In a 2008 arti­cle for the Philadel­phia Dai­ly News and WHYY’s ​“It’s Our Mon­ey” blog, Ben Wax­man traced the flow of fed­er­al, state and city dol­lars through DHS to pri­vate con­trac­tors, often reli­gious, and asked, ​“How sound is the pol­i­cy of hav­ing the wel­fare of chil­dren in the hands of pri­vate orga­ni­za­tions that are not account­able or sub­ject to pub­lic scruti­ny? Should DHS be con­sid­ered a social ser­vices depart­ment when in fact its real job is the man­age­ment of a stag­ger­ing num­ber of con­tracts, worth over a half-bil­lion dollars?”

And yet the city has dou­bled down on its use of pri­vate agen­cies since then. Its Improv­ing Out­comes for Chil­dren (IOC) process, the plan­ning for which began in 2008, explic­it­ly aims to “[shift] the man­age­ment of child wel­fare cas­es from the city to com­mu­ni­ty-based orga­ni­za­tions.” Even Frank Cer­vone, the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Sup­port Cen­ter for Child Advo­cates, an agency that works with the city on this pro­gram, expressed some hes­i­ta­tion as the pro­gram began. ​“We remain cau­tious about the locus of respon­si­bil­i­ty and account­abil­i­ty,” he told a reporter. (The DHS com­mis­sion­er is step­ping down in August to take anoth­er job — it is unclear if any­thing will change under her replacement.)

Jones con­sid­ers the use of mul­ti­ple pri­vate con­trac­tors part of the prob­lem in Car­olyn Hill’s case. “[The agen­cies] are not act­ing like pub­lic ser­vants. They’re act­ing like pub­lic mas­ters,” she says. ​“Part­ly that’s because a lot of it is privatized.”

It’s not just Philadel­phia that has had prob­lems with social ser­vices and pri­va­ti­za­tion. Indi­ana attempt­ed to pri­va­tize a chunk of its health and human ser­vices in 2006 and wound up con­sid­er­ing ban­ning pri­va­ti­za­tion of Med­ic­aid and food stamp man­age­ment because users had so many prob­lems get­ting ser­vices. Back in 2000, a Den­ver Post inves­ti­ga­tion found that Col­orado was spend­ing mil­lions on pri­vate agen­cies that over­saw more than half of the state’s fos­ter chil­dren and pock­et­ed more than three-quar­ters of the mon­ey spent on fos­ter care. And not far from Philadel­phia, a scan­dal rocked Luzerne Coun­ty, Penn­syl­va­nia, in 2008 when juve­nile court judges were found to be accept­ing kick­backs from pri­vate juve­nile deten­tion cen­ters in exchange for fun­nel­ing kids into their facilities.

Dorothy Roberts, pro­fes­sor of law and soci­ol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, attrib­ut­es the cur­rent puni­tive trends in social ser­vice to a neolib­er­al ide­o­log­i­cal frame­work that believes pri­vate solu­tions are the best answer to social prob­lems. Roberts has spent decades research­ing child wel­fare sys­tems. Her 2001 book, Shat­tered Bonds: The Col­or of Child Wel­fare, argued that cur­rent pol­i­cy reflects a polit­i­cal choice to pun­ish fam­i­lies rather than address the soci­etal caus­es of black pover­ty. She has not­ed that about one-third of chil­dren in fos­ter care are black, despite black chil­dren mak­ing up only 15 per­cent of the nation’s children.

In a 2012 arti­cle in the UCLA Law Review[PDF], Roberts wrote:

The end to the wel­fare safe­ty net coin­cid­ed with the pas­sage of the Adop­tion and Safe Fam­i­lies Act in 1997, which empha­sized adop­tion as the solu­tion to the ris­ing fos­ter care pop­u­la­tion. Both can be seen as neolib­er­al mea­sures that shift­ed gov­ern­ment sup­port for chil­dren toward reliance on pri­vate employ­ment and adop­tive par­ents to meet the needs of strug­gling fam­i­lies. This con­ver­gence marked the first time the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment man­dat­ed that states pro­tect chil­dren from abuse and neglect with­out a cor­re­spond­ing man­date to pro­vide basic eco­nom­ic sup­port to poor fam­i­lies. Both the wel­fare and fos­ter care sys­tems, then, respond­ed to a grow­ing black female clien­tele by reduc­ing ser­vices to fam­i­lies while inten­si­fy­ing their puni­tive func­tions. The main mis­sion of child wel­fare depart­ments became pro­tect­ing chil­dren not from social dis­ad­van­tages stem­ming from pover­ty and racial dis­crim­i­na­tion but from mal­treat­ment inflict­ed by their mothers.

