NCCPR News and commentary round-up, week ending September 10, 2024

● WABE Public Radio in Atlanta has published and broadcast a stunning story.  It starts with one of the worst practices of family policing – and then documents one failure after another after another.  That’s why this post to the NCCPR Child Welfare Blog is called All the failures of family policing in a single case - and it's not an unusual case. 

● It’s bad enough that hospitals routinely test pregnant women for drugs without their consent, and then routinely report a positive result to the family police. The Marshall Project and Reveal report on the common practice of doing it based on tests that are wrong up to 50% of the time. 

● From the Dallas Morning News: A story about the new laws curbing the power of the family police – but instead of the usual fearmongering, this story profiles a family that might well have benefitted had the laws been in effect sooner. 

● Many newspapers have an unfortunate - I would say arrogant --  policy of refusing to even consider op-eds that dissent from their editorials. They will accept only much shorter letters to the editor.  In other words: everyone is fair game - except us!  Fortunately, the Albuquerque Journal is not one of those newspapers.  Thank you for publishing this dissent from NCCPR. 

● Record numbers of children are trapped in foster care in Maine. I have a blog post on how a state that once was a potential national model became a national disgrace.  

And if you’re wondering what happens when a state tears apart a record number of families:

● The Associated Press reports: 

Maine unnecessarily segregates children with behavioral health disabilities in hospitals, residential facilities and a state-run juvenile detention facility, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday in a lawsuit seeking to force the state to make changes. 

●And the Bangor Daily News reports that: 

In the months following a scathing federal investigation that detailed maltreatment at out-of-state programs where Maine youth are receiving mental health treatment, state health officials have yet to conduct in-person inspections of those programs, a spokeswoman said.

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

John Hill of Honolulu Civil Beat writes about multiple settlements the state has reached over abuse in foster care: 

If the Legislature can’t be persuaded to demand accountability from the child welfare bureaucracy for the sake of — you know — the welfare of children, maybe they could do it on behalf of taxpayers. 

Because the lawsuits, settlements and verdicts against the Department of Human Services for botching their life-and-death job just keep piling up. 

The latest: $600,000 to the plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging the state negligently placed a teenage girl in a Kailua-Kona home where she was sexually assaulted. 

Negligent, in the sense that a state social worker placed the girl in that foster home even after the girl’s older sister allegedly warned that she had been sexually assaulted and harassed by a man living there.

All the failures of family policing in a single case - and it's not an unusual case

 

An extraordinary story by Stephannie Stokes of WABE, the public radio station in Atlanta, is built around one of the most cruel, most odious practices of family policing systems: making parents pay ransom to get their children back. (No, of course they don’t call it that, but when you take someone’s children and make them pay money to get the children back, euphemisms like “child support” only obscure what’s really happening.)  

But read the story and you’ll see the story is about so much more – in fact, it’s almost every family police failing in a single case. 

Consider: 

● The mother, Annalinda Martinez, had grown up in foster care herself. 

● There really was child abuse – but not by Ms. Martinez.  As the story explains: 

She discovered her ex-boyfriend was abusing her daughter. He was arrested and she testified to put him in prison. 

On the contrary, when she discovered her ex-boyfriend was abusing her daughter, she did the right thing and turned him in. He was arrested and imprisoned. 

● But then: 

without his income, she couldn’t afford their rent. Soon, her family was evicted. All seven of them spent a night in their van.  

● She had no friends or family to call on (remember where she grew up) all she could think to do was call the agency that provided the family with foodstamps, in the hope it also would help with housing.  

● But that agency was the Georgie Department of Family and Children’s Services – the family police.  “That very same day,” Martinez told WABE, “my six kids got taken away.” 

As the story explained:

 The court documents for Martinez’ case say that her family was “found” living in a van. DFCS and a judge argued it was unsafe for her kids to be homeless. But instead of connecting her family to housing, the state put her kids in foster care.

● With DFCS holding the children and demanding ransom, Martinez saw no way out. So …

After about a year and a half, Martinez said the court pressured her to surrender her rights as a parent. She agreed. She believed it would allow her kids to be adopted together into the same home... 

