Sylvia A. Harvey – Type Investigations

When the Clock is Cruel: Parents Face Pandemic Hurdles as They Race to Keep Their Kids

Sylvia A. Harvey — Mon, 03 May 2021 14:45:08 +0000

A 10-year-old in a magenta zip-up sweatshirt playfully stretches a ball of slime between her hands while she stares at a computer screen. On it, she can see her father, Charles Redding, in a courtroom sitting more than 6 feet from his lawyer and a judge, Tanya Bransford, presiding in black robes behind plexiglass. The young girl had been at her elementary school this February weekday but was excused from class to log onto Zoom and help the judge determine if she and her brother should live with their dad, or if their father’s rights would be terminated. Normally, she’d appear in court, but the coronavirus pandemic means participating virtually instead.

When it’s her turn to testify before the Hennepin County Juvenile Court in Minnesota, the fourth grader removes her face mask printed with ponies, looks into the camera, raises her right hand, and swears to tell the whole truth. She breezes through the first set of questions, gushing about how much she enjoys visiting her paternal auntie, Tanya and about her most recent visit with her dad.

Joining Redding’s daughter in this virtual hearing is Andrea Braun, her court-appointed attorney, who asks her client where she wants to live. She doesn’t hesitate.

“With my dad,” she says. When Braun encourages her to elaborate, her eyes start to well. “Because. I really miss him.” Her dad’s lawyer asks her about their relationship. Does she feel safe with her dad and does he take good care of her? The girl sobs through her answer, one hand covering her mouth: “Yes.”

Once her testimony is over, she is excused from juvenile court which, in Minnesota, is open to the public. She wipes away her tears, hits the red “leave meeting” button on her computer, and is off to her next class, PE. Her 13-year-old brother will testify next, offering the same emotional plea to remain with his dad.

The two children now before the Hennepin County court are not being named by The Imprint to protect their identities and the precarious nature of their fate. Approximately 70,000 kids per year are awaiting adoption after having been permanently separated from their parents. That number has risen in recent years – from 62,230 in fiscal year 2015 to 71,335 in fiscal year 2019, the most recent stats available.

The mother of the two Minnesota children died in 2014, and five years later social workers removed them from their father’s home, placing them together with a foster mom they’d never met. And although she does not plan to adopt them, the state is pushing to permanently end their relationship with their father through the family law equivalent of the death penalty in a criminal case: The Termination of Parental Rights. The children are trying to convince the court to give him more time.

So are Redding’s lawyer and the childrens’ lawyer.

Jillian Lenser

Charles Redding.

Despite their deep connection, this family will be legally severed for life unless the 43-year-old father can prove that he’s done all the court has asked him to do on a 12-month timeline and the months that followed, which coincided with one of the most devastating times in recent history for America’s most vulnerable families. That meant emerging from jail and quickly finding affordable housing for the trio, attending online classes without a computer, and presenting clean drug tests from a center that had suspended services during the pandemic.

Redding is among the parents of approximately 220,000 children nationwide per year who have had to follow court-ordered case plans or risk being legally severed from their children and having them “freed” for adoption. Despite the challenges to reunification posed by the pandemic, parents are still being held to a strict, federally imposed timeline put in place more than two decades ago.

In interviews The Imprint and Type Investigations conducted with lawyers, family members and child welfare advocates in at least six states, it’s clear that child welfare timelines have imposed unfair burdens and an unreasonable expectation for parents who — even under normal circumstances — have difficulty complying with court orders to get their kids back.

Presenting his challenges to the court that day in February and hearing his daughter’s testimony left Redding in tears. “It hurt me that they even made her get on the stand,” he said in a later interview. It was joyful, though, to hear the positive things both children had to say about him, he added. “It let me know that I actually do my job as a father.”

The children were taken from him in early 2019 after a child welfare worker, who was referred by law enforcement, visited and found his home in disarray. He had also been accused of domestic violence. Redding contends that the house was messy because he was in the process of moving out. He was set to serve a jail sentence of around nine months for a DUI at the Anoka County Workhouse, a minimum-security jail where he would be allowed to leave daily to work and have weekly visits with his children.

He had already arranged for his children to stay temporarily with his sister. Social services gave him a court-ordered case plan that included securing safe and suitable housing and completing domestic violence prevention classes.

Redding’s case isn’t an anomaly. Across the country, parents are being asked to complete strict and elaborate case plans made difficult, if not impossible, by the pandemic.

Attorneys say the reunification services that their clients are required to complete — including parenting classes, drug and alcohol abuse treatment, domestic violence prevention programs and mental health care — have been unavailable or severely delayed this past year. Some mandatory drug testing sites were temporarily closed, and required family visits that had to be conducted by phone or videoconference that clashed with poor access to technology.

But those types of disruptions were often disregarded as the parents’ court dates approached.

“The timelines haven’t stopped, but everything else has,” said Rachelle Stratton, Redding’s attorney. “Everything else the parents can do has stopped or been altered, but we’re not stopping the timeline. Is that fair to families? Are kids going to look back and say, ‘My dad couldn’t finish his case plan in the middle of a pandemic, so they terminated his rights’?”

Top child welfare officials are aware of the challenges these families are facing and have called on agencies to consider the effect of the pandemic. Jerry Milner, who was until January associate commissioner of the federal Children’s Bureau, issued multiple letters to state child welfare agencies urging them to take extra care in cases where access to services have “been compromised as a result of the pandemic.”

He said that the lack of available resources should not be viewed as parents’ failure to comply and might instead be an agency’s failure to provide “reasonable efforts,” meaning a good faith try to reunite the family. Milner, who was appointed during the conservative Trump administration yet earned the respect of a wide swath of child welfare experts, encouraged agencies to cautiously evaluate a family’s situation before taking the blunt action of terminating parents’ rights. His successor, Aysha Schomburg, took office last month; she declined comment for this story.

Attorneys for children and parents in multiple states interviewed for this story applauded Milner’s words, but said such suggestions are only helpful if they’re mandated — and they aren’t. Milner’s “COVID guidance failed to halt the push for quick terminations in child welfare courtrooms,” said Kathleen Creamer, managing attorney of the family advocacy unit at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia. “The plea contained in the letter was unenforceable, and indeed undermined by statutory language and daily practice in family courts.”

Jillian Lenser

Charles Redding’s 10-year-old daughter gathers sticks during a weekend visit on April 4 with her father in St. Paul, Minnesota.

At issue is the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act, or ASFA, a federal law signed by then-President Bill Clinton that requires local child welfare agencies to request the termination of parental rights whenever a child has lived in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months, with very limited exceptions. Some states move even faster, petitioning to terminate parental rights within 12 months.

ASFA has always had both strong opposition and support. Lawmakers say they passed the law to offer permanent homes to children who were lingering in foster care, but the timelines have also made it difficult for families to reunify — especially now. Some ASFA legislation exists at the state level, but the federal law doesn’t take into account the slow process of recovery from substance use disorder, the reality of relapses or the complicated path to mental health treatment and reentry after incarceration.

These timelines were hard for parents struggling with poverty and racial discrimination before the pandemic, but its arrival has only exacerbated the existing issues.

“People in difficult circumstances have a hard time getting anything done, even in the best of times,” said David Meyers, a lawyer with Dependency Legal Services in California. “Just as the pandemic has widened the income gap, it has highlighted and increased the disparities between those with means — good internet service and equipment to use it — and those who struggle to make ends meet.”

