To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531)

by Beam, Cris

  Now all the Rosario kids were safely accounted for. Mary had taken in six of them—even Brenda, the oldest, was living upstairs with her eleven-year-old daughter, and Aileen lived down the block with her husband and two kids. The two youngest siblings had been fostered, and then adopted, by another family, and Arelis felt good about that and still saw them all the time. But now she looks back on all her suffering and wishes the parental termination could have happened faster. She didn’t know any better, when she was little, than to keep wanting the mom who called her “Daughter of Satan.” But she knows now, and she thinks the child welfare workers who removed her the first time around should have removed her for good.

  I told Arelis about Dr. Rittner, the director of the social work school who was so reluctant to terminate parental rights. At the conference, Rittner said she terminated only two times in all her years of work (later she remembered a few more), but I recounted Rittner’s public speech, and Arelis exploded. “For you to oversee a thousand cases and terminate only two, you’re doing something wrong!” She slammed her hands on the table and gazed up at the ceiling in exasperation.

  Coming from Arelis, this seemed a perfectly reasonable response. But I remember hearing Dr. Rittner tell the story. It was at a big conference at NYU, and the audience of social workers had responded positively to her theory that parents inherently want to do best by their children; I too had nodded right along.

  “Did the people in the meeting call that lady out? Did they think she was doing her job?” Arelis, who generally speaks softly and with a slight lisp, raised her voice again and then had to get up for a cigarette. On her way out, she fumed, “Less than half the parents could get better if you gave them the right help. Did they have a former foster child there to speak for us?”

  4

  Drugs in the System

  DOREEN SOTO IS A MOTHER and grandmother who now lives in a brand-new building in the South Bronx. I first met Doreen in 2007, when she was an inmate at Bayview Correctional Facility and a student in my precollege writing class. Doreen has a big body and an easy laugh, and she always sat at the back of the classroom, her left leg kicked out in front of her, resting from a recent surgery. Even in her state-issued forest-green pants and matching button-down shirt, Doreen had style. Her work boots were laced just so, her hair was shorn close to the scalp, and a gold pinkie ring glinted every time she raised her hand with an answer, which was often. Doreen grasped the complexity of the Baldwin we were reading on sight, perhaps because she had swallowed so many sharp paradoxes in her own life, or had to live with so much ambiguity.

  “You gotta accept the system, and fight it, and be good with you,” Doreen said, summing up Notes of a Native Son. She leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms across her three-hundred-pound frame, and smiled.

  Doreen lost her daughter, Shameka, to the system when Shameka was eighteen months old. Shameka’s now twenty-three, and her own daughter—Doreen’s granddaughter—is in foster care. Drugs were the reason that ACS (then Special Services for Children) took Shameka away from Doreen. And drugs are behind Doreen’s three long state bids in prison.

  There’s no way to talk about foster care without bringing up substance abuse; methodological approaches vary, but most studies show upwards of two-thirds of system-involved parents have some substance use problem—and others put the figure much higher. “Other than a case with one schizophrenic mother,” Dr. Rittner said to me after her talk about terminating parental rights at the conference at NYU, “I don’t think I knew anyone where alcohol and drugs weren’t involved.”

  Despite all her arrests, her years in prison, her homelessness, the beatings and the prostitution and the drug sickness she’s endured, Doreen says the worst day of her life was the day a cop and child welfare investigator came to her apartment to take her baby away.

  “I was dopesick that morning, so I put Shameka on the bed, surrounded by pillows, and went out. The drug spot was around the corner,” Doreen said. She noticed an older white woman loitering in her hallway. “Can I help you?” Doreen asked the woman. The woman just told her she was waiting for someone, so Doreen went to get her drugs.

  “When I came back, I could hear the baby screaming, and the lady was still there. I was like, ‘They didn’t come yet?’ She just said, ‘No, they’re on their way,’ so I went inside my apartment,” Doreen said. “Shameka had fallen behind the bed! So I’m comforting her, and trying to not let her fall asleep, because they say if you fall and hit your head you’re not supposed to go to sleep. That’s when the doorbell rang.”

  Doreen continued: “It was the lady. I was high. I hid the bag. I say, ‘Can I help you?’ And she says, ‘No, unfortunately, I’m from BCW [Bureau of Child Welfare, the old name for ACS/Special Services] and you’ve been under a ninety-day surveillance.” Doreen narrowed her eyes, hardened her tone. “I was like, ‘Ninety-day surveillance of what?’”

  The woman told her that BCW had received an anonymous phone call that Doreen had been neglecting her child. “She said, ‘Remember when you went out? And you came back and your baby was crying? I bear witness to that.’”

  It was then that a policeman stepped in and told Doreen to start packing a bag for Shameka.

  “I said, ‘What do you mean pack a bag? Where are we going?’ The woman answered, ‘Well, we’re going to take her.’ And I said, ‘You’re not taking her without me!’ But the woman told me I couldn’t come, and she handed me her card. I thought, ‘You’re taking my baby, and all I get is a fucking card?’”

