Removing Children from Abusive Situations at Home Isn’t Always the Answer. This Is

Elisa Izquierdo was conceived in a Brooklyn, N.Y., homeless shelter and born with cocaine in her bloodstream in late 1980s. Her mother, Awilda Lopez, went on week-long drug binges and cashed welfare checks to feed her crack addiction. Two of Lopez’s other children lived with relatives, removed from the home by the court system.
Social workers placed Izquierdo in the custody of her father, where she remained until his death in 1994. After returning to live with her mother, school officials noticed that Izquierdo was withdrawn, walked as if recovering from an injury and had a large bruise marking her head, prompting them to call child welfare. Lopez responded by pulling her daughter out of the school. “When I asked her if she was hitting Elisa,” Izquierdo’s aunt recalls of a conversation with her sister, “she told me no, that she just punished her.”
In November 1995, three days before Thanksgiving, Lopez beat her daughter to death by throwing her against their housing project’s concrete wall, the impact causing the six-year-old’s brain to hemorrhage. After seeing the body, one police lieutenant told reporters that it was the worst case of child abuse he had seen in his 22 years on the force. Authorities had been notified of Izquierdo’s case at least eight times, but failed to respond despite plangent cries for help ringing out repeatedly.
The shocking murder, for which then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the entire city was “accountable,” led to the creation of the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), a governmental body with a $2.9 billion budget charged to protect the well-being of New York City’s children. During its overzealous beginnings, the agency took things too far. In 1993, more than 45,000 kids resided in foster care. This year, in an equally stunning turn, those in the system numbered just 10,400, less than a quarter of its prior size. But with a spate of deaths in 2014, is the reduction in foster care population endangering children?

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At the time of Izquierdo’s murder, budget cuts placed heavy caseloads — allegedly as high as 25 families per employee in Queens — on child protection workers, who had little access to data collected by other city agencies. The entire child welfare system was based on “paper case files and folders,” some stacked five feet high along the office walls, says Andrew White, ACS’s deputy commissioner for policy, planning and measurement. A month after Izquierdo’s death, Mayor Giuliani contemplated an additional $18 million cut, largely from the team of field investigators. By the time the budget was drafted, however, he decided to take more decisive action by creating ACS to manage child welfare cases.
By setting up ACS to operate outside the larger social service bureaucracy and appointing a former federal prosecutor to head the agency, Giuliani set a presumption of action. “The philosophy of child welfare has been too rigidly focused on holding families together, sometimes at the cost of protecting babies and children,” Giuliani said in his 1996 address to the city council, according to The New York Times. “When a child is abused, when child safety is in question, then government must act.” Almost overnight, ineffective investigations were replaced by punitive interventions.
But soon, mismanagement crept back in: One contractor faked records, while another misspent thousands of dollars at Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration vetted long-standing partnerships with group homes and residential rehab facilities, ending those that weren’t up to snuff. ACS’s professional staff began integrating a more rigorous understanding of mental health, domestic violence and substance abuse into their work, a move that would culminate in the next administration’s integration of research on trauma.

“Foster care is expensive, not only in financial terms but in human psychological development.”

—Andrew White

In the last year and a half under Bill de Blasio’s mayorship, ACS pioneered new tactics to keep families united, shifting its emphasis to 11 evidence-based preventative services, which officials believe is the largest and most diverse continuum of child-centered programs anywhere in the world. Serving 19,962 families last year, the agency now asks, why take a child away from a bad parent if the city could help that parent do a better job of parenting in the first place?
“Since the late Nineties, there’s been a recognition that foster care is not a panacea. Foster care is very valuable in certain situations and very necessary in certain situations,” explains White, before adding that it’s also a traumatic experience for children that often doesn’t lead to positive results.
A growing body of work by sociologists and neuroscientists points to the negative effects of distressing, adverse experiences in childhood as the root for many developmental problems. Parents who were physically abused or neglected as kids are more likely to treat the next generation in a similar fashion, according to Cathy Spatz Widom, psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. That logic drove Giuliani to aggressively remove kids from dangerous upbringings, but advocates wondered if being separated from parents traumatized foster children?
By examining foster care records, Spatz Widom found little difference in arrest rates during adulthood between kids abused or neglected at home and those placed in foster care or with a guardian — proving that the instability of being removed from the home does not cause a child future harm. That being said, Spatz Widom did discover that children who were moved three times or more developed significant behavior problems — “chronic fighting, fire setting, destructiveness, uncontrollable anger, sadistic tendencies, and extreme defiance of authority” — and, in adulthood, had arrest rates that were nearly twice as high. Stability, she concluded, was hugely important for a child’s development.
“Foster care is expensive, not only in financial terms but in human psychological development. The breakup of a family causes all kinds of trauma, and sometimes that’s necessary. But a lot of times — and we know from looking at cases now — many of the parents we work with today went into foster care during the crack years,” White says. “It’s devastating to see they don’t have stability in their lives, and they don’t have the parenting skills. You can see the history in what’s happening now. We don’t want to repeat that. We want to ensure families get what they need now.”