During an email exchange, Meyers forwarded a redacted notice from a social worker saying that the agency planned to file for termination of the family reunification process, which often precedes termination of parental rights, calling it “an everyday occurrence.”

In Colorado, parents’ attorneys have also reported seeing a wave of orders to terminate parental rights over the past year. A survey of lawyers representing parents in child welfare cases there yielded more than 100 responses that identified pandemic-related issues, including lack of access to services and inability to comply with treatment plans, as impacting many of their clients’ child welfare cases.

A change in federal law is being eyed by advocates as the most powerful way to stop the clock. In August 2020, Rep. Gwen Moore of Wisconsin (D) introduced the Suspend the Timeline Not Parental Rights During a Public Health Crisis Act to do just that. The proposed legislation would lift the ASFA mandate during the pandemic and guarantee that states do not suffer federal funding cuts due to the policy change. It also specifies that a public health crisis is a compelling reason for agencies to not seek to terminate parental rights.

“COVID-19 has created great uncertainty for many, causing millions to face housing, health, food, and job insecurity,” Moore wrote in a news release announcing the bill. “This unprecedented crisis should not lead to permanent damage to families because of a federal timeline created before this pandemic.”

Moore, as a young mother, had to temporarily place her own child in foster care with relatives, and has long been an advocate for child welfare reform. She says that a fraction of the cost spent on foster care could make all the difference for a family in need. But too often that’s not what happens. “Where $80 a month more in food stamps would solve their problem,” Moore said, “we would rather spend $600 per month in a foster care situation than give them that $80 per month.”

Opponents of the bill argue that local child welfare agencies need to maintain their vigilance on timelines, keep conducting in-person visits and continue moving children from foster care into permanent homes, despite the pandemic. Some have expressed fears that with children stuck at home this past year, abuse and neglect may have gone unchecked.

“The lives of these children cannot be put on hold simply because caseworkers are worried about their own safety or family court personnel or foster agencies can’t figure out how to operate in the 21st century,” wrote Sarah Anne Font, a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University, and Naomi Schaefer Riley, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “Children’s needs for safe, stable and legally-recognized families do not recede because there is a pandemic.”

In this tense climate, parents’ attorneys are seeking innovative ways to keep families together and buy them more time. In Colorado, a local county department sent iPads to the Office of Respondent Parents’ Counsel, which assigns lawyers to parents, so they could have visits with their children. The department also asked libraries to leave their Wi-Fi on so low-income parents could sit in the parking lots and have virtual visits.

In New Jersey, a child and parent attorney wrote a letter to the commissioner of the state’s child welfare agency, cc’d to the governor, pushing for a moratorium on involuntary terminations of parental rights.

“Instead of lengthy, contested hearings that pit caseworkers against parents, families would best be served by hearings where all sides assess the needs of a case,” said Amy Vasquez, the attorney proposing the moratorium. She recalled emotional calls from parents who were denied visits with their children by their foster parents or relative caregivers for months during the pandemic. “Safety is paramount, but now it’s time to remember those months and extend time to heal these wounds in parent-child bonding.”

Stratton, Redding’s attorney, who as a supervising attorney has a caseload of about 40 clients, has successfully reunified some families,including two recent cases where, despite the negative impact of COVID-19, a potential termination of parental rights was successfully avoided.

One involved a mother of four who struggled with substance use disorder and was ordered by the county to attend a relapse prevention program while her children were in foster care with their grandmother. She started the classes, but once the pandemic hit, she had to stop them because of a health condition that put her at high risk for infection.

The mother faced criticism at every court hearing for not completing the plan, Stratton said. But after she completed a 30-day inpatient treatment program and nearly four months of outpatient classes, Stratton argued that there was no longer a safety issue, and the children’s guardian ad litem, a person appointed by the court to make recommendations in child welfare cases, agreed. The judge ultimately closed the case.

Though the family struggled with distance learning, all families were now facing those hurdles, the judge noted, and despite testing positive for marijuana,the mother was no longer using the drugs that first triggered the case to open.

Another client of Stratton’s had difficulty visiting her four children because their foster care providers, both relatives, were worried about exposure to COVID-19. She also had trouble proving her sobriety. Rather than risk contracting the virus at the community hospital where she would have to go to provide urine samples, she opted for a drug detection patch. But the patch was unreliable, Stratton said, and resulted in her testing positive for substances she swore she wasn’t using.

Eventually, the mother decided to go back to urine drug tests, which required her to drive an hour-and-a-half round trip to the hospital weekly. When her children were with her for the tests, she had to find child care because the hospital would not allow them inside.

“They deserved to be reunified. They got to the right place,” said Stratton. “It just took a lot longer than it needed to.”

Redding’s fight to reunify with his two children is still ongoing.He was released from the Workhouse in November 2019 and spent the next year trying to reunite with his children.

He managed to meet some of the many requirements, by providing clean urine samples and having visits with his children, but others — like completing a domestic violence program — proved far more difficult. His parole officer required a specific class, but there was a waitlist for it. Once he got in, it moved online and he didn’t have a computer he could use to participate. Eventually, he received a laptop from Stratton’s office and was able to follow through.

When in-person visits were canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions, Redding maintained frequent contact with his children via video chats and cell phone calls. Even if it meant calling from someone else’s phone, he talked with his young teenage son almost daily and spoke to his elementary school-age daughter most weekends when she stayed with his sister Tanya.

In May 2020, after reaching the ASFA deadline, Redding received a petition to terminate his parental rights. It stated that his children had been in foster care for 12 months, Minnesota’s deadline, and that he hadn’t made significant progress to rectify the problems that had resulted in the children’s removal.

During Redding’s Feb. 2, hearing, Abigail Anderson, the child protection investigator with Hennepin County’s Department of Human Services and Public Health, acknowledged that Redding’s situation was unusual, complicated by the fact that the children’s mother never filed the paperwork to declare Redding their custodial guardian and that at the time of the removal he was facing a jail term.

Jillian Lenser

Charles Redding and his 13-year-old son prepare a fire during an April 4 visit to a relative’s St. Paul, Minnesota home.

“We would never ask for out-of-home placement for these kids, if he wasn’t going away to the Workhouse,” Anderson testified. “We would have offered services and expected him to comply.”

Anderson also said she tried to find other relatives who might take the children in but wasn’t successful. “We don’t want your kids to go into foster care with someone they don’t know,” Anderson said during the trial. “These are nice, nice, kids and that’s not an outcome we want for kids.”

Anderson said she would have liked to place the children with Redding’s sister, Tanya, who wanted to be their foster parent. But while the children are allowed to stay with her on weekends, she faced legal barriers to becoming licensed — a common challenge that disproportionately impacts people of color seeking to care for children to avoid foster care.

In his February hearing, an exception was made for Redding to appeal directly to the judge, who was seated in a near-empty courtroom. His attorney believed that strategy would inspire more compassion than if he was reduced to a “two-inch thumbnail” on a computer screen, which dulls the human emotion of testimony, she said.

“I think about the small things that used to happen in trials, like the judge would have seen Mr. Redding and the kids,” Stratton said. “And they are freaking adorable when they’re together. They clearly have such a great relationship, and the judge doesn’t get to see any of that.”

In-person trials encourage judges to restart visits, send kids home on unsupervised visits or simply close the case, Stratton added. “And this pandemic has affected all of that,” she said. “Nobody in Mr. Redding’s case has observed these children with him. Nobody.”

In the months after his February hearing, Redding saw his children weekly and moved in with Tanya.