● But the “forever family” wasn’t.  The adoption fell apart, the children were thrown back into foster care, and Martinez has no idea where they are now, and whether they are OK.

Now, at this point let's pause to consider another bit of cruelty spewed by those most fanatical about tearing apart families like this: Talk about poverty and they’ll immediately say: “Well they wouldn’t be poor if they didn’t choose to do drugs!” 

In fact, contrary to the nonstop fearmongering from the take-the-child-and-run crowd a large majority of foster care cases don’t involve even an accusation of drug abuse. 

But also, often where there is drug abuse, the fearmongers get cause and effect backwards.  This case is one of them. Drugs are in the picture in this case. That’s because after her children were torn from her, after they were taken forever, after her life was torn apart by poverty and by the family police then: 

She was desperate for something that would make her forget that she had permanently lost her kids. She tried marijuana to numb her feelings. Then, she used cocaine. The problem was she was pregnant. So when she gave birth to her youngest daughter a couple of months later, DFCS took her too.  

At that point, Martinez realized that only compliance would get this child back – so when DFCS said jump, she said how high.  Years later she has a stable household; she’s rebuilt her life – almost. 

Because the family police still want their ransom.  And they’re threatening her with jail if they don’t get it. 

Georgia usually doesn’t do this to families in cases that arise today.  It’s one of several states and localities that stopped making parents pay ransom after the practice was exposed by NPR.  But somehow, the desire of the family police and their allies to twist the knife every chance they get never seems to end.

Read -- and hear - the full story from WABE

NCCPR in the Albuquerque Journal: Baby bonds and universal basic income better approaches than foster care

Many newspapers have an unfortunate - I would say arrogant --  policy of refusing to even consider op-eds that dissent from their editorials. They will accept only much shorter letters to the editor.  In other words: everyone is fair game - except us!  Fortunately, the Albuquerque Journal is NOT one of those newspapers.  So we thank the Journal for publishing this dissent:

The Aug. 25 Sunday Journal editorial “Funds for baby bonds could be better spent on boosting foster care” says “Bold, new approaches are desperately needed” to deal with a “shortage” of licensed family foster homes and prevent children from being warehoused in group homes, institutions and state offices. 

That’s true. But there’s nothing bold or new about the Journal’s proposed solutions: more money and goodies for middle-class foster parents and the ever-popular “public awareness campaign.” 

The only thing that’s bold or new, but not in a good way, is the Journal’s proposed funding mechanism: Ditching a program to help children at birth – a program especially helpful to children whose poverty makes them most likely to land in foster care in the first place.

Read the full column in the Albuquerque Journal

Maine child welfare: Once a potential national model, now a national disgrace

The child Maine politicians keep forgetting

A Maine newspaper has a good story about a bad record - but three implicit assumptions don't hold up.

Among the greatest child welfare tragedies in America is what’s been happening in Maine. Maine doesn’t have the worst system in America, but it’s bad enough, tearing apart families at a rate more than double the national average. 

What makes it especially tragic is that Maine is a place that almost got child welfare right.  After the death of Logan Marr – taken needlessly because of poverty only to be killed by her foster mother – the system embraced safe, proven alternatives.  Briefly, it was a national model; a finalist for the Innovations in American Government awards from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. 

A succession of foster-care panics, egged on first by Maine’s Trump-before-Trump governor, Paul LePage, but also by the administration of his Democratic successor, Janet Mills, largely wiped out the progress. 

That explains the headline on a story in Sunday’s Portland Press-Herald and sister newspapers: “Number of Maine children in state custody rises to 20-year high.” 

The story is careful, nuanced, and refreshingly free of the kind of demagoguery regularly spewed by the worst actors in Maine child welfare.  But the story includes three implicit assumptions that don’t hold up: 

Implicit assumption #1: The biggest false assumption is the idea that, while yes, children might be emotionally harmed by needless foster care, at least if you take the child and run that child will be physically safe.  

