Jane Crow and the Abolition of Family Policing

In the Spring of 2023, Governor Greg Abbott weaponized Texas caseworkers to investigate the parents of transgender minors for child abuse, threatening arrest and having their children placed in foster care (Goodman & Morris, 2022). To defend their families, many parents planned to leave the state. The scenario is all too familiar to low-income Black parents, who are routinely surveilled by caseworkers. Under the guise of child welfare, caseworkers investigate families, prejudge parents, and enjoy an outsize role in consigning children to foster care and institutionalization. The explicit racism in child welfare is finally being acknowledged as Jane Crow.

Indeed, the murder of six Black adoptees by their mothers in March 2018 could have been an inflection point for child welfare reform. For decades, episodic tragedies had marred the nation's care for abused and neglected children, but the Hart family incident put a spotlight on the entire spectrum of child welfare: Child Protective Services, foster care, and adoption. Premised on rescuing maltreated children from their birth families, child welfare had instead become an instrument of damage to minority families and sometimes death to their children. Rather than using the incident to advocate for systemic reform, the professions and multiple agencies mandated to care for troubled families circled their wagons; shielded by confidentiality provisions and protected by the cartel they had assiduously constructed, child welfare would simply wait-out the storm and return to its substandard status quo. To observers of child welfare, this would not have been surprising, indeed it was all but predictable; a don’t-just-do-something-sit-there strategy in the face of child welfare tragedies has a long, deadly history in the United States.

The Casualties

At the inception of the new millennium, Nina Bernstein a New York Times journalist, published The Lost Children of Wilder (2001), a wrenching account of three generations of a poor Black family's encounter with New York's child welfare system. Citing discrimination in foster home placements, a progressive attorney, Marcia Robinson Lowry, sued the city for relying on white, private agencies to place Black children in foster care where they languished. The 1988 Wilder settlement did little more than retrench the city's child welfare agencies, although Lowry later established Children's Rights, an organization that sued dozens of states for violating the rights of poor minority children. In her chronicle, Bernstein recited Malcolm X's experience as a ward of the state, “We were ‘state children’ court wards; [the judge] had the full say-so over us. A white man in charge of a black man's children! Nothing, but legal, modern slavery—however kindly intentioned” (p. 375).

Fast forward, and New York City's child welfare system had metastasized. In Invisible Child, journalist Andrea Elliott (2021) surveys the wreckage surrounding 11-year-old Dasani and her family, assiduously tracking her journey into early adulthood. Bounced between public housing, homeless shelters, and the Administration for Children's Services (ACS), Dasani, her mother Chanel, and five siblings became fugitives in a vast network of agencies ostensibly designed to serve them. “Each agency represents a pillar of power with its own offices, workers, and labyrinthine lines, its own shade of fluorescent lighting. But to Dasani's mother, they are one in the same,” Elliott writes. “They are limbs of a monolithic body called ‘the government’—a system that profits off the poor, says Chanel, while punishing them for that very condition” (p. 39).

Noting that ACS had removed 3,232 children from their parents in 2015—94% minorities—Elliott invokes “Jane Crow” to describe the racism of the City's child welfare system. With ACS having filed a neglect petition against Chanel, the family appeared before a judge:

Today marks the family's reentry into a system so complex that even lawyers struggle to understand it. The system, Chanel has learned, has three major players: the ‘investigator’ (working for ACS), the ‘judge’ (presiding over the state's family court), and the ‘provider’ (a pool of private agencies contracted for services ranging from therapy and parenting classes to foster care and adoption). (Elliott, 2021, pp. 292–293)

Eventually, Dasani and her siblings were placed in therapeutic foster care, diverting $1,900 per month to each foster parent. Combined with the $93 processing fee for the agency, the total cost for the family's foster care was $33,000 per month, or $400,000 annually.

Dasani's good fortune was landing a spot at the Hershey School, a private boarding school in Pennsylvania, yet events conspired otherwise. Despite an early adjustment, Dasani misses her family, acts out, and is expelled. Nine months after leaving Hershey, Dasani joins the Bloods gang, her mother is sentenced to Rikers Island for a handgun violation, and the children are once again scattered, at the mercy of ACS foster care placements. But, in 2020, Chanel joins Joyce McMillan's “Black Families Matter,” immediately identifying with other mothers abused by the City's child welfare agencies.

