NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending October 8, 2024

● The Imprint reports on a series of meetings in which families and their advocates told some of New York City’s biggest names in family policing – private agencies that have been around in some cases for a century or more - how much harm they have done.  No surprise there. Here’s the surprise: The agencies’ response boiled down to – well yes, you’re right.  Here’s how the story begins:

 A pediatrician imploring fellow physicians to stop wrenching newborns from their mothers. A social worker who doesn’t want to report kids in dirty clothes to CPS. A case planner living with regrets that he failed to avoid a family separation through foster care.

 These rare, firsthand stories from the frontlines of the child welfare system are not often shared with the public. But they’re examples of the remarkable testimony presented over three sessions in New York City this year, gatherings titled The Reckoning: Transforming Systems to Achieve Family Justice and Integrity. More than 600 social workers, nonprofit executives and staff, legal experts and advocates for parents’ rights have joined the hours-long convenings that began in March. …

 ● Longtime followers of family policing will recall when Maryville, a modern-day orphanage near Chicago, was cited as a national model – so wonderful, in fact, that it was the centerpiece of a 1995 60 Minutes story touting orphanages.  Seven years later it was exposed as rife with so much abuse that Illinois took all foster youth out of the place.  In 2016 the entire residential program was shut down.

Want to know how much Illinois learned from this?  

In 2019, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services touted the brand new Aunt Martha’s Integrated Care Center as a national model.  Just five years later, amid a sexual abuse scandal, it was shut down.  But, as the nonprofit news site Injustice Watch explains, the abuse scandal was only the beginning: 

The list of alleged transgressions — many seemingly overlooked by state officials for years — includes: sex trafficking of minors; staffers who should never have been hired in the first place because of disqualifying prior arrests; overlooked claims of guards using sexual innuendos with children, sleeping on the job, and sharing pornographic videos among themselves at work; and thousands of reported violent attacks among young residents. 

Somehow in just five years, a facility with only 33 beds racked up 

3,850 unusual incident reports when young residents displayed “physically aggressive behavior” against their peers or staff, records show. 

Oh, and care to guess where the director of DCFS during most of this time used to work? 

See also this follow-up story from Injustice Watch. 

● Of course, as a Philadelphia Inquirer story makes clear, it’s not just one institution in one state.  Consider what instututionalized young people told the Juvenile Law Center for their latest report on these places: 

“What should have happened in my story is that someone should have asked me why I was always late to school. Instead, no one asked me, and I was sent away.” 

“I felt like I was a prisoner there and I didn’t feel safe there.” 

“It messes with your head to be kept in a cage for so long.” 

“You go in there with one specific problem, and then you come back out with 30.″ 

JLC Senior Attorney Malik Pickett summed it up: 

“A lot of people tend to have this glorified view of what placement looks like, especially residential juvenile justice facilities. And they kind of picture it like this beautiful college campus where youth are getting treatment services, but they don’t really realize the horrors that are going on behind those walls. They’re so blind to what’s actually happening inside these facilities.” 

See also The Imprint’s story about the report. 

● And now over to Arkansas, where the Arkansas Times has done a deep dive into the harm caused by that state’s residential treatment industry.  The story quotes Reagan Stanford of Disability Rights Arkansas who told lawmakers: 

“Across Arkansas, facilities are rife with countless examples of abuse, violence and neglect.  The child is often seen as the failure, not the treatment facility. And because they are viewed as the failure, all too often the child gets cycled back into a residential placement.” 

● Bipartisan legislation has been introduced in Congress concerning hidden foster care – essentially blackmail placements in which parents are coerced into “voluntarily” placing their child in foster care.  The Imprint reports that the bill would not regulate the practice, but it would force states to reveal how often it happens – so we’ll finally know how many children really are torn from their homes every year.

● After the New Jersey Attorney General sued a chain of hospitals for testing all pregnant women for drug use, often without their knowledge or consent, NJ Spotlight News reports the hospital chain is modifying its approach.  But the new approach may just lead to new forms of discrimination. 

● And the text of NCCPR’s presentation to this year’s Kempe Center conference is now available on this blog.  It’s called Attn: Family Police: Children’s “Well-being” is None of Your Damn Business.”