NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending August 13, 2024

● When family police agencies try to treat substance addiction as a moral failing instead of as a disease, some of us have said: Well, you wouldn’t treat cancer as a moral failing, would you?  Of course not.  Except in North Carolina, that is. Check out this story from NC Newsline.

● There’s another story on the Interior Department report documenting the horrors inflicted on Native American children when they were kidnapped, sometimes at gunpoint, and forced into so-called boarding schools where they were beaten, raped and tortured.  The horrors afflict Native America to this day. 

Prominent proponents of tearing apart families today sometimes suggest that some parents simply choose to be drug addicts and that’s what makes them poor. I recalled those cruel comments when I read this part of the story, from The 74: 

The final report, released last week, also documented how the boarding school system negatively impacted genetics and health outcomes for Native families, who for generations have had the nation’s highest rates of substance abuse, suicidal ideation and chronic illnesses, such diabetes, arthritis, and cancer. 

“As we have learned over the past three years, these institutions are not just part of our past,” Assistant Secretary of the Interior Bryan Newland wrote in the report’s opening letter. “Their legacy reaches us today, and is reflected in the wounds people continue to experience in communities across the United States.”  

● Family policing apologists also have taken to acknowledging, grudgingly, that, well yes, foster care can be traumatic, but, they claim, what happens in children’s own homes must be worse.  Abundant research says otherwise.  And before you buy the apologists’ claims, read this story from Oregon Public Broadcasting.  

There are two important research summaries out this week: 

● ChildTrends summarizes the research on what works, and what does not, when it comes to pregnancy and substance use. Bottom line: the family policing approach makes everything worse.  As ChildTrends explains: 

Data show that certain policies are associated with positive and negative outcomes. For example, in states that consider prenatal substance use to be a crime, the policy is associated with a 45 percent increase in overdose deaths among pregnant women, following implementation of this criminalization. Among all policies that involve child welfare and/or law enforcement, data suggest these policies are associated with no decrease in prenatal substance use, less use of prenatal care and addiction treatment, a 10-18 percent increase in babies born exposed, and more children entering foster care. 

In contrast, policies that fund treatment for prenatal substance use are associated with a 45 percent decrease in overdose deaths for pregnant women, and those that prioritize treatment access in cases of prenatal substance use are associated with more prenatal care use and healthier birth outcomes. 

● And that’s why the Colorado Legislature was right to change state law as described in this story from Colorado Politics. 

● One of the most promising approaches to curbing child abuse and “neglect” is providing families with a guaranteed income.  Even a little bit of no-strings-attached cash can go a long way.  The New York City Family Policy Project has a new report on the various guaranteed income experiments across the country and what we can learn from them. 

● Idaho is going in a somewhat different direction.  From now on, if a child is taken away because a working parent couldn’t provide adequate supervision, and that child is placed in the foster home of a state employee the foster parent can get paid parental leave. 

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

KTVF-TV in Fairbanks, Alaska, reports: 

A 60-year-old Fairbanks man will serve 30 years in prison after forcing underage boys to have sex with him, sometimes giving the minors cigarettes or alcohol as part of the exchange. 

Paul Michael Worman pleaded guilty Tuesday to first-degree sexual abuse of a minor as part of an agreement reached between his attorney, Emily Cooper, and State Prosecutor Kathryn Mason. 

Trooper investigators discovered in 2020 that Worman had been a state-licensed foster care provider for more than two decades until allegations arose in 2017, saying that Worman was grooming the minors for sexual favors.