“When a child is abused, when child safety is in question, then government must act.”

—Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani

During an intervention today, ACS first tries to repair a family with intensive therapy and developmental workshops. If that fails, it looks to non-custodial parents or other family members to act as caretakers, keeping the family as intact as possible. “This is not a cookie-cutter approach. It’s individualized service to address their unique concerns,” White says.
Many of ACS’s 11 models were adapted from other realms of social work, particularly criminal justice, and cover every imaginable scenario. Brief Strategic Family Therapy, for example, is targeted at reasserting parental leadership when minors develop drug addictions and other behavior problems. Child-Parent Psychotherapy, meanwhile, helps mothers strengthen attachments with children under five who experienced a traumatic event, ensuring the youngster feels a sense of safety. There’s also various levels of monitoring. Family Treatment and Rehabilitation, which is on the high-risk end, helps participants achieve a baseline of sobriety (for instance) with three visits a week, while a low- to moderate-risk family struggling with poverty may partake in Family Connections, where plans are reevaluated every 90 days. A team of six improves program development, and other staff continuously monitor contractors to ensure correct procedures are followed.
Many are still critical of ACS, particularly when it comes to the length of time children stay in foster care — a median of 53 months in 2014 — waiting to be adopted. The city’s public advocate, Letitia James, filed a class action lawsuit in July on behalf of 10 foster children, which pointed out that New York City’s wait times are twice as long as the rest of the country and that children suffer higher rates of maltreatment while in foster care. In a press release, James claims that, “ACS has delegated foster care to 29 contract agencies, but has consistently failed to monitor these contract agencies — leaving thousands of children languishing in the system with no permanent home.” ACS attributes much of the adoption delay to bureaucratic systems outside their control and says their new programs are making headway. A settlement with Gov. Andrew Cuomo was reached in October, and a state-appointed monitor was assigned to ensure the city takes corrective action; ACS is still contesting the legal challenge in court.
Despite the suit, White looks at ACS’s progress today and believes that “we are far and away the leader in the country doing this work on the preventive side,” he says. “A small foster care system is a reflection of a healthy city. We have a city now that is more stable for families than back in the Nineties.”
The hope is that today, child protective workers would visit an Elisa Izquierdo earlier and regularly. They could provide treatment for her mother’s drug addiction and diagnose any mental illness. The innocent girl could be placed with another family member and would have the opportunity to grow up. Because of Izquierdo’s death, a system changed. Now it is ACS’s responsibility to ensure that she didn’t die in vain.
Homepage photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Each Day, 731,000 People Are in Jail. How Many Are There Simply Because They Can’t Afford to Make Bail?