After another hearing in March, Judge Bransford issued her decision. Redding’s child welfare case remains open, but she did not terminate his parental rights. Instead, she ordered unsupervised visits during the week, and overnights on the weekend.

Redding is relieved and has already begun another parenting class, his attempt to do everything he can to regain full legal rights for his children. “I’m very happy and now I’m working on getting them back,” he said. “They will not be labeling me as a bad father.”

This story was reported with support from the Puffin Foundation.

The post When the Clock is Cruel: Parents Face Pandemic Hurdles as They Race to Keep Their Kids appeared first on Type Investigations.

The Backstory: Sylvia A. Harvey

Sylvia A. Harvey — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 17:33:43 +0000

Sylvia A. Harvey talks about her investigation into how the foster care system often removes parental rights from parents who have been to prison. Harvey’s story followed Kenneth Clark, a father of five who lost custody of his children after being sent to prison for a failure to appear in court. She reports that of the nearly 443,000 kids in the United States foster care system today, many are the children of currently or formerly incarcerated adults, like Clark, who are fighting hard to regain custody. But under Arkansas law, where Clark lives, foster care agencies are required to terminate parental rights after a child has lived in foster care for 12 of the last 22 months. This puts many incarcerated parents on a near impossible timeline for regaining custody of their children, even after they are released. Harvey’s story follows Clark from his original detainment to the present day, chronicling his anger, frustration, and hope that he might one day be reunited with his children.

Mary Retta: Can you speak a little bit about why you wanted to report on this story, how Clark’s story in particular came to you, and why you wanted to focus on Clark specifically?

Sylvia A. Harvey: I think the idea was, you know, we this have federal legislation that is essentially an arbitrary timeline for families that are caught up in the child welfare system. And just hearing that parents were having their children removed from their home and permanently taken away, I was just like, that's not possible. I think when you're not working specifically in the space of child welfare, so many things can be taking place that you aren't particularly familiar with. You don't know what's going on until someone tells you, actually, they can take your children after a certain amount of time. And so for me, that was that was just really shocking. And I wanted to know, when is this happening? Where is this happening? Why is this happening? And how is this impacting the families? And what do we need to be doing instead of sort of taking people's children away? I think those were the original thoughts. Kind of, what does it mean to be caught in the child welfare system? What does it need to be doing with the Adoption Safe Families Act, which says that if you have a child in foster care for 15 of the most recent twenty two months, the local child welfare agency can file for a termination of parental rights.

So, you know, I originally started looking into mothers and I was working with a woman in Arkansas, DeeAnn Newell, and she worked inside the jail there. And she said, ‘I work with a lot of mothers that are doing the parenting program, and, it's just heartbreaking how many women are losing their children.’ So we worked to try to get me into the jail, but it was just too hard; they weren't open to having me come in and report on these stories. And it just happened, actually, that Kenneth’s case came along and I thought it was interesting to look at it from the perspective of a father. What does it need to be a father that has been put in a position where you are at risk of losing your children? What does it mean to be incarcerated and not had any contact with the Department of Human Services to know where your children are? What does it mean to be released and still not be able to get connected to your children? And I just think that we think so much about parenthood in these cases of child welfare that you think of the mother. And the way that fathers are treated is a really awful reflection on how we viewed the role of fathers and the importance of fathers. So I thought I would just illustrate a different aspect of parenthood and losing the rights to your children

Retta: Sort of building on that, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about what it was like to talk to Clark over the course of reporting your story. He gave you a lot of personal details, and I was just wondering if you could speak to how you went about building trust with him and whether he was comfortable sort of going on record with his real name and giving all those details?

Harvey: So I was introduced to him through someone that he'd already had started to establish a relationship with. So DeeAnn Newell was someone that he was working with. She'd taken him on as a client and said, you know, let's do let's do the work. So she had already been in touch with me. She knew what my intentions were. She'd seen my previous work. So she thought that it would be important for him to have a conversation with me. So once he had that initial conversation and just sort of told me what was happening, I think he started to develop a level of comfort because there was something about someone listening to him fully, thinking about his whole story and not just looking at a part of it, but saying, I'm listening to you, I want to know the whole story, I want to tell as much of it as I can so that people understand what's going on.

And he wanted nothing more than to have his story told. So I think that that was something that started to develop pretty naturally through the course of having different phone calls. He was in a transitional program and we spoke a lot on the phone, and then I actually went to Little Rock. And so being there in Little Rock, going to his home, looking at where he's living, driving him to work, seeing what it's like for him to take this commute to get to work, talking to the people in his church, just meeting the people in his support network, going to these drug and alcohol meetings. So going to meetings with him, just really entering intimate spaces so that I could see and feel what it was like for him to some degree. So I think taking those really intimate steps were important. And in terms of his name, he definitely wanted to use his name. He was like, this is my story. This happened to me. And I want the world to know.

Retta: And sort of on the flip side, I guess I was wondering if you could speak a bit about what it was like when you approached these agencies that you talked about in your stories, like Child Protection and speaking with the prison, and what you learned in reporting and talking to those larger structures?

Harvey: Child Protective Services never go on record talking to journalists about cases in particular, or I've never had the experience in any time that reach out to them. They say, ‘we can't speak about cases specifically.’ They can just give you general information or they can respond to questions that talk about their process. So that was that was expected. I didn't expect that they would go into detail. And the same was true for the attorney that represented him. She said that she didn't discuss her cases. So at one point I was like, well, how am going to tell this full story? I need I need their voices, I need the evidence, I need more than Clark's story. And that's when I went about getting the transcripts. So the transcripts were a huge, huge sort of milestone.

So then Clark had these records. He was able to send me those, and then there was everything. You see DHS, you see the attorney. Everything is sort of there for me. So that was a huge, huge milestone. That was a huge victory to be able to refer to his transcripts and see exactly what the judge said, to see exactly what the attorney said, to see exactly what the DHS worker said, to see where people were not being honest, where people were being caught in lies. Just everything was laid bare in those transcripts and I think that that helped out a lot because it gave a voice to the organizations that were not willing to speak on the record.

Retta: You also mentioned that you started working on this story a long time ago. And so I was wondering if you could speak to how the pandemic and travel restrictions shaped the end of the story or the reporting of the story?

Harvey: Yeah, this story started, far, far before the pandemic. I guess it was a number of things. So for Clark himself, facing homelessness and I couldn't even find him. So if you’re homeless, you don't have money, you don't have a phone…there's no way to get in touch with him. So there were long stretches of time where I just didn't know where he was or how he was doing. I couldn't get in touch with him, so I couldn't follow up on a certain aspect of the story. And then maybe he would find me. He had my number tucked away somewhere, and once he found a stable place or once he was in a shelter that allowed him to call out, he would call me and give me an update. So that posed a challenge.

And then obviously there are just challenges around scheduling for a magazine. You know, I think that with covid, the idea was that the focus of all media coverage and all stories for a couple of months was only covid. It was like, if it's not a story that's related to covid, then it's not a good time to publish. So it was like, alright, we’ll just wait. And then he gets rearrested during this pandemic. And then you're like, how is it possible that you were arrested in this pandemic, and now you're being thrown in jail for a failure to appear? So just really thinking about what it means to be incarcerated during this time, what it means to take that kind of risk essentially, and why it's happening.

Retta: I'm wondering what you hope the impact of this piece will be? Especially as conversations about abolition are entering more into the mainstream, what do you hope people will take away from this story?

