Making Family Visits Easier…a $1.2 Billion Bond Initiative House Homeless…and Immigrants and Crime

THE LA COUNTY SUPES WANT TO MAKE IT EASIER FOR FOSTER FAMILIES TO GET KIDS TO VISITS WITH BIOLOGICAL PARENTS

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a motion to instruct the head of the county’s Department of Children and Family Services to develop a plan to help foster parents get kids to regular visits with their biological families. (These court-ordered visitations help kids and their biological parents bond and improve likelihood of future family reunification.)

LA County is facing a serious shortage of foster families. The hope is that by making required family visits easier for foster parents to fulfill, more people will choose to become foster parents.

The motion, introduced by Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Michael Antonovich, directs DCFS (with input from other county departments) to explore the feasibility of contracting with existing ride-sharing services, and providing thorough training, so that drivers can provide trauma-informed transportation services for foster kids.

Currently, foster children in need of transportation to parent visits, which can occur multiple times per week, rely on understaffed DCFS Human Services Aides (HSA) to facilitate the meetings. DCFS will also explore the possibility of hiring more HSAs to serve more kids.

DCFS will also look into expanding the number of available visitation sites to increase options for foster parents and kinship caregivers, and expanding existing “supportive visitation models” to help biological parents learn and practice parenting skills, to increase successful family reunifications.

“Because we already ask so much of our current and prospective resource families, it’s important that the county be as supportive as possible to those who are stepping up to provide a temporary, safe and loving home for our kids,” Supervisor Kuehl said.

DCFS will report back to the board in 90 days with a plan for improving the family visitation system to better serve LA County’s foster youth.

---

ANOTHER IMPORTANT MOTION APPROVED: SUPES IN SUPPORT OF CITY BOND MEASURE TO HOUSE HOMELESS

The LA County Supervisors also approved a motion to support the City of LA’s Proposition H—a $1.2 billion bond measure to fund large-scale construction of housing for LA’s homeless.

The proposition goes before voters in November, and if approved, would pay for 8,000 to 10,000 permanent supportive housing units for the city’s chronically homeless residents, as well as fund temporary shelters, affordable housing, and other efforts.

“Let’s get on with the business of making a significant dent in homelessness,” said Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, the motion’s author. “We cannot afford to allow the status quo to persist – our fellow Angelenos are depending on us.”

For more on the ongoing LA City-County collaborative effort to combat homelessness, read our previous post: here.

---

INACCURATE PERCEPTIONS ABOUT IMMIGRANTS AND CRIME, AND A RULING TO GRANT BOND HEARINGS TO DETAINEES WHO HAVE COMMITTED MINOR CRIMES

Last month, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that immigrant detainees in California with prior convictions (and subject to noncitizen mandatory detention) must be granted a bond hearing.

Asian Americans Advancing Justice, the ACLU of Northern California, and the lawfirm Keker & Van Nest brought the class action lawsuit on behalf of immigrants held in detention for minor—and very old—crimes.

“People who have served their time, turned their lives around, and are supporting their families should not be condemned to mandatory lock-up,” said Michael Tan Staff Attorney at the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project (IRP). “In America, everyone should get a chance to see a judge before their freedom is taken away.”

Despite a surplus of discriminatory policies (like the bond-blocking practice reversed by the 9th Circuit) and recent political rhetoric that focuses on the criminality of immigrants, studies have actually shown that statistically, immigrants to commit less crime than native-born Americans.

And the numbers can’t be attributed to any immigrant-specific tendency to avoid self-reporting arrests and crimes committed, according recent research by Bianca Bersani, a sociology professor at UMass Boston, and Alex Piquero, a criminology professor at UT Dallas. The researchers found that first generation immigrants were slightly less likely to under-report their justice system involvement compared with their non-immigrant peers.

In an op-ed for the LA Times,
Bersani and Piquero call on lawmakers, officials, and others in positions of power to “drop the fear-based tactics,” that fuel unjust policies and practices. Here’s a clip:

In a recent study, we investigated whether immigrants have a greater tendency to underreport their offenses than native-born Americans. Over a seven-year period, a large sample of adolescent offenders were tracked and interviewed 10 times. At each interview they were asked if they had been arrested. We then compared these self-reports with official arrest records to check for accuracy.

Bottom line: We found no evidence supporting the idea that immigrants are especially prone to hide their criminal behavior. Over the seven years of the study, immigrants accurately self-reported their arrests 87% of the time, which is slightly more accurate, though not statistically different, than their native-born (86%) and second-generation (84%) peers. The finding that the foreign-born commit less crime than their U.S.-born peers is not a product of differences in reporting practices across these groups.

As the public’s views on immigration policy trend toward support for increased pathways to citizenship, the rhetoric on the immigrant-crime nexus appears particularly resilient to scientific evidence to the contrary. Interest in the rhetoric-reality divide is more than an academic puzzle as exposure to these messages exacerbates fears, fuels anxieties and provokes reactionary responses that are not well conceived, like mass deportation plans or broad stroke exclusionary practices.