(Scroll down to the second section for the corresponding story.)
FOSTER CARE SERVICE PROVIDERS PUT THE HEAT ON DCFS
A community meeting was held in South LA last week to discuss the ramifications of the decision by the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) to drop what are known as “family preservation services” meant to keep kids out of the foster care system while providing troubled families help through various programs that allow them to get control of their lives while keeping kids safe.
Kelly Vassar has the story for Chronicle of Social Change. Here are some clips:
The coalition, angered by recent cuts of $14 million in cuts to family preservation services set to take effect in July, addressed three primary issues with the DCFS’ policies in SPA 6: detention strategies, dismantling the safety net, and the dismantling of partnerships that had been developed during a county-wide effort to bring down the numbers of children entering foster care.
“At our last snap shot, which was through April, we had 27,188 children under our courts’ jurisdiction,” stated Judge Nash, while reading from a report for the county’s judges. “Are there any services that will allow the child to safely remain in the home? We must force DCFS to answer this question in each and every case.”
[SNIP]The $14 million cut to the family preservation fund for high-risk DCFS families also concerns the SPA 6 coalition, because reduced funding for family prevention strategies means the number of child detentions in South L.A. might escalate.
Indeed, as Nash pointed out, it already has.
David Green, president of the local 721 Service Employees International Union (SEIU), discussed ways to best serve the children of South L.A., he observed the “detain first, ask questions later mentality” was the not the best way to move forward.
Proponents of family preservation policies argue that reuniting families is a much more suitable priority than foster care, considering the poor life outcomes experienced by many foster children.
Obviously, family reunification requires rigorous risk assessment. We don’t want more dead kids at the hands of their families. Nor do we want more kids yanked away from parents that could’ve been helped to nurture their children. (And we don’t want them sent to frightening places like Teens Happy Homes, for that matter.)
“JUVENILE IN-JUSTICE” PHOTOGRAPHER’S 24 HOURS IN SOLITARY
Juvenile In-Justice Project photographer and advocate Richard Ross was given the opportunity to spend a day in an isolation cell at a juvenile detention facility last month. He documented his stay with a digital camera that snapped a photo every seven seconds during his twenty-four hour voluntary solitary confinement.
Wired’s Jakob Schiller has the story and photos. Here are some clips:
His incarceration started at 4:30 p.m. on May 3 and lasted until 5:00 p.m. the following day. During the entire time he had a digital camera and an intervalometer set up in the corner of the cell that took a picture every seven seconds as a way to record his stay.
Ross chose 24 hours because that’s the typical amount of time a juvenile offender spends in isolation at the facility when they’re first admitted. It’s not punishment for some aggressive or egregious behavior, just a matter of procedure while the bureaucracy “evaluates” them. Sometimes children are put in isolation because they are low-level offenders and should not be housed with the more serious offenders in the general population. Isolation can also be used for disciplinary action, however, and Ross has interviewed many kids who have spent weeks alone.
“It was unbelievably dehumanizing [in the cell], and I’m an adult and I knew that I had 24 hours,” he says. “Then you have these kids who are used to sleeping in their beds, some of whom have never been away from home.”
[SNIP]“Humane” would not be how Ross described his experience in the cell. Instead, he says it was cold and designed to take away any sense of control. There was no clock in the room and someone else decided when the lights were on or off. The food was predictably terrible, the bed was unforgiving, and the only thing he was allowed to read was the Bible. To stay sane he sang “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” because it reminded him of his wife.
As difficult as the experience was for Ross, he had it easy. It was on his terms. He knew when he was getting out. He had a nice hotel and dinner to go back to. He spoke with many kids who were scheduled for 24 hours but spent many days. One child in California had spent eight weeks.
SCOTUS UPDATE: BOTH SIDES MISSED THE BOTTOM LINE ON DNA SWABBING AND 4TH AMENDMENT
In a delightfully smart essay for Slate, law professor Barry Friedman explains why both the majority and the dissenting justices are wrong about Maryland v. King, Monday’s ruling on the constitutionality of DNA swabbing upon arrest for serious crimes.
Here’s an unusually large clip (and we hope Slate will forgive us), but we wanted to show you how great Friedman’s reasoning is (and definitely go read the whole thing):
What the justices seem to see only through a glass darkly is that there are two very different kinds of searches, reflecting two different kinds of policing. There are investigative searches, and there are regulatory searches. The first kind are what you see on television, like on The Closer when Brenda Leigh Johnson tries to catch a bad guy who has committed or is about to commit a crime. The second kind includes airport security or drunk driving roadblocks—or even searching arrested people for weapons. These searches aim not to catch criminals, but to deter bad things from happening in the first place. Sure, we want to find the person getting on a plane with a gun. But the real reason for airport security is to deter people from bringing weapons to airports in the first place.
The categories matter because until you see them you can’t understand what the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure offers in each situation. Justice Scalia was right that the Fourth Amendment is categorical in requiring that the police must have a good reason before conducting investigative searches. These searches target a specific person for a specific crime, and before the government can single you out from the crowd for its special, loving attention, it has to have reason to believe you deserve to be the lucky winner. That’s probable cause.
If you think about it for all of a nanosecond, though, it makes zero sense to talk about “probable cause” as a protection against regulatory, deterrent searches. We don’t have any reason to think anyone in the airport security line did anything wrong. But does that mean airport security is unconstitutional? Surely not!
The Constitution does offer protection from invalid regulatory searches, though, in two ways. The first is generality: Search everyone, and there is a good chance the courts should uphold it. If Congress decided that everyone in the country, members of Congress included, should be in the DNA databank, lawmakers are more likely to have a good reason than if they only go after a politically vulnerable group like people who are arrested. (And yes, the chance of universal DNA collection actually getting adopted by Congress resembles that of the proverbial snowball surviving in Hades, demonstrating how general applicability is a good political check on government intrusiveness.)
The second protection is “cause,” but of a specific and heightened sort: The rule should be that the government must have a really, really good reason to subject a particular group to a regulatory search—for example to collect DNA from arrestees rather than from everyone.