Harvey: Wow, I think there are so many things to take away. I think the first thing is to really think about our child welfare system and how it penalizes families of color, particularly Black families and poor families, and what that looks like. So, Clark’s story is an illustration of what that looks like and how we continuously as a country classify child maltreatment when in fact it's just poverty. What does it mean to bring up these families to a living wage? What does it mean to recognize the work that people are doing to have a better life? In the case of Clark, he’s working at a place where’s being paid about $10.25, $10.50, I don’t remember but it was above the minimum wage. And during his hearing, he was questioned about that, like, ‘well, how much are you earning per week?’ You know, as if ‘oh, that's not going to be enough to take care of your kids.’ But then there's the question of, okay, you don’t want me to sell drugs, you don't think that the legal job that I have that pays me ten dollars and fifty cents is sufficient, and you won't do anything to help bring me to a living wage. But you want to take my children and give them to someone else and then pay those other people to take care of them? I think that there is something very problematic in the exchange of money in that situation.

If we want Clark to be able to take care of his children, there is a way that we can bring him up to a living wage, and there is a way that we can make sure that he had the resources he needs to get on track. Whether that’s a transition program for employment, whether that is a housing program. Just really having services in place for people that are transitioning, people that are reentering society. And I think that ending cash bail is a small but mighty thing that could take place in every state in this country and be helpful.

The post The Backstory: Sylvia A. Harvey appeared first on Type Investigations.

How a Trip to Prison Cost Kenneth Clark His Right to Be a Parent

Sylvia A. Harvey — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 15:17:19 +0000

Kenneth Clark sported a colorful striped shirt and black shorts the last time his two daughters, Kira and Kenae, saw him. The father of five slung his bag over his shoulder and set out for the day. Listening to music, Clark took in the southern warmth of Fort Smith, Ark., and pounded Midland Avenue looking for an affordable used vehicle for his family. There was a truck for sale that he’d spotted about an hour away from his home, but he also wanted to visit a few used-car dealerships in the surrounding area. Clark was just starting to emerge from the worst two years of his life; he remained out of work, but he had managed to save three months of his disability payments and had recently received his stimulus check. Finally, he thought, he might have enough to make the purchase.

“He would get up and go look for a car. That was his main concern,” said B.J., the mother of two of his daughters. “Getting wheels under us, so I could get the kids to their appointments, I could get to school.” They were close to finding something they could afford.

Key Findings

Kenneth Clark tried to help his friend during an assault. Those efforts ended up landing him in prison. And thanks to the Clinton-era Adoption and Safe Families Act, it also ended up costing him his children.

But on May 3, a Sunday, Clark’s plans went badly awry. As he went about his daily search, he saw an old friend being attacked by her boyfriend. “Hey, man, leave that girl alone!” Clark said he hollered from across the street. “You wouldn’t hit on a man.” His words did not deter the boyfriend, however, so Clark decided to intervene to stop the attack. It was a choice that helped extract his friend from a terrible situation but that also further enraged the boyfriend, who retaliated by calling the police on Clark. Though the police didn’t think Clark had done anything wrong, he said, they arrested him all the same—for failure to appear in court several months back.

Rana Young / Type Investigations

“I didn’t think he would call the police,” Clark said of his friend’s boyfriend. “But I do know she’s a woman. Ain’t no man got no business beating a woman like that.”

Key Findings

Under the law in Arkansas, where Clark lives, foster care agencies are required to begin terminating parental rights whenever a child has lived in foster care for 12 of the last 22 months. That put Clark on an almost impossible timeline.

More than three months later, Clark remains in jail, locked in close quarters as a pandemic rages. For 23 hours a day, Clark said, he is confined to a large dormitory-style barracks alongside dozens of men, unable to maintain any kind of social distancing. The Pulaski County Regional Detention Center, which is holding Clark, reports that there are not currently any confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the facility, and that all employees and detainees are given face masks. But with the virus spreading rapidly through prisons—some 57,000 incarcerated people had tested positive as of July 7, and at least 651 prisoners have died, according to The Marshall Project—Clark, who is 62, worries about his safety. He doesn’t think he should have been jailed for his offense, given the risk of catching the virus.

Key Findings

The law requires child protective agencies to make “reasonable efforts” to keep children with their parents. But Clark and his lawyers documented how the state had given him almost none of the services he would have needed while in prison to hold on to his parental rights.

“I’m a nonviolent offender,” he said. “People that work here, they interact with the outside. They can transport Covid to me, and I’ll never get to see my kids again.”

That a minor incident could have outsize consequences on Clark’s life is a story that is sadly familiar to him. Four years earlier, Clark was arrested on a drug possession charge and sent to prison just as a child welfare case was unfolding against him and his then-girlfriend, Nicole. While a journey through either of these two broken systems—the criminal justice system or the child welfare system—would have been fraught, the combination ensnared Clark in an impossible predicament. Struggling to navigate the two bureaucracies, as well as an unforgiving Clinton-era child welfare law, Clark lost three of his children—for good; his parental rights were terminated. It was a loss so profound it unraveled Clark, setting him on the path that led to his rearrest in early May.

Clark’s saga began in 2016, a decade after he and his immediate family moved from New Orleans to Arkansas to escape the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At the time, he was living with Nicole and their two children in a two-bedroom apartment near a park in Fort Smith. Clark relished the small moments of fatherhood: reading Charlotte’s Web to his daughter Kabrina before bed, or making his son Kendrick’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich the way he liked it, with a smidgen of maple syrup in between the two gooey layers. When B.J. would allow it, Clark also spent time with his daughters from that relationship. Clark, who had spent years of his own childhood in foster care, wanted to be present for his children in ways his biological parents had not been for him. And for a while he was.

Rana Young / Type Investigations

Then, in March of that year, when Nicole gave birth to their third child, Kendall, she tested positive for marijuana. The newborn did not have traces of it in his system, but under Arkansas’s Garrett’s Law, enacted in 2005, the fact that he had been exposed to drugs meant that doctors had to report Nicole to the state police or the Division of Children and Family Services (DCFS). The DCFS began an investigation into the family and ultimately opened a protective services case, in which the agency monitored the family for signs of child maltreatment and gave the parents a case plan to follow. Nicole and Clark, who had also admitted to smoking marijuana, were ordered to attend a Department of Human Services (DHS) meeting, remain drug- and alcohol-free, and allow DHS case workers into their home for drug and alcohol screenings.

During their first visit to the DHS, Clark and Nicole played with their children while a social worker observed. They also submitted to drug tests and passed, Clark said. As long as the investigation remained open, both parents had to submit to random screenings. “We gotta do this together,” he told Nicole. They made a pact to abstain from drug use, and for a while they were successful. “I was negative, she was negative,” Clark said.

Then, a month later, in April 2016, a caseworker dropped into the family’s home for a follow-up visit. According to the subsequent DHS report, Nicole tested positive for methamphetamine, amphetamines, and marijuana. Clark, who said he hadn’t so much as smoked marijuana since the case file was opened, wasn’t home during the visit and wasn’t tested. Yet the DHS removed their three children on grounds of “neglect” and “environmental issues,” citing the mother’s drug use and the poor, unsanitary condition of the home, including “electrical outlets without covers, bed bugs in the corner of the ceiling, pull-out sofas…on the floor,” according to the DHS report. A neighbor called Clark to tell him his children were being removed, and he arrived, drenched in sweat and out of breath, just as Kendall, Kabrina, and Kendrick were being loaded into a van.