Given what happened to Logan Marr (remember her?) one would think Maine would be the last place to jump to that conclusion.  

Oh, Logan Marr was a horror story, you say? Why yes, and so were the cases that set off the foster-care panics in 2011, 2018 and 2021.  When anecdotes collide, it’s time to look at the data.  Study after study by independent researchers finds abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes and the rate in group homes and institutions is even worse.  

What? The Maine family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) reports much lower figures?  Yes; that’s what happens when you are, in effect, investigating yourself. 

So don’t kid yourself. Taking away all those kids is not being “on the safe side.”  You can be sure children have been taken from homes that are safe or could be made safe with the right kinds of help, only to be abused in foster care.  

Deluging workers with false allegations, trivial cases, cases in which poverty is confused with neglect and needless removal of children into foster is not helping to find the horror story cases either.  Maine had horrific cases in 2017 and early 2018.  The rate at which families were torn apart skyrocketed.  Then, the deaths stopped, right?  What, no?  Oh yeah, as the story points out, in 2021 there was another “spate” of deaths.  Does that not tell you anything about what works – and what doesn’t? 

Implicit assumption #2: Some of the families could have stayed together – but only with a lot of help.  

In some cases, it would indeed take a lot of help.  In many others it would take very little – research shows small amounts of cash lead to big reductions in what agencies label neglect, and even abuse.  And in some cases, the Maine family police are just plain wrong to remove a child at all. 

Implicit assumption #3: You can compare rates of “child abuse” across states.  

The story makes such a comparison, based on a table in a federal report; then offers only a tepid caution: 

The increased number of children in state custody isn’t a surprise. Maine has had the highest rate of child maltreatment and child abuse cases in the country, according to a 2023 study, although that report acknowledged the limitations of comparing states. 

Here’s what the federal report actually says on the matter: 

[R]eaders should exercise caution in making state-to-state comparisons. Each state defines child abuse and neglect in its own statutes and policies and the child welfare agencies determine the appropriate response for the alleged maltreatment based on those statutes and policies.            

And, as we explained in a detailed post last year about the misuse of these data in Maine, here's why: 

What that table actually measures is the percentage of the child population for whom child protective services workers check a box on a form saying they think it’s at least slightly more likely than not that a parent or caretaker abused or neglected a child.  This can be little more than a caseworker’s guess. 

For several years, until about 2020, Kentucky was #1 – and Kentucky media were far less responsible in reporting this, offering no caveat at all. 

But what does it tell us that, just as the system was in full panic mode, “child abuse” in Maine soared to the #1 spot in this table? It should tell us that, because of the panic, workers suddenly started checking the substantiated box on cases they never would have checked before. 

So Maine’s so-called #1 ranking is a function of the panic.  Then the #1 ranking is used to justify more panic. 

And Maine continues its plunge from potential national model to national disgrace.

NCCPR News and commentary round-up, week ending September 3, 2024

● Last week, we highlighted a story about the powerful using their great power to take a child from the powerless. Now, OSV News reports on another case where the same dynamic is at play. 

● Business Insider has more about the Illinois guaranteed income pilot project, targeting families on the radar of the family police. As the story explains: 

Studies and basic income pilots have previously found that cash payments can mitigate neglect by strengthening parents' access to basic necessities. Researchers have also told BI that reducing family financial stress can lead to lower rates of physical abuse and domestic violence. 

Business Insider also has an overview of where such programs are underway - and where legislatures have actually banned them. 

● When you begin a sentence with the words: “Yes, it’s Big Brother …” what is the only ethical way to end that sentence?  Not the way a leading proponent of predictive analytics in child welfare ended it.  I have a blog post on what she actually said – and why predictive analytics is the Project 2025 of child welfare. 

● The New York Times has a terrifying story about a chain of private psychiatric hospitals holding patients against their will because of financial incentives.  They’re paid for each day they hold the patient.  What does that have to do with family policing?  Private foster care agencies also are typically paid for each day they hold a child in “care.”  And, as the New York Daily News pointed out nearly 50 years ago, they’ve been known to do the same thing. 