  Doreen said she was sobbing as she packed Shameka’s bag and, although the BCW woman was decent, the policeman’s presence didn’t make it any easier. “I knew that cop,” Doreen said. “He was a crooked cop. He used to get paid off by the cocaine dealers on 164th and Amsterdam. He just kept saying, ‘We can do this easy, or we can do this hard.’ I wanted to say I knew who he was, but I said to myself, ‘No, bitch, you don’t want to end up in jail, because they’re still gonna take your daughter.’”

  The worst part was handing Shameka over. “She didn’t want to go,” Doreen said. “She was holding on to me, and screaming at the top of her lungs. But then the cop and the lady went out and I watched them go from the kitchen window. My daughter was screaming and looking at me; she was turning blue from crying so hard. I was sobbing and thinking, ‘I’m no good, I’m no good.’”

  That night, when Doreen went to get high, she was arrested for the first time in her life. She never lived with Shameka again.

  Doreen thinks it was her own mother who made the call to child welfare. This can happen, but it’s far more common for mothers like Doreen to be “caught” when they have to interact with some institution. Such as when they go into labor.

  This is what happened to Robbyne Wiley—another African American woman in her forties—who had her baby taken from her in the hospital back in 1991. Robbyne had three children already, and she’d been warned when her last child, a daughter, was born positive for crack cocaine to stop using. But Robbyne didn’t expect, the morning after delivering her fourth child, that her doctor would walk in empty-handed.

  “I said, ‘Can you bring me my baby?’ And he said, ‘Your baby’s not here.’ They just took my baby like that,” Robbyne explained, her eyes growing round with the memory. “And I did not get him back until he was four years old.”

  The federal government requires that all fifty states have a system in place to notify Child Protective Services if a baby is born “positive tox,” or drug-exposed. Twelve states and the District of Columbia define a positive tox delivery as child abuse or neglect (meaning a fetus can be abused in utero), and twenty-five states have laws that allow a woman to be incarcerated for such a crime—either at delivery or while still pregnant. A sad byproduct of this legislation is that moms in many parts of the country won’t seek prenatal care, as a dirty urine test could land them in jail.

  There’s no universal testing for the newborns; in most places doctors simply deci
de who looks like a drug user and test subjectively. But black women have been reported to health authorities at delivery up to ten times more often than white women, even though studies show that drug use is relatively equal, for instance, between blacks and whites (9.5 percent and 8.2 percent, respectively), and that more pregnant white women use drugs than pregnant black women (113,000 versus 75,000).

  Racial prejudice in drug testing is only one reason that there are proportionally more kids of color than white kids in foster care. Nationally, African American children represent 47 percent of the children in foster care placement, but they constitute only 19 percent of the total child population. White kids have an inverse situation: they constitute 61 percent of the children in this country but only 38 percent of the foster care kids.

  Part of the current inequality in foster care comes from infinite reproductions of the drug-testing scenario in places where families of color are scrutinized by those mandated to report suspected neglect or abuse—places like schools, mental health settings, welfare offices, and hospitals. Studies have shown, for instance, that African American kids are more likely to be suspended or expelled or labeled “aggressive” in their schools than their white counterparts—and these actions trigger calls to Child Protective Services. African American youth are also more likely to be prescribed psychiatric medications for their aggressive behaviors, or to be labeled schizophrenic, and sent to lockdown correctional facilities, whereas white youth with the same violent behavior are more likely to be referred to outpatient clinics, without any marks on their record or risk of removal. (Fifteen percent of all kids in foster care were placed there because of delinquent behavior or status offenses, meaning acts prohibited by their status as minors.) Back at the hospital, doctors are more likely to report injuries in African American families as “abuse” and in white families as “accidents.”

  Still, this doesn’t explain the reasons families of color are maintained in the system year after year after year. Reformers talk about this question a lot, and in broad terms, they fall into three camps. There are those who say that children of color are overrepresented because of a statistical pileup of family risk factors—like teen parenthood, substance abuse, domestic violence, incarceration, and poverty—all of which are stressors, all of which can lead to child maltreatment. Others argue that overrepresentation isn’t so much about race as neighborhoods—which, for African Americans, can have disproportionately high levels of homelessness, unemployment, poverty, drug use, and street crime, both adding stress and making families more visible to police scrutiny. And the third group looks at systemic problems, blaming child protective leadership, government, workers’ cultural insensitivity, and the system’s legacy of institutionalized racism. In terms of where to direct reform efforts, each group would propose different solutions: fix the family, fix the community, or fix the system from the top down. The real answer is probably yes, yes, and yes.