“What’s wrong?” he recalls asking the DHS representative. “I made it here. I ran all the way from 11th Street. I got here as fast as I could.” But the DHS case worker said he was too late and proceeded to take the kids away. She only allowed Clark to say goodbye.

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Since that day, Clark’s three children with Nicole have been somewhere in the foster care system; he does not know where. He has not seen them. But he pines for them. In his back pocket, he carries two photos of Kendall, the only tangible remnants of his youngest child; in his memory, he carries the early mornings he spent on the sofa watching TV with Kendrick, who was 5 the last time they saw each other, or the afternoon dance-offs with his daughter Kabrina, who was 4.

“I want my kids back, I don’t really care about nothing else,” Clark said, during one of our many conversations about his fight to win back his children.

“If I get my kids back it will feel like a thousand pounds of pressure been relieved off me,” he added. “Really, because in my mind, that’s all I live for.”

When the DHS removed Clark’s children—Kendall, Kabrina, and Kendrick—they joined the ranks of the nearly 443,000 kids in the United States foster care system. In many cases, eager parents are on the other end, working hard to get their children back, and for years, Clark was one of those eager parents. But his battle was more complicated than most because it was waged at the crossroads of the child welfare and criminal justice systems, which have disparate missions and rarely communicate well with each other.

In the spring of 2016, shortly after his kids were removed from his home, Clark served a little more than a year behind bars for drug possession. “I was damaged,” Clark says of that time. “I was at my lowest point.” Instead of pressing his attorney to fight the charges, he opted to go to prison on the theory that serving the time could be an opportunity to get his life in order, so he could be present for his children when they came home. “I’m going to take my lick,” he told himself; then he would “come on back and be that standup guy I’m supposed to be.”

But far from an opportunity to prepare for his kids’ return, prison turned out to be the wedge that drove him further away from them. The problem wasn’t just that Clark missed his children desperately, that he worried about how scared they must be; it was that, while in prison, Clark’s child custody case moved forward—without him.

What made this situation particularly challenging is that Clark’s custody case was up against an unforgiving time line. This time line was set some two decades earlier, in 1997, when President Bill Clinton signed the Adoption and Safe Families Act, or ASFA. The law requires state foster care agencies to begin terminating parental rights whenever a child has lived in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months, with very limited exceptions. Since then, some states have decided to do it even faster. In Arkansas, where the child welfare system has been mired in problems, the time line is only 12 months. Lawmakers say they passed the ASFA to offer permanence to children perennially bouncing between foster care placements and group homes, but it has also made it extremely difficult for incarcerated parents to maintain rights to their own children.

Mass incarceration affects millions of families in every state across the country, yet families in some states fare worse than others. Arkansas has the fastest-growing prison population in the country, a trend that has had a tremendous impact on families there. More than 100,000 children in Arkansas have experienced parental incarceration, or nearly one in six kids, making Arkansas the state with the highest proportion of children affected by this country’s system of mass imprisonment.

Incarcerated parents across the country face a higher likelihood of losing their parental rights than parents in child welfare cases accused of serious abuse. In 2018, The Marshall Project analyzed nearly 3 million DHS child welfare cases, finding that in one out of eight, incarcerated parents lost their parental rights, regardless of the seriousness of their crime. According to the data, at least 32,000 incarcerated parents had their children permanently removed between 2006 and 2016 without being accused of physical or sexual abuse; instead, many separations were tied, in part, to poverty. Nearly 5,000 of those cases involved parents who appear to have had their parental rights severed as a result of their imprisonment alone.

Child welfare policy has often been polarizing, with theories as to the best method to protect children swinging wildly over the last 50 years from solutions privileging removing kids from the home to those prioritizing family preservation—and back again.

In the early 1990s, the pendulum was swinging hard in the direction of family separation. For a decade or so prior, the emphasis had been on family reunification, with child protective services required to make “reasonable efforts” to avoid unnecessary removal of children from their families. But critics believed this approach led social workers to try too hard to keep children in their homes, even in dangerous situations. Protecting children and giving them permanence—not necessarily with their birth family—became the dominant national narrative.

The campaign to pass the ASFA emerged out of this anxious moment. It was spearheaded by Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, and Republican Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island, with strong bipartisan support. The ASFA amended the Child Welfare Act by limiting “reasonable efforts” and speeding up the adoption process to make it easier to remove children from abusive households. Its supporters harbored some harsh ideas about the kinds of families who wind up in the child welfare system.

“We will not continue the current system of always putting the needs and rights of the biological parents first,” Chafee said before the Senate. “It’s time we recognize that some families simply cannot and should not be kept together.”

Senator Mike DeWine, now the Republican governor of Ohio, who authored language narrowing the scope of “reasonable efforts” in the bill, directly attacked the idea of seeking to keep natal families together. “Too often, reasonable efforts…have come to mean unreasonable efforts,” he said on the Senate floor. “It has come to mean efforts to reunite families which are families in name only. I am speaking now of dangerous, abusive adults who represent a threat to the health and safety and even the lives of these children.”

The bill passed almost unanimously, with Hillary Clinton presiding over the signing ceremony.

Now, some two decades later, opinion about the success of the ASFA remains divided. Among its supporters, the ASFA is hailed as a landmark child welfare effort. “ASFA established for the first time within federal policy the principle that maltreated children must be ‘the paramount concern’ of the child protection system,” Cassie Statuto Bevan, professor of social policy and practice at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in an article. Statuto was a staffer on the Ways and Means Committee that oversaw passage of the ASFA. She believes it remains a “highly successful law” that has produced “a significant decline in the average time between removal of a child from his/her home and termination of parental rights.”

Yet this newfound speed can also pose a problem. Throughout the country, thousands of parents have lost their parental rights as a result of the ASFA’s time line. Child welfare advocates say the ASFA, in practice, encourages states to remove children without sufficient cause from their families, especially poor families in which allegations of poverty-related neglect—not abuse—are paramount.

“The biggest problem in the system is the confusion of poverty with neglect and the racial bias,” said Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. “The premise of ASFA was, ‘Oh, this vast family preservation conspiracy is forcing children to languish in foster care,’ and that’s nonsense,” he said. “It was the lack of family preservation that forced, and forces, children to languish in foster care.” Federal data shows that parental rights terminations consistently outrun adoptions.

This is the world in which Kenneth Clark found himself when his kids were removed from his home.

During his year in prison, Clark tried hard to stay on top of his child custody case. But he quickly ran headlong into the iron walls of both the prison and foster care systems. Once, during the early days of his sentence, the DHS transported him the half mile to family court for a June 2016 hearing, during which his kids were formally made wards of the state. But that, said Clark, was the last of the DHS’s efforts to comply with its obligations.

When asked for comment on its efforts in Clark’s case, the DHS said that it is not allowed to discuss individual foster care cases, but did say that its protocol is make it possible for the incarcerated parent to attend case service meetings and visitations “as they would with all parents…as allowable and available.”

In September 2016, still in jail, Clark received a DHS notice alerting him to a video conference for a hearing regarding alleged maltreatment of his infant son—specifically, regarding the agency’s allegations of neglect and unsanitary living conditions. The hearing was scheduled for October. “I showed it to the officer,” Clark recalled. “They said someone would get me. It never happened.” His failure to appear or request a continuance meant that his name was added to the Arkansas Child Maltreatment Central Registry, a DHS list of people found to be negligent or abusive of minors.

