● You may need to read this excerpt from a story by The Marshall Project and Reveal twice, because the first time you may think: Wait that can’t be right.  Oh yes it can:  Across the country, hospitals are dispensing medications to patients in labor, only to report them to child welfare authorities when they or their newborns test positive for those very same substances on subsequent drug tests, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.   The positive tests are triggered by medications routinely prescribed to millions of birthing patients in the U.S. every ..read more

 In 2011, Joette Katz stepped off the Connecticut Supreme Court to take a far more difficult job: running the state Department of Children and Families, Connecticut’s equivalent of the New York City Administration for Children’s Services.  Within months, the death of a child “known-to-the-system” made headlines. As happened at least twice previously, there were calls to tear apart more families, and enormous pressure on Katz to tell her workers to do just that. In past years, her predecessors had caved. Katz did not.  “I think in the past that’s been exactly the mistake, frankly ..read more

● Tearing children from their parents because the parents are receiving medication-assisted treatment to control drug addiction doesn’t just impose enormous needless trauma on the children. As The Imprint points out in this two-part series, it also happens to be illegal. But when has the law ever applied to the family police or the family courts?  And by the way, I wonder how many of the sanctimonious judges who insist that taking a drug every day to remain healthy is just another form of addiction are themselves staying alive in part by doing something I do: taking a statin every day – b ..read more

A system that tears apart families at a rate 60% above the national average is driving its own caseworkers away. The Boston Globe had one of those stories almost every major newspaper publishes sooner or later – the one about the enormous number of family police caseworkers who keep quitting and how this adds to the terrible turmoil faced by children and families caught up in the system.  But this story took things a step further than most.  Every story blames high stress and low pay.  But the Globe story also cited something else: a job that had become like an assembly line, p ..read more

● COVID taught us that when the family police step back and community-based community-run support organizations step up, child abuse is reduced.  Now the Family Justice Journal devotes an entire issue to what that kind of support should look like. (Remember, you can download it as a .pdf to avoid the #$%^& flipbook format :-))  ● And yes, there’s still another study showing the value of providing concrete help to families in reducing child abuse.   ● A commentary in The Imprint reminds us of something else that makes a huge difference in improving the lives of children ..read more

● In North Carolina, court hearings in family policing cases are supposed to be open, with limited discretion afforded judges to close them.  But some judges have been abusing that discretion.  IndyWeek reports on a lawsuit from Civil Rights Corps seeking to stop those abuses. The story quotes Amanda Wallace,  who spent a decade as a Child Protective Services investigator before founding Operation Stop CPS … “The majority of children coming into custody, it’s because of poverty-related concerns,” Wallace says. “If the public just came and sat inside the courtroom, they’d see—wai ..read more

Saturday, on “National Adoption Day, who will stop to remember that for some children and some young adults every mass adoption ceremony, every treacly feature story on the local news is an act of cruelty – ripping the scab off a wound that never fully heals?   Termination of parental rights is child welfare's "death penalty."  So why do some of the very judges who order a family "executed" preside over public celebrations of the aftermath?    This post originally was published on November 15, 2020              Ther ..read more

● It’s always a good time to hear from Jerry Milner, who ran the federal Children’s Bureau during the first Trump Administration.  But it’s an especially good time now.  Fortunately, he’s the guest on The Imprint podcast.  His thoughts on policy begin at about 22:30 in.  ● President Biden has apologized for what “child welfare” did to Native Americans in decades past.  But an apology doesn’t end the suffering, which continues to this day. So now, The Imprint asks, what next?  For some, the apology rang hollow. Others described it as an important first step. But th ..read more

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 cou ..read more

The Vermont State Capitol             Nationally, little attention has been paid to how family policing functions in Vermont.  For whatever reason, the awful system next door in New Hampshire gets plenty of attention.  But Vermont is even worse; probably the worst in New England and among the worst in the nation.   Yet it goes largely under the radar.              A story about foster youth getting access to their own records was a useful reminder that Vermont needs more atte ..read more