Kalief Browder spent three years in jail despite never being convicted of a crime.
He was arrested for a stealing a backpack in the Bronx — a crime the then 16-year-old maintained he didn’t commit. His mother was unable to put up the $3,000 bail, so he was locked in solitary confinement on Rikers Island, New York City’s central jail, for roughly two years as he awaited trial. Browder tried to commit suicide several times — once with shredded bed sheets hung from a light fixture — and suffered physical abuse from guards and inmates alike, as detailed in The New Yorker.
In 2013, prosecutors dismissed the charges, and he was released. Last month, Browder committed suicide, sparking a wave outrage against the system that had imprisoned a young man for years only on the basis of an accusation. With its “unfortunately-long history of horrible abuses,” Rikers Island became an “example of failing to save jail for people who are convicted, as opposed to people who have just been accused,” Karin Martin, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, tells NPR. “We’re realizing that we can’t afford, both financially and kind of morally, the horrible impacts of mass incarceration.”
In New York City, the emotional outpouring that resulted from Browder’s premature death recently crystallized into real reform as Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a sweeping, $18 million overhaul of the city’s bail system. Since 2009, the Big Apple had tested alternatives to monetary bail at a jail in Queens, offering “supervised release” through a nonprofit to low-level or nonviolent offenders. The only requirement? That a person had to do was check in regularly. Nearly nine out of 10 defendants — 87 percent — still showed up to court. Similar to programs in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Charlotte and Phoenix and states like Kentucky, Arizona and New Jersey, nonprofits in the Big Apple will be following up with text messages reminders, visits with case managers and other check-ins to ensure that people keep their date with the judge.
“We know that there are thousands of people who are now being held pre-trial in the city’s jails simply because they cannot afford to pay a few hundred dollars in bail. Instead, they are held at great expense in jail and frequently lose their jobs, have to drop out of school and lose daily contact with their children and families,” Michael Jacobson, executive director of the CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance, says in a statement. “Using risk as a standard for pre-trial detention as opposed to how much money someone has will increase public safety, reduce unnecessary and costly detention and make our pre-trial system more fair and just.”
Jails don’t get the same attention as their larger counterparts, state and federal prisons, but the average American is 19 times more likely to be locked up locally than thrown in the slammer. On any given day, 731,000 people are in jail; about 12 million people are admitted in the course of a typical year, according to research by the Vera Institute of Justice. Some are serving out a sentence, but most are simply waiting for their case to be resolved, either through a trial or a plea.
Though the cash bail system is intended to ensure that a person shows up for trial, it’s the most significant reason why some remain locked up and others are released. Put simply, if the accused or his family can’t find the cash for baile fast enough (or at all), he or she will remain behind bars. Most of the time, bail isn’t astronomically expensive. In New York, more than half — 54 percent — of inmates held through the end of their case were behind bars because they couldn’t post bail of $2,500 or less, mostly for misdemeanors.
“There’s no reason to keep people in jail at great costs, when they are no threat to anybody,” says Jonathan Lippman, chief judge of New York State. It “strips our justice system of its credibility and distorts its operation.”
To aid cities and states in determining whether a person is likely to reoffend, the John and Laura Arnold Foundation developed risk assessment tools. Among the key factors that are considered are the person’s age and criminal history, including any prior incarcerations and failures to appear in court, as well as whether the current offense is violent, Anne Milgram, the foundation’s vice president of criminal justice, tells NationSwell. Drug use, employment and other criteria traditionally weighed at arraignment hearings are almost meaningless, she adds.
The judges who used the Arnold Foundation’s criteria have seen notable drops in the jail population and correlated drops in crime. In Charlotte, for example, the number of inmates dropped 20 percent.
“The central challenge of our work has been getting people on board thinking a little differently about how these decisions are made,” says Milgram, a former criminal prosecutor. “There’s a lot of individual discretion for police, prosecutors and courts, but we haven’t used objective data to inform those decisions. We’re not taking away any decision making; we’re providing information that you both need and should want.”
New York will likely develop their own “updated science-driven risk assessment tool” in the near future (Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance called for one), pending an update to state law in Albany.
There’s been some criticism leveled at the latest changes in Gotham by some of bail reform’s biggest promoters. Robin Steinberg, executive director of The Bronx Defenders, a legal aid service, and David Feige, board chair of The Bronx Freedom Fund, which assists those charged with a misdemeanor make bail for $2,000 or less, both called the reforms “long overdue” but stressed that the city must not intrude too far into the lives of defendants. There’s no benefit in being released from jail, they say, if an organization can impose even stricter pretrial requirements, the violation of which could result in reincarceration or other penalties.
“Here’s how it works: A young man arrested for shoplifting might plead guilty and be sentenced to perform one day of community service. But that same defendant who is innocent of the charge might, as a condition of his release, be ordered to attend a one-day drug education program, report to a pretrial-services officer every week, and undergo drug treatment or testing — all because he claimed to be innocent and sought to challenge his arrest,” Steinberg and Feige write in an op-ed for The Marshall Project. “The problem with the pretrial-services model is that these ‘services’ … are often identical to, and sometimes far more onerous than the sentence one would receive for actually being guilty of the crime.”
Natalie Grybauskas, assistant press secretary for the city, tells NationSwell that the only conditions for release will be “whatever check-ins are deemed appropriate by the provider.” Any added services, like a referral to drug education, will be voluntary.
The city expects to select providers from a group of applicants in the fall, she adds.
 

