Today’s child welfare system
has its roots not in benevolence, but in bigotry.
Foster
care began more than 150 years ago with a Protestant minister by the name of
Charles Loring Brace. Brace founded an organization that still exists, New York
City’s Children’s Aid Society.
Brace
had seen the revolutions in Europe of 1848, and they terrified him. In
particular, he was terrified of poor immigrant Catholics, whom he branded a
“stupid, foreign criminal class” and the “scum and refuse of ill-formed
civilizations.” He worried that “some demagogue might arouse their passions and
fuse all the elements for a Parisian scene of riot and blood.”
And, of
course, Brace explained, these Catholic immigrant parents were genetically
inferior, passing bad “gemmules” on to their children. Fortunately, these ill
effects could be reversed – by taking away the children and shipping them out
to middle class Protestant farmers in the countryside.
Brace
did just that. Between 1854 and 1929, his “orphan trains” took at least 100,000
such children. But the name notwithstanding, many of the children were not
orphans. And many were taken without the knowledge or consent of their parents.
In 1990, I discussed some
of this history in a letter to The New York
Times. That prompted a touching and wonderfully ironic testament to
the importance of family: a response defending Brace from his own
great-grandson, Charles Loring Brace IV.
Bigotry?
Heavens, no, Brace IV said. Those remarks about “scum and refuse” reflected
merely a “somewhat genteel sense of superiority.” And you can’t blame
great-grandpa for the whole “gemmules” idea – he got it from Charles Darwin!
The headline the Times put on this letter is: “Brace Took Up Bad
Science in Good Faith.”
Bad Science in Arizona
Flash forward 163 years.
The place is Arizona, scene of the nation’s longest
sustained foster care panic. The sharp, sudden increase in children
removed from their homes began in 2003. It might – might – have finally stopped
in 2016. Arizona tears apart families at
a rate 60 percent above the national average when rates of child
poverty are factored in. Metropolitan Phoenix takes children at the
highest rate among America’s big cities when poverty is considered.
And the
state is remarkably creative about figuring out new ways to do it.
The
latest plan: secretly tape interviews with those suspected of abusing and
neglecting their children. Then run the recordings through a “Computer Voice
Stress Analyzer” (CVSA) to see if the suspect is telling the truth.
Academics who have studied the
technology … have dismissed it as ineffective. Kelly Damphousse, the dean of
the University of Oklahoma’s College of Arts and Sciences, led a 2007 study for
the Department of Justice. … “The software isn’t capable of distinguishing who
is telling the truth,” Damphousse said …
“It’s a sham. … There is no
scientific validity to the results,” said John J. Palmatier, a former police
officer and criminal justice professor who has studied such technologies for 34
years. … “They’re actually using it? I hope Arizona has deep pockets,
because if the right attorney finds out, they’re going to pay big bucks,”
Palmatier said.
In fact, the right
attorney did find out. When family defender Gregg Woodnick
blew the whistle, the Arizona child protective services agency decided it would
not make clandestine use of CVSA after all. So that part of the plan never got
off the ground. But the agency still uses it with the “permission” of the
suspect.
The Ultimate in Bad Science
But of course, the
classic example of child welfare’s never-ending love affair with bad science
is “predictive
analytics” in which computer software supposedly tells caseworkers
which families are at high risk for abusing their children.
I have yet to encounter
anyone who favors predictive analytics who is both an advocate of family
preservation and does not run a child
welfare system. But some reformers who do run such systems say, in effect:
§ Yes, we
know that the Los Angeles experiment with predictive analytics produced a false positive rate of 95 percent.
§ Yes, we
know about how predictive analytics reinforces racial bias in criminal justice, with
a disturbing tendency to overestimate the dangerousness of the accused if
they’re black and underestimate the danger if they’re white.
But, they say, we will avoid all these pitfalls. We will only use predictive analytics the right
way.
I trust
them to try their very best to do just that. But I don’t trust their
successors, whoever they may be. And I don’t trust the successors to those successors.
Because the typical child welfare agency is like the one in Arizona – chaotic,
dysfunctional and ready to grasp at any straw that might get it off the hook
the next time a child “known to the system” becomes front page news.
That’s
why child welfare keeps taking up bad science in good faith.
