What needscoffee said. Also, again, I do this stuff for a living. My clients who are adoptive parents adopted those kids out of the same dependency court that’s now taking them back. Not only were they foster parents, they fostered those specific children that they adopted and later abused, neglected, or abandoned. It’s not a bulwark against shitty parenting. I’ve also had a number of clients who had their kids taken away because they used drugs, so their kids were deemed at risk even though they had not yet been harmed, only for those kids to be severely physically or sexually abused in foster care. You can imagine how that makes the parents feel about the system.
And then there was this fun case (here’s a link to a free copy of the slip opinion; if that doesn’t work, you can try searching elsewhere):
https://cadependencyonlineguide.info/view/cases/16091.PDF
In re B.D. (2019) 35 Cal.App.5th 803
TL;DR version: kid was taken away from his parents and placed with foster parents who were deemed suitable adoptive parents. The bio parents’ parental rights were terminated, and the adoption process was moving forward when it came to light that the foster parent was physically abusing the kid. But wait, it gets worse! It turns out this adoptive parent had been investigated for sexually abusing this same child a year earlier, but the right hand of the child welfare agency didn’t know what the left hand was doing, and this information was never shared with the social worker on the case, the child’s attorney, or the judge. But wait, there’s more! This foster parent had had his parental rights to his own children terminated, he had previously been convicted of a violent crime and sentenced to prison, and he had grown children living at home who had sexually abused other children! And the Bureau knew this but didn’t disclose because somehow this guy still managed to become a licensed foster parent, so golly gee, guess he’s all right!
So it’s a cute idea and all, but even if we ignore the Constitutional problems, there’s the inherent Minority Report problem of trying to figure out in advance who is going to be a bad parent, to say nothing of the practical problem of staggering governmental incompetence to actually implement such a system.
Here’s an idea: we could spend our resources helping parents instead of punishing them. I once informally polled the County Counsel (our court’s prosecutors) as to how many of these cases would go away if the child welfare agency could just buy a house for everyone who needed it. I assumed their guesses would be lower than mine; it’s well-established that poverty alone is not a basis to detain children, and presumably they believe in what they’re doing. But I got estimates as high as 80%, and the lowest was 50%. Read that again. The lawyers whose job it is to take away kids in LA County believe that half of those parents just need a home.
This was starkly illustrated by one of the first cases I picked up as a baby lawyer. I represented a mom whom I’m sure most of you would not approve for a parenting license. She was black, poor, uneducated, unemployed, and had 5 kids by 5 different men. The first 4 were in the wind; the fifth had just beaten her up. I spend a lot of time trying to persuade DV victims to leave their abusers so they can get their kids back, but I didn’t have to do that with her; she promptly took her kids and left without a backward glance the first time he laid a hand on her. Problem was, they were now homeless, along with tens of thousands of other people in a county with limited shelters. The Department wanted to take her kids away. Now, at the time, the county paid foster parents $800 per month per child; it’s gone up since then and there have always been higher rates for special-needs kids. So they were going to pay $4,000 per month just to the caregivers. They literally could have bought her a house for that. And it was clear in that case that a house was really all she needed. She was a great mom. Her kids were happy, healthy, clean, and attending school (those that were school-aged). Her oldest was diagnosed with ADHD, and she was on top of his medication. Her youngest had a speech delay, and she was on top of his Regional Center services. She was on top of the school administration when her daughter was being bullied. I saw her deftly supervise all five kids at once while listening to my advice and responding with intelligent questions. Her kids loved her to pieces; I saw them run to her in court and hug her and refuse to let go, after they had been detained and before I got them released. After they returned to her care, she continued to struggle to find a place to live; she was on a mile-long waiting list for Section 8 housing, which she finally got after about 2 years. But even while they were couch-surfing, her children thrived in her care, as reported by the social worker who continued to supervise the family. She finally got her case closed when she finally got a Section 8 apartment. She hasn’t been back in the system yet.
So perhaps we could all look inward and ask ourselves why we’re willing to go to such great lengths and expense to curtail other people’s freedoms, when we could often just help them for less.