising him, will only invite more trouble.

 “If I don’t bring [my son] there, then it’s just going to be easier to keep them out of my life,” she said. “Out of our lives.”

Oh, and one last question: What wasn’t getting done by caseworkers for the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, what child in real danger was missed while so many people there spent some much time tearing apart and keeping apart this mother and child?

Child welfare in Tennessee: Here comes the new lawsuit, just like the old lawsuit.

That’s why the new one won’t fix child welfare either 

I have an idea for a great TV game show: Name That Lawsuit!  Here’s how it works: I post excerpts from lawsuits about Tennessee’s “child welfare” system, contestants guess which is from the lawsuit filed 25 years ago and which is from the lawsuit filed last month. 

Ready? You’ll find the answers at the end of this post. So now let’s Name. That. Lawsuit!

Excerpt A: 

Foster care is intended to be temporary, until children can either be reunited with their families or placed in another permanent home; however, children in Tennessee linger in foster care and are moved from place to place without the opportunity for a stable childhood.

Excerpt B: 

While in foster care, children routinely spend years, and often lose much of their childhoods and suffer additional deprivations, as they are moved from one inadequate placement to another without appropriate services, languishing in state custody. 

Excerpt C: 

Children are routinely placed in emergency shelters and other temporary holding facilities for upwards of six months at a time because the state has nowhere else to place them. 

Excerpt D: 

Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services (“DCS”) warehouses children in spaces which lack the basic necessities of life, including adequate food, bedding, soap, and potable water. Intended as temporary placements, DCS leaves children in these situations for months on end.

It’s not really a game, of course. Rather it illustrates the need to understand why that first lawsuit failed – it’s the same reason the second lawsuit almost certainly will fail: Neither suit addressed the problem at the root of all the others: Tennessee tears apart thousands of families needlessly, often when poverty is confused with “neglect.” 

Because the first suit was silent on that issue, and the litigators even thwarted the state’s own efforts to curb needless entries into care, it was doomed from the start. Indeed, it was like many other failed McLawsuits – almost identical in state after state. 

That’s not hindsight.  Consider the timeline: 

2001: We post the statement of principles for the original Tennessee settlement and compare them to a far more innovative settlement in Alabama. That settlement demanded that the system be rebuilt to emphasize keeping families together. (A member of NCCPR’s Board of Directors was co-counsel for plaintiffs.) At the time we asked: 

If these principles can indeed become reality, which would be the better reality for vulnerable children? 

2005: Alabama’s success is on the front page of The New York Times. Yes, there’s been backsliding in Alabama, too – there always is when the monitoring stops.  But it’s nothing like the collapse in Tennessee.  

2009: Marcia Lowry, who brought the suit while leading the group known as “Children’s Rights,” doesn’t just ignore the problem of wrongful removal, she successfully sues to prevent the Tennessee Legislature from acting to curb it in the county where the problem was worst. And they used some interesting tactics to do it.  

2014: Lowry leaves Children’s Rights and forms another group to bring the same sort of litigation, A Better Childhood. 

2019: All court oversight of the Tennessee system ends. Though Lowry has left, Children’s Rights declares victory. But that year, Tennessee took away 22% more children than it did the year the lawsuit was filed.  

2023: Entries into care are down, but still just as high as they were back when the suit was filed – and that’s now 70% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in. 

2025: By now, Children’s Rights has dramatically changed course, engaging in advocacy and litigation geared to the only approach that works to keep children safe: doing more to end the needless removal of children. They’ve publicly acknowledged they got some things wrong when Lowry was in charge. 

But over at A Better Childhood, Lowry brings her new Tennessee McLawsuit, which makes all the same mistakes as the old one. 

The new suit makes no mention of wrongful removal, no mention of confusing poverty with neglect, and no mention of the pervasive racial bias in the system – something one would hope would be of particular concern when suing a state where children can be taken from parents whose only crime is “driving while Black.”  

Tennessee’s children deserve a much better system, but that will require a much better lawsuit. It’s one thing to play a game of Name That Lawsuit. But there is no excuse for what A Better Childhood is doing now – playing games with children’s lives. 

Answers: B and C are from the old lawsuit, A and D are from the new one.