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.