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

●From NBC News, still another expose of still another residential treatment center. 

● Hawaii News Now reports: 

A circuit court judge has ruled that the state was “grossly negligent” when it placed an eight-year-old boy in a foster home, where he was then repeatedly sexually abused for years.

Predictive analytics: The Project 2025 of child welfare

“Yes, it’s Big Brother.  But we have to have our eyes open to the potential of this model.”

-- Rhema Vaithianathan, co-designer of child welfare “predictive analytics” algorithms, discussing the idea of assessing children’s risk of abuse – while they’re still in the womb.

The Lincoln Project is a group of disaffected Republicans appalled by what has happened to their party. They’re probably best known for their ads.  One that’s gotten a lot of attention is their vision of what would happen if the near-total ban on abortion envisaged by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 becomes reality.  Among the proposals: a massive increase in “abortion surveillance.” 

In the Lincoln Project ad, a father and daughter are pulled over by a police officer and ultimately arrested, the father for trying to take the daughter across the state line for an abortion, the daughter for “evading motherhood.”  (And just to be clear, some states already are trying to do things like this.) 

Have a look at the ad and then I’ll explain what all this has to do with child welfare: 

Among the striking features of the ad: the creators’ understanding of how the data we routinely surrender every day can be turned into an Orwellian nightmare of omnipresent surveillance.  Fortunately, something like this would only be supported by certain elements on the far right.  Liberals would never stand for it, right? 

But that brings us to the Great Exception of the Left: the fact that some of my fellow liberals (though many fewer than in decades past) will discard everything they claim to believe about civil liberties as soon as somebody whispers the words “child abuse” in their ears.  It’s one reason there is so little due process in what should be called family policing. 

Consider the quote at the start of this post.  It’s from a Boston Globe story in 2015, the early, heady days of the movement to bring Orwellian hyper-surveillance, what amounts to computerized racial profiling, to child welfare in the form of “predictive analytics” algorithms.  

We were told algorithms would indicate who is most likely to abuse a child so the family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) could swoop right in!  Big, centrist media – news organizations such as The New York Times, which now are appalled by Project 2025 -- swooned over it in 2015 and beyond.  (Almost the lone exception: a prescient warning from Prof. Virginia Eubanks in her book, Automating Inequality, excerpted in Wired. Many more, on the left and right, are opposed now.) 

At the time, the focus was on models like the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), used by  screeners in metropolitan Pittsburgh when they receive reports alleging “neglect.” Without even a pretense of informed consent, AFST harvests vast amounts of data originally surrendered, voluntarily or unknowingly, for entirely different purposes.  Then it coughs up a “risk score” – an invisible “scarlet number” -- to determine the urgency of sending out an investigator.  The questionable means by which it was sold, the questionable claims about how it would work, and the many problems that have arisen are outlined in detail, with sources, in our publication Big Data is Watching You. 

In the years since, some reliably blue states and localities rushed to adopt algorithms. Illinois, Los Angeles and Oregon all later backed away, in the first two cases after spectacular failures.  But blue-leaning metropolitan Pittsburgh presses on, even after an independent evaluation found problems with racial bias and, the Associated Press reports, the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating whether AFST is biased against the disabled. 

But the designers of AFST are proposing ever more dangerous algorithms. Even in 2015 and before, they had bigger plans, plans that sound remarkably like something out of that Lincoln Project ad. 

The Pittsburgh algorithms stamp an invisible "scarlet number
"risk score" on children. Once there, it can never be erased,

That Boston Globe story included a reminder that the co-designer of AFST, and prominent advocate of taking away more children, Emily Putnam-Hornstein had written as far back as 2011 that “prenatal risk assessments could be used to identify children at risk of maltreatment while still in the womb.” (Recall the officer in the video asking the daughter: “What are you, about eight weeks pregnant?”) 

“Prenatal risk assessments” are what Putnam-Hornstein’s co-designer, Vaithianathan, was talking about when she said: “Yes, it’s Big Brother.  But we have to have our eyes open to the potential of this model.” 