Slavery resurfaces in Torn Apart by Dorothy Roberts (2022), who eviscerates “family policing” as Child Protective Services (CPS) investigates neglected and abused children, then diverts many to juvenile services and institutional care, in the process degrading minority communities. A professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Roberts indicts CPS, foster care, and juvenile justice for controlling minority parents. “For families that are screened into the child welfare system, the next phase of surveillance entails forced compliance with services mandated by agencies and rubber-stamped by judges,” Roberts notes ruefully. “It is Orwellian to call this ‘serving’ families when the vast majority are ‘served’ against their will” (2022, pp. 183–184). Worse, “the family-policing system produces professional kidnappers because that's the nature of the role it assigns to its workers, regardless of their good intentions” (2022, pp. 66–67). Prepandemic, 656,000 American children were determined by CPS to have suffered from abuse or neglect, 250,000 were severed from their families and placed in foster care. Including an equal number who are informally separated from their families, “that is a total of half million children taken from parents’ physical custody annually as a result of CPS involvement,” observes Roberts. “This is no benign social service program” (2022, p. 36). Too often, children inducted into child welfare “graduate” from foster care or institutional care, some 20,000 aging-out of the system each year, bereft of family altogether, often becoming homeless, resorting to petty crime, or foraging for subsistence.

Roberts contends that child welfare should be abolished, noting the recent natural experiment when families were sent CARES Act checks during the COVID pandemic, which coincided with a 25% reduction in ACS investigations of child fatalities (2022, p. 291). During COVID, community-based supports were mobilized for low-income families, offering childcare and other services. Subsequent analysis of child maltreatment, as determined by caseworker investigations and emergency room visits, found a reduction of about half (Newman, 2023), validating critics of ACS. Indeed, lawyers representing parents besieged by ACS chastised the agency for refusing to acknowledge the unexpected benefit that the City's response to COVID represented regarding the unnecessary removal of children:

With the near-complete shutdown of New York City, the child welfare apparatus had no choice but to remove fewer children from their homes. Catastrophe did not ensue. Rather, the numbers tell a different story. Children remained safe across a range of metrics, avoided the trauma of removal from their homes during a global pandemic, and experienced sustained safety as the City began to reopen. (Friedman & Rohr, 2023, p. 52)

Nor was the decline in reported child maltreatment confined to New York City. “A review of available data suggests that there was not a significant rise in child abuse related to COVID-19. Child welfare reports dropped, emergency department (ED) visits declined, and hospitalizations were stable,” analysts concluded in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics. “The total number of child abuse reports to state child welfare agencies plummeted up to 70% during the pandemic” (Sege & Stephens, 2022, p. 1).

An intimate and disturbing portrait of child welfare dysfunction appears in We Were Once a Family by Roxanna Asgarian (2023). The murder of six Black children who had been adopted by two white women provided the opportunity for a journalist to investigate how Texas caseworkers and judges expedited the removal of two sets of siblings, then failed to follow up on the care of the adoptees. The adoptive parents, the Harts, presented themselves as lesbian saviors of children neglected by their birth mothers, yet reports of maltreatment of their adoptees prompted the family to move from Minnesota to Oregon and finally to Washington State. The Hart family made national headlines when the parents, frantic to maintain their idealized mixed-race family, but hounded by child welfare and law enforcement, agreed to a suicide-murder pact, driving their van off a cliff on California's Pacific Coast Highway, killing themselves and all six children.

Beyond the six murdered victims, Asgarian explores the circumstances and response of the adoptees’ birth mothers, who, having been discarded by state caseworkers, would learn of their deaths from the journalist, herself. Priscilla Celestine and Nathaniel Davis were eager to adopt three of those children, whose mother's cocaine use had led to a CPS investigation, but CPS and a judge expedited the children's adoption out of state to the Harts. Upon learning of the children's deaths, their grief-stricken aunt Celestine railed at CPS: “They got it all backwards,” Asgarian quotes her, “They should have done something with the mother, put her in rehab—but you have people here, loved ones, to take them in, and you take them away. They got it all messed up” (p. 151).

The Cartel

Alert to efforts to reform child welfare, Asgarian cites Dorothy Roberts, whose Shattered Bonds (2001) detailed the racism implicit and explicit in child welfare. Social work, of course, has been complicit in racializing children's services, coining “disproportionality” to mask the large number of minority children inducted into care, much higher than their share of the population. At that time, Alvin Schorr, an expert on child welfare had warned, “Child welfare around the country is in a parlous state. In many places the debasement of services, the decline of staff, and the absence of sustained citizen engagement are so advanced that it is difficult to see how these may be reversed” (2000, p. 124). Yet, having colluded with the Children's Bureau to monopolize child welfare training under Title IVE for schools of social work (SSWs) through the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute, social work remained smug and indifferent to the damage it was inflicting on troubled minority families. SSWs would reap millions of dollars in federal funding to “professionalize” the child welfare workforce by replicating the self-interest model for which trade associations have become notorious. In the process of constructing a cartel in child welfare (Stoesz, 2016), social work effectively excluded other disciplines that could have enhanced child and family wellbeing: lawyers to defend children and families interdicted by CPS, sociologists to conduct surveys of families, psychologists to mount experiments to determine optimal interventions, and policy analysts to simplify the crosscurrents of child welfare policy.

