NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 7, 2024

● Last week’s round-up included a New York Times story about a lawsuit that aims to stop the New York City family police agency, the Administration for Children’s Services in its infinite arrogance, from harassing battered women and their children. I have some additional context in this blog post. 

● ACS’ arrogance is on full display when it claims that, as long as it manages to institutionalize a child for at least 60 days, it has carte blanche to keep the child institutionalized – and judges have no power to stop them.  Their argument boils down to: We always get it right, so you’ll just have to trust us!  Fortunately, as The Imprint reports, an appeals court disagreed. 

● The agency’s arrogance is nothing compared to the arrogance of the private agencies that institutionalize children and oversee many of the foster homes in New York. Faced with hundreds of lawsuits from children abused while in their “care,” their latest excuse for demanding a huge taxpayer bailout is a claim that they are the real victims! They say they’ve fixed everything now, and they shouldn’t have to pay for “sins of the past.” In a column for the Albany Times Union I discuss the evidence that actually, the sinning has never stopped.

● In just the past week we got fresh reminders of the horrors inflicted on institutionalized children  The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that: 

The Pennsylvania Department of Education and the Department of Human Services have agreed to pay $450,000 to settle a case brought by former students of the Glen Mills Schools, which closed in 2019 after an Inquirer investigation revealed decades of violence against boys sent to the reform school in Delaware County. 

The settlement also promises increased oversight – but only enough to raise the level of oversight from nearly nonexistent all the way to pathetic.  And “oversight” never works because abuse is practically baked into the institutional care model.  That’s one reason why institutional “care” should be abolished.

● The U.S. Department of the Interior has released a report on the ghastly scope of the effort to eradicate Native America by tearing apart native families and institutionalizing children in hideous “boarding schools.”  

As The Imprint reports, 

The atrocities occurring within school walls range from abusive to culturally genocidal, with matrons, priests and other school employees using various methods to erase the cultures and identities of tribal children. … 

In a rare and sweeping admission, the federal agency that oversaw [the boarding schools] is now calling for a formal national apology to the descendants of those who died or suffered rampant abuse and trauma in this system. 

Somehow, that doesn’t seem like enough.  Especially because, as the story explains: 

“The most important thing is that our work to tell the truth about the Federal Indian boarding school system be paired with action,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland, a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, noted in the report. “As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past. Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States.” 

● One person who claims to recognize this suffering is the head of Washington State’s family police agency -- but only, it seems, as a way to pit Native Americans against Black Americans and other oppressed groups, and doing nothing to help any of them.  I have a blog post about it.

● There’s an excellent new issue of the Family Justice Journal, this one devoted to “relational health.”  Among other things, it exposes how ludicrous it is to build a system around depriving children of any and all contact not only with their parents but also grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, friends, mentors, and classmates  - all in the name of putting the “paper permanence” of adoption by strangers ahead of the relational permanence children really need. 

● They’re fanatical about paper permanence in Los Angeles. WitnessLA looks at the meaningless hoops the Los Angeles County family police agency forces parents to jump through before their children can get them back, and the rush to terminate children’s rights to their parents if they don’t jump through every one.