Yes, we do, but not in the way Vaithianathan has in mind. 

Pittsburgh has moved ahead with a model, called “Hello, Baby,” that stamps that invisible scarlet number risk score on every child, if not quite in the womb then immediately upon birth. Proponents say it’s only to target prevention, not policing.  That is the case – for now. But, just as  Vaithianathan says, and as is discussed in detail below, “We have to have our eyes open to the potential of this model.” 

Technically “Hello, Baby” is voluntary, but good luck taking advantage of the extremely limited opportunity to opt out – right in those first days after your child is born when, after all, it’s not like you have anything else to think about.  (Ever notice how often, when a corporation forces you to opt out of something it’s because they know you won’t want to opt in.) 

Once infants are branded with those scarlet numbers, they can never be erased.  If they’re labeled as being at high-risk of abuse as infants, it increases the chances that their own children will be labeled at high risk of abuse. If ever these “high-risk” children, as adults, are accused of child abuse, the “Hello, Baby” risk score could raise his AFST score, making it that much more likely their own children could be torn from their arms. (Again, authorities in Pittsburgh say they’ll never, ever do such a thing – but, as Vaithianathan says …) 

Among those most at risk: anyone who actually has been in foster care – since, no matter what the algorithm, having once been in foster care is likely to increase the “risk score” as a potentially abusive parent. 

But even this isn’t enough for Putnan-Hornstein and Vaithianathan. They’re pushing still another algorithm, the  Cross Jurisdiction Model Replication project.  

Like “Hello, Baby,” CJMR generates a risk score for every child at birth. Unlike “Hello, Baby” there is no opt-out at all.  And while with AFST the developers bragged about not explicitly using race (while using poverty), and with “Hello Baby” they claimed (falsely) that they weren’t using poverty, this time there’s no more let’s pretend.  The use of race and poverty as risk factors is out in the open. 

But fear not, say Putnam-Hornstein and Vaithianathan, as noted above, unlike AFST these algorithms are only to target prevention. The places that adopt them would never, ever use them as a tool to investigate families.  They promise!  

Right.  After all, to think these data would be abused is like imagining that a big company like Facebook would sell data without consent.  Oh, yeah, that.  Well, OK, but that’s private industry.  Let’s try again: 

The notion that all that “Hello, Baby” and CJMR data would be misused is like imagining a police force would misuse juvenile records that are supposed to be sealed.  Oh, yeah – that. 

And when a child “known to the system” dies and demagogic politicians condemn the family police agency for not using all that data, you can be sure that agency will stand firm and never, ever change its policy and use algorithms like “Hello, Baby” for investigations! 

The people who want us to believe that are the same people who repeatedly used questionable claims to sell their algorithms in the first place.  And that’s not the only problem. 

The co-designer of the Pittsburgh algorithms and the CJMR project, algorithms that supposedly have no racial bias problem, Putnam-Hornstein, denies the field has a racism problem in the first place. She demeans Black activists and takes pride in being part of a group that defends a self-described "race realist" law professor who hangs out with Tucker Carlson. She has said "I think it is possible we don’t place enough children in foster care or early enough" and signed onto an extremist agenda that proposes requiring anyone reapplying for public benefits, and not otherwise seen by "mandatory reporters," to produce their children for a child abuse inspection.  

She’d even taken to spewing weird personal attacks like this one against her betters on LinkedIn(!) – before deleting and replacing her profile.  (LinkedIn has rules about this, by the way.)

 

Would you trust an enormously powerful algorithm in these hands?  In fact, it’s too powerful for anyone’s hands. 

To see why, take another look at that Lincoln Project video.  But instead of a police officer pulling over a car, imagine a caseworker at the door of a newborn and her family: “The algorithm says you’re high risk,” she says to the mother.  “So we’re taking your baby.” 

Here’s the moral of the story: When you begin a sentence with “Yes, it’s Big Brother …” the only ethical way to end that sentence is: “… so we’re not going to use it.”