Among those enlisting in the child welfare abolition movement was Alan Detlaff, Dean of the University of Houston SSW. A former CPS worker, Detlaff (2023) recalled his experience with the damage child welfare inflicted on poor families:

My background is in the child welfare system; prior to entering academia I worked for several years as a child protective services caseworker and investigated allegations of child maltreatment. I witnessed the tremendous harm the system causes Black children and families, which led me to understand that the only solution was to completely eliminate family separation and foster care.

Detlaff had the temerity to challenge an op-ed by the CEO of the National Association of Social Workers, who, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed claimed, “Strengthening social worker and police partnerships can be an effective strategy in addressing behavioral health, mental health, substance use, homelessness, family disputes and other similar calls to 911 emergency-response lines” (McClain, 2020). Undeterred, Detlaff founded upEND to abolish child welfare, and in September 2022 invited Dorothy Roberts to speak to students and faculty on Torn Apart. In consultation with his practicum faculty, Detlaff also announced that the University of Houston's SSW would no longer place students with “policing organizations,” such as CPS. In response, four senior faculty enlisted alumni to oppose Detlaff's abolitionist agenda, one issue being the threat to federal funding through Title IVE. Two months later the University's interim provost fired Detlaff as dean (Detlaff, 2023).

Decades of suboptimal professional education have contributed to the travesties that Bernstein, Elliott, Roberts, and Asgarian depict. Inevitably, an insider of high rank like Detlaff would recognize the contradiction between rhetoric and performance, call it out, and determine a corrective course, only to be sacrificed on the altar of professional self-interest. The Detlaff affair served notice to leaders of SSWs that defection of the family policing paradigm would not be tolerated. Just as the murder of George Floyd by a police officer represented an inflection point in law enforcement, so the murders of the six Hart adoptees should serve as a reckoning for child welfare.

In the United States, a tragic sequence of care has defined child welfare: CPS to foster care to adoption, with institutional care frequently interjected (Karger & Stoesz, 2023). Quite aside from the damage and indignities that the child welfare system inflicts on troubled families, recent events have made structural change imperative: the cost of multiple and sequential foster care placements, totaling $400,000/year for Dasani's family compounded by a plummeting caseload of at least 50% due to the government shutdown during the COVID pandemic. Suddenly, diverting maltreated children to foster care was not only inordinately expensive, but also unnecessary.

Restructuring Children's Services

Shorthand for the need for structural reform, “abolition” begs the question of what would replace the current system of “family policing” along with its sequelae, foster care, and institutionalization?

Foremost, redirect public funds that encourage the removal of children to family supports in the neighborhood. If three-fourths of families subjected to child welfare are impoverished, then a major shift in funding is in order, diverting funds from foster care and institutionalization to preventive services. The current disparity of funding foster care at 10 times that of preventive services incentivizes government to remove children from their families as caseworkers place children in foster care or institutionalize them. The shift from family policing to family support will require an overhaul of a half-century of contradictory child welfare policy. Accordingly, Congress should simplify the crosscurrent of policies defining the federal role in child welfare to generate a single and consistent approach for troubled families. Congruent with the Evidence-based Policy Making Act of 2018, such a reorganization of child welfare will require extensive and unbiased research on the current system, acknowledging dysfunction, highlighting promising innovations, and identifying linkages to related programs warranting modification.

Second, dismantle the child welfare cartel that maintains inferior service at inflated cost. Consolidating the major disciplines comprising child welfare—counseling, psychology, social work, and family services—into a “human services” discipline, requiring its graduates to be proficient in research would upgrade professional practice. Absent state-of-the-art research virtually all of the knowledge undergirding child welfare consists of anecdotes and good intentions. Performance metrics should be employed to assure the best students graduate with Human Services degrees, as opposed to a de facto social promotion regime, assuring graduation for students who simply attend classes.