When School’s Not in Session, NYC Food Trucks Are Serving Hungry Kids

In New York City, 75 percent of public school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. For some of the city’s most impoverished students, school lunch might be the one the one nutritious meal he or she gets for the day.
But what happens during the summer when school is out? Do these kids just go unfed?
Well, for the last few years, New York City’s Department of Education has operated a summer meal program to make sure no kid goes hungry, Education News reports. And this summer, the Big Apple got a little creative with their delivery methods.
Since June, four brightly colored food trucks have been roaming the city’s five boroughs, feeding healthy breakfasts and lunches to kids under 18-years-old for free.
MORE: This State Is Making Sure No Child Is Ever Denied a School Lunch
These trucks stop at more than 1,000 locations such as pools, schools, libraries, parks, public housing sites, community-based organizations and soup kitchens. Serving healthy, low-fat fare such as blueberry granola, zucchini bread, omelets, bagels, tacos, salad, watermelon and grilled chicken, the trucks have handed out more than 4.4 million summer meals.
The program is sponsored by the National Basketball Association (NBA) and Share Our Strength (SOS), an organization working to end childhood hunger in the United States.
“Ensuring the health of our children is our highest priority — and providing them with quality, nutritious meals is central to that,” said New York City mayor Bill de Blasio.
It’s important that no child goes hungry — how can he or she succeed on an empty stomach? As Billy Shore, founder and CEO of SOS said, “Making sure kids get the healthy food they need in the summer feeds more than just their bodies. It feeds their futures….If we want strong, healthy kids who can hit the ground running when school is back in session this fall, we need to make sure they’re getting the nutrition they need this summer. It’s that simple.”
The summer meal program ends in just a couple of weeks — on August 29 — right before the new school year begins. Those interested in finding the location of the nearest truck can text “nycmeals” to 877877.
DON’T MISS: When These Kids Couldn’t Afford a Hot School Lunch, This Hero Stepped Up

A Well-Rounded Education: This City is Spending $23 Million to Revive the Arts

In recent years, a lot of attention and funding has been given to educating our nation’s youngsters in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (aka STEM). Arguably, this focus is for good reason since careers in these subjects are high paying and competitive.
But what about the arts? Not every student wants to be an engineer, doctor or scientist. And even if a student wanted one of those STEM careers, what’s wrong with teaching him or her how to wield a paintbrush as well as a stethoscope?
With the priority on STEM and other core subjects, an education in the arts has often been treated as a luxury, especially when schools have limited budgets. The New York Times reported in April that a number of low-income public schools in South Bronx and central Brooklyn put arts educations on the chopping block due to spending cuts.
But now, in an announcement from mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City will be spending a whopping $23 million to boost arts instruction especially in undeserved middle and high schools in next year’s fiscal budget. According to Metro, the spending plan also allocates $5 million for the hiring of 120 certified teachers, $2 million to launch a support team in each borough to guide hiring and curriculum, as well as $7.5 million to spruce up facilities (some of which are dilapidated) at schools.
MORE: Delaware Pushes to Get More Low-Income Students Enrolled in Higher Education
“For too long, we had underinvested in arts education and cultural education in our schools,” de Blasio said. “And it was time to right that wrong and do something aggressive about it.”
A well-rounded education is essential. Research shows that the arts encourage students to stay and succeed in school (as we’ve seen at the fictional William McKinley High on Glee). The arts also improves academic performance — including higher grades and scores on standardized tests — regardless of socioeconomic status. 
“For people who think that the arts is another way to waste time or to build in something else, that’s not what it is,” schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña told Metro. “The arts, in many, many ways — particularly in middle school — make kids come to school.”
Maybe one day, our nation’s attention on STEM will be redirected towards STEAM instead.
DON’T MISS: How California’s Scorching Sun is Saving the Arts

Meet the People Hoping to Change the Face of Immigration in America

You might not know it from watching the evening news, but immigration isn’t solely a Latino issue. In fact, there are more than 60 million first- and second-generation black Americans with immigrant backgrounds in the U.S. — each with a unique voice that yearns to be heard. Enter The Generation Project (otherwise known as The G Project), an innovative awareness campaign launched earlier this month by The Black Institute, which focuses on the successes and achievements that black immigrants and their descendants have contributed to the country. These so-called “Gs” emigrated from Africa, Europe, the Caribbean or South America. They all have distinct stories and backgrounds, and many of them have a vested interest in the ongoing fight for comprehensive immigration reform.
MORE: A New Weapon in the Immigration Wars: Hospitality
The G Project officially celebrated its launch last week at a high-profile panel headed by New York City’s First Lady Chirlane McCray. McCray, wife of newly seated mayor Bill de Blasio, is a second-generation immigrant, whose grandmother and grandfather emigrated from Barbados. “Now, I am a G-two, a second generation immigrant,” McCray said during the panel. “But when people look at me, and hear me, they see that I don’t speak with an accent. They see me as African-American, but they don’t think about where my people came from. And I am not unique. When it comes to immigration, there are 60 million people like you and me, and our voices are too important. The stakes are too high for us to not be heard.”
MORE: This Is What the Path to Citizenship Really Looks Like
As the fight over immigration reform continues, The G Project hopes to encourage black immigrants and their descendants to become part of the conversation, developing a unified message that speaks to their experiences. As McCray noted at the panel, these immigrants and their families depend on it. “Whether we consider ourselves African, Caribbean, or African-American, everyone needs to know their heritage. Everyone needs to know their roots,” she said. “After all, you cannot fulfill your future, unless you honor your past.”
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