Indiana
counties’ refusal to accept federal funds for family defense shows disdain for
overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately Black families
The federal government will reimburse family policing agencies and/or the courts for part of the cost of providing lawyers to indigent children and parents when the agency wants to investigate those families for alleged child abuse. Thanks to some excellent reporting by the Indiana Capital Chronicle we now know that in one of the states where families need this help the most, Indiana, one in five counties won’t even apply for the money.
● In Indiana, the family police agency, the Department of Child Services, is an oppressive, omnipresent fact of life for poor families, especially poor Black families, to a degree that boggles the mind. Nationwide, on average, 37% of all children and 53% of Black children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18. But in Indiana, it’s half of all children – and nearly four out of every five Black children.
● Year after year, Indiana tears apart families at one of the highest rates in America, even when rates of child poverty are factored in. DCS brags incessantly about modest progress, but in 2022 Indiana still took away children at a rate 65% above the national average. There is no evidence that Indiana children are 65% safer than the national average. And again, Black children are hit hardest, taken into foster care at a rate 50% above their rate in the Indiana child population.
To all this, many readers, conditioned by decades of horror stories about parents brutally beating torturing or murdering their children, may say: “So what?” Indeed, that may be why so many Indiana counties are not bothering to get that federal funding to bolster legal representation for families. Overloaded lawyers often have so little time and so many clients that families are almost literally defense-less. Perhaps these counties want to keep it that way.
The problem with this is the problem that has plagued America’s entire war against child abuse for decades: Every time we take a swing at “bad parents” the blow lands on their children.
Consider all the ways all this hurts children:
● Anyone who recalls the anguished cries of children torn from their families at the Mexican border knows how much it traumatizes children to take them from everyone they know and love. Yes, DCS caseworkers mean well. But the children they take cry out the same way for the same reasons. No wonder study after study finds that, in typical cases, children left in their own homes typically fare better even than comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. And yes, that includes cases where the issue is substance use.
● The harm isn’t just emotional. Multiple studies find abuse in one-quarter to one-third of family foster homes – a point I will return to below. The rate of abuse in group homes and institutions is even worse.
● And all the time, money and effort wasted on false allegations, trivial cases and poverty cases is, in effect, stolen from finding those few children in real danger. That’s almost always the real reason for the horror stories that, rightly, make headlines.
There are so many ways to do better: One of the most effective is high-quality family defense. Under this model, families get a lawyer with a reasonable caseload, their own social worker, and sometimes a parent advocate who’s been through the system herself.
No, it’s not to get “bad parents” off; it’s to craft alternatives to the cookie-cutter no-real-services “service plans” often dished out by agencies like DCS. Once again, the research is clear: This kind of defense reduces foster care with no compromise of safety. That’s a key reason why the federal government now allows partial reimbursement for it. Between the reimbursement and the reduced foster care costs, this approach also pays for itself.
reimbursement. In fact, the paperwork is minimal, but it does offer clues to how well, or badly, courts are providing defense for the defenseless. Perhaps that’s why some counties don’t want to fill out those forms.
Among the defenseless: 22-month-old Nova Bryant. There’s a lot we don’t know yet, but news accounts give no indication that Nova’s parents beat her or tortured her or abused her in any way. Rather, Nova had a whole lot of medical needs, her mother had ADHD and there apparently were concerns about the condition of the home. DCS apparently figured Nova’s parents couldn’t take care of her.
But apparently, neither could her foster mother. After leaving the 22-month-old in the bathtub (and allegedly changing her story concerning how long the child was left there) Nova drowned. The foster mother has been charged with Neglect of a Dependent Resulting in Death.
We don’t know who represented Nova’s parents when she was taken away. Perhaps they had a great lawyer with a great team and they did everything they possibly could. But the odds are against that. Because Nova lived, and died, in Clay County – one of the counties that has not bothered to apply for that federal aid. The odds of even a great lawyer having the necessary resources are slim.
So stop and consider: What if Clay County had applied for the money and used it to provide high-quality interdisciplinary family defense? Maybe the outcome would have been no different. Or maybe the defense team for Nova’s parents would have demanded that DCS follow federal law, which requires “reasonable efforts” to keep families together, and provide the family with the help they needed to take care of Nova. Maybe the defense team would have demanded that DCS look harder at Nova’s large extended family as a resource. Perhaps she’d be alive today.
And yet, in another county that turned down federal aid for legal assistance, Johnson County Court Administrator Shena Johnson said: “[T]he system we have works well.”
There are a whole lot of children who would disagree. Nova Bryant surely would have been one of them – had she lived long enough to speak.