Third, congruent with the Evidence-Based Policy Making Act, mount randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to determine optimal interventions with low-income populations. As the Abecedarian Project of Craig Ramey and the Nurse Family Partnership of David Olds have demonstrated, significant outcomes regarding efficiency and effectiveness can be achieved through RCTs (Stoesz, 2020). Lack of funding is no longer a valid excuse for avoiding RCTs; for a decade, the Arnold Ventures foundation has pledged to fund any credible RCT. Equally important, families receiving services should be surveyed to assess their experiences and preferences. A colossal contradiction in social services in general, and child welfare in particular, has been the disinterest of service providers in assessing consumer satisfaction. While middle-income and upper-income consumers are routinely surveyed regarding healthcare, auto insurance, and online purchases, the perceptions of families subjected to child welfare have been studiously—and conveniently—ignored.

Fourth, organize caregivers in the community as a base of support as opposed to reflexive reliance on professional intervention. Long ago, John McKnight (1995) criticized the rise of social services in poor communities, observing “those institutions have commodified the care of community and called that substitution a service” (p. x). That substitute care must be returned to the community. In the Southwest, for example, a network of comadres and abuelas could provide culturally apropos supports to troubled families while avoiding the stigma of being inducted into the child welfare system.

Fifth, recruit young people into service with poor families by appealing to graduates of first-tier colleges and universities. Adapting Teach for America, such a strategy could introduce thousands of highly motivated and talented young adults to family care, who, with experience, would also develop innovations in local services. The desultory quality of students who enter the social care disciplines not only assures substandard interventions, but also invites corner-cutting in reports, in the process subverting professional ethics in favor of organizational compliance. Inevitably, annual turnover of one-third of child welfare staff compromises agency performance.

Finally, monitor judges regarding their diligence and creativity in maintaining family coherence, as opposed to rubber-stamping CPS removal recommendations. In 1899 Juvenile Courts were introduced in Chicago and Denver as an alternative to adult adjudication; in the 1910s Family Courts were established to address domestic concerns. Making juvenile and family courts more family-friendly is essential to restraining imperious judges who too often defer to CPS caseworkers.

Despite the validity of Roberts's indictment of family policing, a major omission remains, incidents where parents maim or kill their children. Periodically, CPS investigates unstable parents but fails to intervene effectively; for 2022, the Children's Bureau estimated that 1,750 children died from maltreatment, an unknown number being active CPS cases (Children's Bureau, 2022). In 2009, Banita Jacks of Washington, DC, was convicted of murdering her four daughters, reflecting the failure of the Child and Family Services Agency, a lapse resulting in the firing of six social workers (Emery, 2009). In 2020, Netflix aired The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, recounting the failure of police and the Los Angeles Department of Child and Family Services to protect an 8-year-old boy from lethal abuse; four social workers were convicted in the case but won a split decision on appeal (Villareal & Brennan, 2020). The 2018 Hart murders are exceptional only insofar as there has been no punishment of caseworkers mandated to protect the adoptees. The frequency of CPS failure to protect abused children warrants revamping the intervention with such seriously dysfunctional families. Training in forensics, substance abuse, family law, pediatric physiology, and violence de-escalation should be coupled with multi-disciplinary teams representing diverse ethnic and racial personnel. Field experiments should be deployed to determine optimal outcomes.

As an epithet directed at child welfare, Jane Crow reprises the violent abuse of Black families under Jim Crow, from the end of Reconstruction until the 1960s. Yet, as Michelle Alexander (2010) recounted in The New Jim Crow, control of Black families simply migrated to incarceration; abetted by the “war on drugs,” the carceral state detained and imprisoned millions of Blacks. As Black men were sentenced to prison, “the child welfare industrial complex” surveilled families, reflexively removing children who were placed in foster care and often institutionalized, destroying families and degrading communities. After decades of such malfeasance, a reasonable conclusion is that the current child welfare system is impervious to “reform.” Indeed, the evidence suggests that “child welfare reform” is just as ludicrous as the notion of “reforming” slavery or adjusting the Black codes of Jim Crow.

Since the 1970s, America has conducted a vast experiment in child welfare, establishing multiple policies purporting to protect neglected and abused children, empowering federal and state agency staff to intervene when children are alleged to have been mistreated by parents, diverting hundreds of thousands of children to foster and institutional care, and subsidizing disciplines to professionalize services to troubled families. This experiment has resulted in state violence perpetrated on minority families by caseworkers, agencies, and the courts. In the name of “child welfare” these agents have not only acted with impunity, but also ignored standards regarding the most basic elements of research to say nothing of running roughshod over parental rights. Until conservative politicians dispatched caseworkers to threaten parents of trans-children, wealthier white families have been largely spared the intrusion of family policing. A half-century of such massive malfeasance warrants abolishing and replacing the current system of child welfare.