Around the same time, and without warning, Clark was transferred first to a jail in Malvern, then to a facility in Calico Rock, Ark., over 200 miles from Fort Smith. He said he stopped hearing about his children’s status and was not informed about—or transported to—any subsequent custody hearings. During that period, two other, crucial hearings took place, including a permanency planning hearing, during which the judge began the process of deciding Clark’s children’s fate. At that hearing, in March, without Clark present, the court set two conflicting plans for the children: While continuing to work towards reunification, the court set a parallel goal of moving the kids toward adoption.

Two months later, the DHS set that second goal in motion. In May 2017, Clark received notice that the agency had petitioned the court to terminate his parental rights.

At the time, Clark had just been released to a reentry program—a year before his sentence was up, because of good behavior, he said—and he was taking steps to get back on track. But with the arrival of the termination petition, his world flipped upside down. He suddenly became one of hundreds of formerly incarcerated parents across the country struggling with the challenges of reentry while fighting to preserve their parental rights. That petition, if granted, meant that Clark would permanently end the legal parent-child relationship, and his children would be eligible for adoption.

While the ASFA narrowed the scope of “reasonable efforts,” it did not do away with them altogether. According to the Federal Children’s Bureau, child welfare agencies are supposed to provide services that are “accessible, available, and culturally appropriate” in order to help families remedy the conditions that brought their children into the foster care system. Clark, according to his attorney, could reasonably expect the State of Arkansas to send notice of court hearings to the correct address, give him a case plan to complete, provide him assistance to complete the case plan, and assign an attorney to represent his interests. Yet almost none of that happened. “Reasonable efforts,” it turns out, aren’t strictly defined in federal law, giving states the power to determine what they consider reasonable on a case by case basis.

Clark did not receive a DHS case plan to help guide his reunification with his children. (He later learned that the case plan had been sent to his former home address while he was incarcerated.) But even if he had gotten one, the road to completing a case plan while behind bars would have been extremely difficult. Incarcerated parents rarely have access to the reunification services typically required by the courts, such as parenting classes, drug and alcohol abuse treatment, mental health care, or vocational counseling.

Moreover, despite petitioning for visitation while in Calico Rock prison, Clark says he never received a reply. His next attempts, while in a state-mandated reentry program called Quapaw Hidden Creek, were hobbled by a tangle of rules. The six-month program—which is considered to be incarceration, albeit more flexible—was meant to offer people returning from prison a combination of structure and support, a safe place to live, and a chance to focus on their sobriety while also trying to secure a job. Clark had hoped to use this time to sit down with a social worker from the DHS and make a plan for reunification. But without an appointment, the agency didn’t need to make efforts to get him there, and the initial restrictions of the reentry program barred him from leaving the grounds except to go to work and scheduled court appearances.

The DHS did not take these restrictions into account, so the ASFA clock continued to tick. The May 2017 petition to terminate his parental rights noted that Clark’s children had been in foster care for 12 months, reaching Arkansas’s deadline, and the parents hadn’t made significant progress to rectify the problems that had resulted in the children’s removal. Clark was found to have failed to provide reasonable support and maintain regular contact with his children, effectively abandoning them. The petition further argued that Clark had not complied with his DHS case plan—which, of course, he had never received. (The petition also noted that Nicole, the mother of his three kids, had failed to successfully meet her case plane. Clark and Nicole had broken up early in his prison sentence. She moved, her phone was disconnected, and they had not been in touch.)

The petition arrived like a meteor from outer space. Desperate not to lose his kids, Clark says he tried reaching the DHS before the court hearing, in June. Those calls, he says, were never returned. A staffer at Quapaw eventually led him to Dee Ann Newell, founder of Arkansas Voices for the Children Left Behind. Newell, who had witnessed countless terminations of parental rights and knew the system well, took Clark on as a client. “Fathers are the least important in the whole system,” Newell said. “It’s a huge statement on our system and society on whether a father is worthwhile.”

Newell encouraged Clark to work around his restrictions—specifically, the requirement that he not leave Quapaw Hidden Creek—by writing a letter to the DHS. The agency had left Clark, a parent eagerly trying to reunite with his children, relegated to pleading his case on a piece of paper. He asked the DHS to “show mercy.” He explained that “during my incarceration, my hands have been tied somewhat,” but that while in prison he had completed parenting classes, a domestic violence program, a six-week behavior class, and other wellness courses. Now, he wrote, he planned to continue his sobriety, secure a job, and seek opportunities to prove himself as “a father and a productive member of society.” He pleaded for reunification with his children. “I love my children greatly and am in the process of making serious life changes so that I may provide a stable, drug free Christian environment for my children.”

After mailing his letter, Clark continued to follow the exacting steps of his reentry plan. He was required to wear an ankle monitor and submit to biweekly drug screenings, and he wasn’t allowed to have a cell phone. Still, he moved forward. He started a job at De Wafelbakkers, a frozen pancake purveyor, in June, trekking 14 miles to work the night shift in the sanitation department. During the day, he attended substance abuse meetings and GED classes; during the weekend, he went to church. At night, he worked, his earnings automatically placed into a savings account. He paid $98 a week in rent to Quapaw and withdrew $30 every two weeks for living expenses. The rest he saved to prepare for his release.

On June 28, 2017, Clark was scheduled for the hearing that would determine whether he would lose his parental rights. Clark had not been assigned any legal representation for an entire year, even though he had a right to an attorney at each stage of the proceedings. So when he arrived in court for his hearing he asked for a public defender, which he was granted. The court rescheduled Clark’s hearing, ordering him to return in 16 days—a notably short amount of time to prepare for getting his children back. At the same time, the court terminated Nicole’s parental rights.

When Clark returned to court, it was evident that the brief time his lawyer, DeeAnna Weimar, had been granted to prepare would shape his hearing. She had failed to get various essential documents like pay stubs, proof of clean drug screenings, certificates of completion of various classes, letters of support, and a list of restrictions imposed by his reentry program that had prevented him from completing portions of his case plan—anything that would have bolstered his chances of reunification. Nonetheless, Weimar pulled together what evidence she did have to argue that Clark should be reunited with his children. (Through an assistant, Weimar declined to comment for this article.)

At the heart of Weimar’s argument was the claim that the DHS had failed to do its part to make “reasonable efforts” to reunite Clark with his children, as required by federal law. Clark could reasonably expect the State of Arkansas to send notice of court hearings to the correct address; to give Clark a case plan to complete; to provide him assistance to complete the case plan; and to assign him an attorney—but almost none of that happened. Weimar asked the court not to terminate his rights and instead offer the services that should have been offered before.

The DHS representatives who were on hand for the trial appeared unmoved by these arguments. They countered that Clark had abandoned his children and called for his parental rights to be terminated. A DHS caseworker, Chelsea West, testified that she had offered Clark services—but then admitted that she had never contacted him while he was in prison, or at Quapaw, to offer services. She also claimed she hadn’t known where Clark was, though the DHS had obtained the sentencing order; the agency thus knew exactly where he had been sent.

As for the DHS lawyer, Katharine Hughes, she largely doubled down on these arguments; she ignored the DHS’s responsibility to put forth reasonable efforts to reunite the family and instead insisted that Clark should have found a way to get in touch with his children, that his incarceration constituted abandonment.

“Whose fault is it that you were incarcerated for that time?” Hughes asked.

Clark took responsibility, saying, “It was mine.”

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Then Clark tried his best to make his case. “I think it would be in the best interest of my children to live with me,” Clark pleaded. “I’m ashamed and I’m embarrassed for what I took my kids through. And the man I am today, I’m not that man that I was a year ago.” He noted that the department had consistently clean drug tests for him that they failed to introduce and stressed that he had persisted in seeking custody despite DHS’s failure to offer him help.

