February 18, 2013: The Solano County Women's Re-Entry Achievement Program (WRAP), designed to work with women while they are in jail and after they are released, is gaining national attention for its work helping young women break cycles of drug abuse and criminal activity. Participants must be residents of Solano County who are incarcerated and who are pregnant and/or mothers of children that are under the age of 18.
Solano Superior Court Judge Wendy Getty noted that most women who graduate from the program are mothers. "This is a chance," Getty said, "at stopping the cycle...I know [WRAP] is working because they're not coming back."
To refer a woman to WRAP: 707-427-6640. Ask for Pat Nicodemus or Patty Ayala (bilingual/Spanish-speaking staff).
At left, Vyctorya Sandoval, who died a month after her second birthday. Social workers had visited the home over a seven-month period "during which...the child lost almsot half of her body weight and clumps of hair fell from her head. [Posthumous] blood tests suggested she had been hungry and thirsty...". She also had a broken rib.
The story is based on the leaking of an 82-page "confidential and privileged report"that was delivered to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which overseas the DCF, on April 16, 2012. The report was under the direction of Amy Shek Naamani, below, an attorney for the Board of Supervisors' Children's Special Investigation Unit ("a special county legal unit that reports secretary to the ... Supervisors." The report is, as reporters Garrett Therolf and Jason Song note, "the harshest assessment of the DCF in recent memory."
Revealing the DCF as, in Therolf and Song's words, "a stifling bureaucracy" with an "inept workforce":
Investigators largely blamed the department's problems on its decision to place its least experienced social workers in its most crucial job: assessing dangers to children. Many of those workers — facing a total of 160,000 child abuse hot line calls each year — are "just 'doing their time,'" according to the report.
[DCF] Supervisors are poorly qualified and often disregard policy, creating a situation akin to "the blind leading the blind," with workers rarely held accountable for "egregious" errors, the report said.
Another one of the failures of the DCF system has been the focus on reuniting families or keeping them together -- a plan that significantly decreased the number of children in foster care, and increased the number of child deaths. Philip Browning, who took over as the head of DCF in September 2011, after the forced resignation of Trish Plohn.
...Browning has transferred or demoted many top managers since the [April 2012] report. More than 30 people are being added to the staff to monitor foster care contractors for fraud and abuse. He has promised to restore the agency's emergency response section as a place for elite, higher-paid workers.
He also has eased the department's focus on keeping children out of foster care. Last year, the agency filed 14,785 court petitions, most of them for removing children from their families — an increase from 13,481 the year before.
This is a reversal from Browning's earliest statements upon taking the directorship of the DCF. In late September 2011, three weeks into the job, he gave a story to the Los Angeles Daily News, touting his plans to revive family reunifications -- they had been eased off after a series of investgative reports of child deaths by the Los Angeles Times -- "as a DCF priority."
Efforts to streamline policy manuals and raise standards across the entire department won't be finished until 2015 under the plan approved by county supervisors.
October 4, 2012: In 2007, the last year for which numbers have been crunched on this subject, 1.7 million children the U.S. had a parent in prison, and increase of 80% over 1991 numbers. Over the same time period, the number of mothers in prison increased 122%. One in 15 African-American children have a parent in prison; 1 in 42 Latino children; and 1 in 111 white children. (Again, 2007 numbers.)
These figures come from the Sentencing Project, a 26-year-old, Washington, D.C.-based advocacy nonprofit that works to promote reforms in sentencing policy, "addressing unjust racial disparities and practices, and advocating for alternatives to incarceration." SP has just released a revised version of its publication, "Parents in Prison."
CONTACT WITH CHILDREN
• Nearly half (48%) of all parents in state prisons lived with their children before being sent to prison. o 47% of fathers in state prisons lived with their children compared to 64% of mothers. • 62% of parents in state prisons and 84% of parents in federal prisons are incarcerated more than 100 miles* from their last residence. • 59% of parents in state prisons and 45% in federal prisons have not had any personal visits with their children while in prison.
CHILDREN’S LIVING SITUATIONS • Most fathers in prison (88%) report their children are living with their non-incarcerated parent. • Mothers in prison are more likely than are fathers to have children living with grandparents, other relatives, or in foster care.
Two-thirds of female inmates are convicted of nonviolent offenses and nonviolent offenders are more likely to have children. Nonviolent offenders are also the ones most likely to end up in a vicious cycle of reimprisonment. "People who commit violent crimes are locked up longer and are less likely to reoffend," says [Executive Director Georgia Lerner of the Women's Prison Association]. "People who commit nonviolent drug and property crimes tend to go in and out [of prison] over and over, because if it's addiction or economic issues driving the crime, it does not get solved, it only gets exacerbated by people being removed from the community."
... Children of incarcerated mothers experience internalizing (fear, withdrawal, depression, emotional disturbance) and externalizing (anger, fighting, stealing, substance abuse) problems, as well as heightened rates of school failure and eventual criminal activity and incarceration. Research in this area is scarce and often of poor quality.
UPDATE, August 13, 2012: The California Report (listen below), in a report by Amy Isackson, stemming from research done last November by Colorlines, highlights this issue this morning, and focuses on HR 6128, a bill authored by U.S. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Huntington Park-Downey), that proposes to make it easier for relatives of children whose parents have been deported to become legal guardians, and to make it more difficult for the government to terminate parental rights in immmigration proceedings. In California, SB 1064, authored by state senator, Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), Child Custody: Immigration, covers similar territory. The bill was heard August 8 in Assembly Appropriations and was referred to the Appropriations "suspense" file; it will be heard again this Thursday, August 16. Photo, at left, by Ahmad Terry for the Rocky Mountain News.
... would authorize a court to extend the review hearing periods following consideration of the parents circumstances if a parent has been arrested and issued an immigration hold, detained by the United States Department of Homeland Security, or deported to his or her country of origin, and, under these circumstances would authorize a court to continue the case only if the court finds that the parent has made reasonable efforts to regain custody of the child or that termination of parental rights would be detrimental to the child. The bill would prohibit this extension under specified circumstances, including if the child was an abandoned infant, the parent was accused of murder or voluntary manslaughter of another of his or her children or of felony assault against this child or another of the parents children.
November 6, 2011: ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10:A free webinar on Shattered Families will be held at noon PST. Session will feature Rinku Sen, president of ARC; the author of the "Shattered Families" report, Seth Wessler; and present information and offer recommendations. Click here for more info.
UPDATE, October 3, 2012:SB 1476 was vetoed over the weekend by Governor Brown, who stated in his veto message that he was "sympathetic" to the intentions of the bill, "... "But I am troubled by the fact that some family law specialists believe the bill's ambiguities may have unintended consequences. I would like to take more time to consider all of the implications of this change." For background on this bill read below the jump.
UPDATE, August 28, 2012: The state Assembly approved SB 1476 yesterday "on a party-line vote [50-19]," according to a story in this morning's San Jose Mercury News. The bill now goes to the Senate for a final vote (it is expected to pass) before heading to the Governor's desk for signature.
July 2, 2012: California state Senator Mark Leno, author of the SB 1476 bill which would allow judges to legally recognize multiple parents when it is in a child's bst interest to have more than two parental relationships, said the grassroots consequences of the legislation would be welcomed by anyone who has ever, under any circumstances, had the responsibility of parenting children who