This is the same point made by Jones and James; instead of fix­ing pover­ty, Roberts notes, the state ​“address­es fam­i­ly eco­nom­ic depri­va­tion with child removal rather than ser­vices and finan­cial resources.” It stereo­types and pun­ish­es low-income African-Amer­i­can women as ​“aggres­sive” and ​“cog­ni­tive­ly delayed” with­out ques­tion­ing those labels. Offi­cials are often bla­tant in their assump­tion that black par­ents, par­tic­u­lar­ly black women, are incom­pe­tent. Women like Car­olyn Hill.

Mean­while, Wax­man point­ed out (using 2008 num­bers), ​“If the DHS bud­get were divid­ed by the num­ber of chil­dren it serves, each one would get a check for $34,000 every year.” That might do more to solve the prob­lems caused by pover­ty than remov­ing those chil­dren from their homes.

EMWM points out that when the state is over­stretched in tak­ing chil­dren away from fam­i­lies whose only prob­lem is pover­ty, it can miss the cas­es in which a child actu­al­ly is in imme­di­ate danger.

That dan­ger, James says, can come in part from women being eco­nom­i­cal­ly unable to leave dan­ger­ous cir­cum­stances — women who face domes­tic vio­lence, she points out, some­times have their chil­dren tak­en away because they them­selves have been abused.

And right now, in Detroit, as water is being shut off to thou­sands who were late on exor­bi­tant bills, par­ents fear that if any­one finds out they don’t have water, the Depart­ment of Human Ser­vices will take their chil­dren. The fear of los­ing one’s chil­dren then becomes a bar­ri­er to ask­ing for need­ed help.

An uphill battle

On June 11, Car­olyn Hill went to Fam­i­ly Court for the lat­est hear­ing in her two-year fight to adopt her nieces. She had lined up 12 wit­ness­es to come tes­ti­fy on her behalf, includ­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers, friends and neigh­bors, the pas­tor from her church, who used to see the girls with her every Sun­day, and five mem­bers of EMWM. They were all on a list pro­vid­ed to the court by Hill’s lawyer.

Only one of them was allowed to tes­ti­fy, Dr. Steven Samuel from Jef­fer­son Hos­pi­tal, who had eval­u­at­ed Hill and found her able to care for the chil­dren. Mean­while, accord­ing to Hill and Jones, the rel­a­tive with cus­tody of the chil­dren had no one list­ed to tes­ti­fy. The only per­son to tes­ti­fy on her side was the children’s ther­a­pist, who had not seen the girls since August of 2013. And yet Hill lost her case.

​“Every time they asked me a ques­tion and I went to answer, they’d tell me to just answer the ques­tion yes or no,” Hill says.

​“Because fam­i­ly court is closed, all kinds of mis­in­for­ma­tion can go on, we don’t know what goes on behind closed doors,” says Jones.

Hill has filed a new appeal. Mean­while, she has­n’t seen the chil­dren since the end of Jan­u­ary. ​“First I was see­ing them four times a month, two hours every time, four hours in my home and four hours at the agency,” she says. ​“Then they said when the kids would come from my house they would act up, so they cut the vis­its down to two hours at the agency.” Then they cut them down to one hour, and then none at all.

The only rea­son she can think of that the chil­dren remain with the oth­er fam­i­ly is that they have more mon­ey than she does. The chil­dren may be spend­ing more time in day care with the new fam­i­ly, accord­ing to Hill, but the time she spent car­ing for them is seen as less valu­able because she is poor. James says, ​“They’ve made absolute­ly clear that a good moth­er is one who dumps their kid in some child care or oth­er and gets a job. Stack­ing super­mar­ket shelves, any­thing you do is bet­ter than tak­ing care of your child or chil­dren. In oth­er words, if you’re not exploit­ed you’re nobody.”

Since the 1996 wel­fare reform bill, low-income women get lit­tle finan­cial help rais­ing chil­dren, and then their pover­ty is used as a strike against them. They are pushed to find work because, James says, the soci­ety does­n’t see the care work they do as wor­thy of finan­cial sup­port. Mon­ey, it seems, is everything.

​“We’re fight­ing so hard because it can­not be the case that income is the deter­mi­nant of whether or not you’re a good fam­i­ly,” Jones says. ​“If that’s the case half of Philadel­phia would lose their kids.”