The question of time, the issue at the core of the ASFA, hovered over the proceedings. “How long do your children need to wait before they get to have permanency?” Hughes asked Clark. He explained that he would be released from Quapaw in two months, and that by then he would have things in order for his children. But Hughes remained unmoved. “So, the kids should at least wait until September, and then however long it should take you to get everything set up, get your house set up, get everything ready for the kids?” By this point Clark and his children had been separated for close to 15 months, and it didn’t strike Clark that two more months was unreasonable given the DHS’s admission that it had failed to hold up its side of the plan.

Aubrey Barr, the court-appointed attorney who represented his children, shifted to a line of questioning about his financial status that child welfare advocates describe as common. She wanted to know how much he earned on his job, and he answered $10.25 an hour, at the time nearly $2 an hour above the state minimum wage. Barr recommended that Clark’s rights be terminated, and then, as a final twist of the knife, asked the judge not to allow a final visit.

That judge, Annie Powell Hendricks, applauded Clark for his strides—and then told him that his children deserved permanency and it was in their best interest to terminate his parental rights. “I think your children are adoptable. They’re young and happy children with no physical or medical conditions, who are in pre-adoptive homes,” she said. (The judge was wrong. At the time, Clark’s son Kendrick, then 6, had been reported by the DHS to have behavioral problems and was in therapeutic foster care; a boy in his situation—a Black child, who isn’t an infant, with reported behavioral issues—will almost certainly have more trouble finding a permanent home.)

Hendricks argued that the issues that put the kids in state care hadn’t been remedied. She argued that there was no proof Clark could provide appropriate housing for the kids; no proof that he had completed drug and alcohol treatment in prison or had mitigated the risk of harm from an unrelated domestic violence complaint back in 2014. It was as if Clark’s testimony and paperwork for the prison drug treatment program, the domestic violence program, and the job at De Wafelbakkers didn’t exist. That Clark was due to be released from the reentry program soon and was well positioned to have housing and transportation in place did not appear to carry any weight at all. The ASFA alarm had rung.

“The Court is going to find abandonment, because it has been fifteen months,” the judge ruled. She briskly denied Clark a final visit.

During the hearing, Clark’s lawyer had tried to argue that Arkansas’s Act 993, a new law that clarified the role of child welfare for children of incarcerated parents, articulated the “reasonable efforts” language in a way that exposed the DHS as negligent in Clark’s case. The law says: “The Department of Human Services shall: Involve an incarcerated parent in case planning; Monitor compliance with services offered by the Department of Correction to the extent permitted by federal law; Offer visitation in accordance with the policies of the Department of Correction if visitation is appropriate and in the best interest of the child.” The law was passed on April 7, 2017, three months earlier. Unfortunately for Clark, it had yet to go into effect.

“I’ve been getting punched, kicked, and knocked down, slapped down,” Clark told me a few months later. “I’ve still been getting up. It take everything in me not to know nothing about my kids. I interacted with my kids every day and then one day they was gone.”

Clark asked his lawyer to appeal and used the time to continue building a life that would be conducive to raising his children. He faced challenges that most people with prison records face when looking for housing, as many landlords will not rent to someone with a criminal record. Again, help came from outside the DHS. A fellow parishioner at his church connected him to a landlord renting a three-bedroom house on the West Side of Little Rock, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood. The aging white house had a sprawling backyard for his kids, and the tree-lined streets were quiet, aside from the roosters that perched on Clark’s new porch in the morning. The rent was set at $750 a month, but the landlord knocked off $100 in return for Clark’s making improvements to the house. Clark gave the landlord $1,400, moved in his things, and bought a truck.

He worked at night, attended substance abuse meetings by day, and dreamed about the moment he would see his kids again. He spent more time with Kira and Kenai, his two children with B.J., and their bond intensified. Still there were days when he felt unbearable sadness, especially around the holidays. “It’s hard because at the end of the day, when I go home, I go home to nobody,” Clark said.”

In the years since the ASFA was passed, the number of young people adopted from foster care has steadily increased: up from roughly 37,000 in 1998 to nearly 60,000 in 2017, according to federal data. At the same time, the average stay in foster care dropped from nearly 33 months to just over 20 months. For Clinton, it has remained an achievement that gives her great satisfaction, one she highlighted in a 2016 presidential debate: “Hundreds of thousands of kids now have a chance to be adopted because I worked to change our adoption and foster care system,” she said.

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Those numbers didn’t shoot up just because the law changed, however. For one thing, the numbers of adoptions had begun climbing even before Congress passed the ASFA. Moreover, Congress provided federal funds to states that increased adoptions by offering incentive payments. States receive $4,000 for each adoption that exceeds the previous year’s number. Older children and those with special needs garner a bonus of $6,000. There is no penalty if the adoption falls apart; the state can keep the money and collect another fee if it completes another adoption for the same child.

Daniel L. Hatcher, a professor at the University of Baltimore’s School of Law, questions whether such payments have distorted public policy. “The concern is incentivizing states to rush towards terminating parental rights regardless of whether they actually have a long-term home already lined up for the child,” Hatcher said. “It’s the race for the money, and it’s a race for showing numbers rather than actually doing what’s best for the children.” Providing services to children in foster care is expensive for states, so the bonuses only increase incentives for a state to move children out of their custody, rather than support birth parents over time in order to reunify a family. “States like to get them out of the system as soon as possible.”

Still, parents and some advocates are hopeful that change might be on the horizon. A February 2018 congressional spending bill included reforms that may provide a bit of relief from these pressures, redirecting some federal funds to help keep children with their families of origin through such preventive measures as mental health care and addiction treatment for parents.

Meanwhile, the ASFA can be amended at the state level. Formerly incarcerated parents who lost their children because of the ASFA have won reforms in a handful of states. New York, California, Colorado, Washington, and Illinois have all passed bills over the last decade giving foster care agencies more flexibility when it comes to filing orders terminating the parental rights of incarcerated parents. Nebraska, Oklahoma, and New Mexico have passed legislation explicitly including exceptions to termination for parents who are incarcerated.

Still, families in states without exceptions remain especially vulnerable to separations.

In May 2018, Clark learned that he had lost his appeal. “I felt empty, lost, confused,” he told me. He blamed himself for losing his kids, for not understanding that they could be permanently taken from him. “That’s what’s beating me to death.”

In Clark’s appeal filing, his lawyer, Tabitha McNulty, had argued that the evidence was insufficient to support termination. She wrote that the state had failed to make reasonable efforts to offer Clark required services or even to communicate with him about his case, and that Clark had been deprived of due process. To prove abandonment, she argued, the state would need to show intent, illustrated by more than simply a lack of visits between Clark and his children—and the DHS had failed to do so.

“The reality of this case,” she wrote in her appeal letter, “is that DHS treated Kenneth as it often treats incarcerated parents—DHS completely ignored him.” (McNulty wasn’t permitted to respond to questions from The Nation, but wrote in an e-mail exchange, “I’ll never forget this case.”)

The DHS’s attorney, Keith L. Chrestman, countered that the agency had provided Clark with services, communication, and guidance at the start, and had continued to communicate with him after the children entered foster care by providing him notice of hearings and arranging transportation. It was only when he was moved to a different prison that the effort stopped. “To transport him roundtrip from his place of incarceration (Calico Rock) to circuit court (Fort Smith) is nearly 450 miles,” Chrestman argued. “Given his incarceration, neither reunification with Clark nor DHS-provided services for him was a practical possibility.” It was, inadvertently, a devastating critique of the inappropriateness of the ASFA’s rules for incarcerated parents.

