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.