  Within these generalized descriptions, there are thousands of subtleties and examples of various other kinds of racism threading their way through child welfare. Most of it isn’t intentional or centrally located in one “bad” child welfare director, or organization, or design flaw. It’s akin to the criminal justice system, which is also disproportionately filled with people of color—and where, again, experts argue about the sources of disparity. Is the root problem there one of poverty, inequitable opportunities, institutionalized racism, or one giant pileup of minor discriminations? Again, the answer is yes, yes, yes, and yes.

  Another way to look at race and foster care is to look at money, because this is one area where the numbers match. African Americans accounted for two-fifths of the 558,000 children in foster care in 2000, which is similar to the proportion of all poor children who are African American (40 percent). In other words, African American children are represented in child welfare in comparable proportion to their distribution in low-income families. And the National Incidence Study (NIS) for Child Abuse and Neglect, which gives the most comprehensive estimate of all cases, has unequivocally determined low income to be a strong risk factor for all forms of maltreatment.

  In the eighties and nineties, the NIS studies consistently reported that African American parents do not abuse their children any more than white parents do. In fact, they found no significant differences in the incidences of abuse and neglect across any ethnic or racial lines. But then, in 2010, the NIS produced its most comprehensive report yet and something shifted: it found a 73 percent higher rate of black maltreatment over white. Chapin Hall Center for Children, a major progressive policy research center, released an issue brief on both these findings and cosponsored a conference with Harvard University on race and child welfare. Although the brief addressed the potential of racism in foster care, the authors mainly attributed the disproportionality in maltreatment to the disproportionality in poverty among blacks and whites. It’s time, they said, to stop trying to reduce the numbers of African Americans in care because we presume there’s a bias and instead focus on the reasons the numbers are so much higher and direct help toward the families that need it. If poverty and its attendant burdens—depression, anxiety, drug use, heightened community violence, paucity of support systems, and so on—can sow the seeds for child abuse, then child welfare needs to go back to prevention. But this is a tall order for one sprawling and splintered administration, which has always been reactionary: it treats symptoms, not disease. The solution, as it has always been, is bigger than foster care, bigger than abuse; the real solution will be rooted in society as a whole.

  This kind of perspective shift, on a smaller scale, has been a rallying cry for drug-using mothers too; rather than just calling in foster care and removing a baby at delivery, we could pan back and treat the addiction. We could see addiction as a health issue, rather than a crime.

  This would be an important change, because drug testing largely spotlights the substances that harm adults—not the ones that harm the infants. Alcohol, for instance, is not illegal and it won’t turn up in a drug test, but it is one of the most dangerous substances for a fetus. The so-called crack babies, on the other hand, have grown up—and the dire predictions about them proved false. A review in the Journal of the American Medical Association of thirty-six studies that looked at physical growth, cognition, language and motor skills, behavior, attention, affect, and neurophysiology found no connection between prenatal exposure to cocaine and a decrease in functioning.

  Dr. Barry M. Lester at Brown University is a principal investigator for the largest longitudinal study on cocaine-exposed babies (thousands of these babies are now in their late teens), and he’s working with the National Institute on Drug Abuse on a similar study looking at babies and meth. At a conference in 2009, Dr. Lester said that they’d tracked around 450 babies (half meth-exposed and half drug-free) for the previous three years, and so far no substantial differences had emerged. In fact, meth-exposed infants exhibit many of the same characteristics as cocaine-exposed babies, Lester said: at birth, these babies can have some difficulty feeding, then they seem to even out symptom-wise for a couple of years. I spoke with Dr. Lester a few years after the conference, when the kids in the meth study had hit five years old. By this time, just like the kids in the cocaine study, the kids started showing poor inhibitory control, which means that they acted out more and didn’t always know how to stop themselves.

  “We see this when they go to school, probably because there are more demands put on them there, and because their failure in behavior control becomes more obvious,” Dr. Lester said. And he contextualized the findings further. “Yes, there are drug effects, but they aren’t of the magnitude everyone thought they would be; they’re much more subtle—on the order of ADHD.”

  Lester’s studies subtract for factors like poverty and foster care, so that only prenatal drug exposure is considered. This means he can add back in, for instance, a child’s experience with child welfare to see how that affects the developing brain. “Out-of
-home placement is one of the factors that seems to ride along with drug exposure, in terms of affecting the prefrontal cortex and poor inhibitory control. It’s sort of a double whammy,” he said. That’s why he doesn’t think we should be legislating automatic removals in the delivery room. “We’re seeing an escalation in the legislation getting more punitive with meth. We already learned this with all the research on cocaine—that addiction is a mental health disorder. There’s plenty of evidence that it’s treatable. There’s also plenty of evidence that mothers who use can be adequate parents. Of course, some are not adequate parents, but then there are also mothers who don’t use who are not adequate parents either.”

  One final troubling statistic is that the newborn drug tests are wrong on average more than 25 percent of the time. A study by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the American Association for Clinical Chemistry found that initial urine screenings can produce false positives. Even tests on a baby’s first stool (long considered the gold standard in drug testing) can be wrong up to 70 percent of the time.