Between the federal reimbursement and the reduced foster care costs, high-quality family defense pays for itself. (Getty Images)
The federal government will reimburse county courts for part of the cost of providing lawyers to indigent children and parents when the state wants to investigate those families for alleged child abuse and, possibly, take away the children. Thanks to some excellent reporting by the Capital Chronicle we now know that one-in-five Indiana counties don’t even apply for the money.
To which 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 counties are not bothering to collect the money. 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.
That’s because most cases are nothing like the horror stories. In Indiana in 2022, 85% of the time, when children were thrown into foster care their parents were not even accused of physical or sexual abuse. Forty percent of the time, there wasn’t even an allegation of drug abuse.
Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with neglect.
Indiana’s history
When it comes to tearing apart families, Indiana is one of America’s worst offenders. The Department of Child Services 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.
Black children are hit hardest, taken into foster care at a rate 50% above their rate in the Indiana child population. When it comes to investigating Black families, Indiana leads the nation – nearly four out of five Black Hoosier children will be forced to endure the trauma of a child abuse investigation before they turn 18.
Consider all the ways 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. 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.
A better way
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.
For example, 22-month-old Nova Bryant of Indiana was taken from her parents only to die in foster care. There appears to have been no allegation that the parents abused Nova, only that they couldn’t cope with her special needs. We don’t know what kind of legal representation Nova’s parents had, perhaps it was first-rate and nothing would have helped. But we do know that Nova lived – and died – in Clay County, one of the counties that refused to seek the federal funds.
Between the federal reimbursement and the reduced foster care costs, high-quality family defense also pays for itself. The paperwork is minimal, but it does offer clues to how well, or badly, courts are providing defense for the defenseless.
The federal funds come from the same source as federal aid to pay for placing children in foster care. Getting the foster care funds is far more complicated. But I’ll bet no one in Indiana child welfare is turning down that money.
One can only wonder how anyone can survey the enormous damage wrought by this system and turn down federal aid for legal assistance, claiming, as Johnson County Court Administrator Shena Johnson does: “[T]he system we have works well.”
There are a whole lot of children who would disagree.
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