DCS problems go far beyond ‘professional kidnappers’

In a courthouse far from Arizona, a 7year-old girl, still traumatized from being taken from her family and placed in foster care, turns to her lawyer and asks: “Can I have that quarter? I am saving all the change I find on the ground and keeping it with me. If they ever kidnap me and my brothers again, I can take a cab back home to mommy.”

I thought of that little girl when I read Mary Jo Pitzl’s story about the state Department of Child Services caseworkers in Prescott who apparently were fired for wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Professional Kidnappers.”

Clearly, that little girl understands the child welfare system better than most of the professionals who work in it.

The caseworkers were not really fired for their sentiments or for acting on them. They were fired because they were dumb enough to literally wear those sentiments on their sleeves. We know this because the numbers from Prescott and across Arizona back up their bragging.

The fairest way to compare rates at which children are taken from their parents is to compare the number of children taken over the course of a year to the number of impoverished children in each community.

That’s because poverty is the leading cause of stress that prompts a small number of parents to strike out against their children, and also because, far more often, poverty itself is confused with “neglect.”

Arizona removes 28 children out of every 1,000 impoverished children, a rate nearly 50% above the national average. (The ratio is the same if you compare the rate of total children removed to the total child population).

There is no evidence that Arizona children are 50% safer than the national average. On the contrary, states with much lower rates of removal, such as Alabama, are, relatively speaking, national models for keeping children safe, while sparing them the trauma of needless foster care.

Study after study has found that, in typical cases seen by workers for agencies such as DCS, children left in their own homes do even better than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care. In addition, all this needless removal overloads caseworkers, leaving them less time to find children in real danger.

In Maricopa County the number of children removed from home for every thousand impoverished children is 32 – the highest rate among America’s top 10 cities and their surrounding counties. In Yavapai County, home of the T-shirts: 34.5. And in Pima County: 38.8.

In contrast, the place where that little girl was searching for quarters, New York City, takes children at less than one-third the Arizona rate. A comprehensive study found that New York has reduced foster care without compromising safety.

Yet no one is being fired in Maricopa County or even Pima County. Only because in those counties the workers make better fashion choices.

Of course, not every caseworker behaves this way – indeed, the Prescott workers were turned in by a former supervisor. Yet the supervisor says she was disciplined for refusing to force a young child into a group home.

The data tell us is that the former caseworkers are not just a few bad apples. The contempt those T-shirts reflect toward overwhelmingly poor, disproportionately nonwhite families runs deep and wide in Arizona child welfare (and many other places as well – 18 states have rates of removal even higher than Arizona).

And the problem is getting worse. After a brief improvement, the rate at which children are torn from their homes in Arizona is going up again – in 2019, removals statewide increased 6% over 2018.

America is in the process of reconsidering how it polices poor communities. We need to reconsider how they’re policed by agencies like DCS as well.