In the wake of losing his appeal, Clark’s life began to unravel. He lost his job, then his home. He began sleeping in his truck, until it was towed. He pawned appliances and donated blood for cash. Eventually, Clark fell back on his old ways, thinking he could earn a few bucks to get back on his feet. “All the setbacks—setback, setback, no visitation, no communication—caused me to act,” he recalled. “I was homeless, with nowhere to go, out on the street.”

Clark doesn’t condone his actions, but says he tried everything he knew how to do. Soon he was rearrested on minor drug possession charges. When he got out on bail, his parole officer ordered him to live in a shelter in Fort Smith, the city of the offense, 160 miles from where he had been living. It didn’t matter that he didn’t have any support system there or a place to live. The biggest problem: He still needed to report to Little Rock for court appearances, an expensive and long commute that he had to pay for himself. He scraped together the money the first time, but didn’t make it to subsequent hearings. It was that failure to reappear that landed him in jail in May, after intervening to help his friend.

Once the state terminates a parent’s rights, they’re no longer able to visit or speak with their children, or even learn where their children end up. Clark’s kids might have been placed together in a stable, permanent adoptive home. They might have been permanently separated. Or they may be languishing in a group home. Newell, the advocate who’s worked with Clark throughout his case, says children are rarely adopted, especially if they’re children of color or older, or face challenges like Clark’s son Kendrick, now 9. Given the current law, the only way Clark will ever see his children again is if they choose to seek him out when they turn 18. But that’s half a lifetime away.

Before his most recent arrest for absconding, Clark had spent nearly every day of the preceding six months with his daughters Kira and Kenae. Whether he was peering over their shoulders as they played on the iPhone he purchased, helping one prepare for her basketball game, or picking them up from school, he wrapped them tight with his love. He’d had plenty of time to think about how substance abuse had been the catalyst that led to some of his greatest hardships and the single most painful loss of his life—three of his children. “I ain’t got nothing out of the drugs,” he said mournfully one day. “It made me feel good, you know, for the little relief part, but then the next morning the situation still there.” The part of his life that he could work to control was staying sober, even if he didn’t have support from our nation’s most vital institutions. He would try on his own. His life was slowly getting back on track and he felt more prepared than ever to be a dad to his three children, the ones he may never see again. “I do know this: I can take care of them. I can. I know I can.”

None of that seems to be possible for Clark now. Kira and Kenae cried when they spoke to him via phone after his arrest. “They’re upset ’cause Dad’s not around…and they can’t see Dad,” B.J. said. But he speaks to his children as often as possible, at a cost of $6 for a 20-minute call, and his daughters are hoping he makes it home to start over again soon.

Clark has now served 60 of the 90-day sentence he received for his failure to appear in court. But once he serves that time, his stint in prison may not be over. While he is eligible to bail out and fight his drug-possession case from home with his family, coming up with the $1,080 to post bail is unlikely.

“They know that they’ll see Dad again,” B.J. said of her two daughters with Clark. But then she paused. “Hopefully… If he doesn’t catch this virus when he’s incarcerated. That’s my main concern.”

The post How a Trip to Prison Cost Kenneth Clark His Right to Be a Parent appeared first on Type Investigations.

Reflections on Rage and Reform

Sylvia A. Harvey — Fri, 12 Jun 2020 17:58:01 +0000

“A riot is the language of the unheard.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

I was stunned into hand-over-mouth silence as I sat on my couch watching the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I avoided watching the video for two days. As a journalist reporting on criminal justice, I'd seen enough grotesque disregard for Black life on video. Sometimes I watch and share videos of police violence and sometimes I refrain, afraid of becoming a voyeur of Black death, worried I'll traumatize the already emotionally burdened people on my timeline. Mostly, I think of slain 14-year-old Emmett Till and his mother’s choice of an open casket. I think of how the country needs to see its own inhumanity.

Derek Chauvin, the former officer that killed George Floyd, casually rested his hand in his pocket as he pressed his knee into George Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes as Floyd managed to say “I can’t breathe.” I needed to see that video even if it would summon a rage I wasn’t sure I could quell, the same rage that has exploded all over the world in protests against police brutality and systemic racism toward Black people.

In a group chat during the first days of the demonstrations, my white European friend bemoaned the idea of protests that involved destruction of property or forms of theft, arguing that “ransacking stores doesn’t lead anywhere, it’s useless rage that actually backfires.” This is a friend I love and respect and yet neither she nor any white person should tell a Black person how we should express or contain our rage. After explaining how America’s history of white supremacy and structural inequality has disenfranchised Black people, I sent her an image. It was a photo of one of the burning buildings in Minneapolis. I said, “Imagine that fire inside your body and no ocean to jump in, just a single bottle of water to cool off.” That is what justice has looked like for Black people, a splash every now and then meant to reduce the raging fire to an ember.

Now, two weeks later, protests are still going strong, and what she called “useless rage” has led to palpable reforms. The officers responsible for George Floyd’s murder were arrested and charged. The Los Angeles mayor announced plans to slash the LAPD budget by as much as $150 million, and the Minneapolis City Council announced it will disband the city’s police department. In Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser renamed the street outside the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” Breonna’s Law, a total ban on no-knock warrants, was passed in Louisville, Kentucky. Confederate monuments, symbols of white supremacy, are being removed. And the music and publishing industries are being called out and challenged to start undoing the historical inequities that continue to disenfranchise Black people. These demonstrations, far from useless, have served as a catalyst for important change.

In some ways, this moment was inevitable. Black people have survived centuries of oppression and fought for freedom, justice, and equality. Yet we remain under siege. Racist exclusionary practices have perpetuated poverty and economic insecurity for decades, and Black people are consistently policed and devalued by many of the country’s most important social institutions: the criminal justice system, the child welfare system, the healthcare system, and the education system. Each institution operates in a way that disproportionately and negatively impacts Black communities.

Why are Black people sicker? Why do we die earlier? We’re often relegated to resource-depleted, racially segregated communities where landfills and factories pollute the water and air. And then, if insured, we experience racial disparities in health care. In our schools, which are consistently underfunded and under-resourced, racial bias leads to disproportionate suspension as early as preschool, and the expulsion of Black students, perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline. Black children are significantly overrepresented in the foster care system because poverty is often mislabeled as abuse and neglect, which can lead to permanent termination of parental rights. Black boys as young as 10 are perceived by police officers as older and less innocent than their white counterparts, and are more likely to face police violence if accused of a crime. If Black people are arrested, they are far more likely to be charged and, if convicted, they receive harsher sentences. Today, they are locked up at nearly six times the rate of whites.

Imagine that compounded systemic racism slowly sucking the life and prosperity from an entire racial demographic, then add daily racialized violence. Attacks on Blackness are dangerous and consistent, a recent example is Amy Cooper, but there were a slew of white women before her – Pool Patrol Paula, BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Golf Cart Gail – casually calling the police on Black people knowing their encounter with law enforcement could be deadly. Then there is the action and inaction of local governments: people left to die in prisons during a lethal pandemic, Black men hunted and killed by white men wearing the hood of vigilantism, unarmed Black people killed by police.

Decades of oppressive conditions, structural and racial inequality, and blatant disregard for Black life has reached a height that will no longer be tolerated. So what needs to happen? Everyone in a position of power and privilege – especially white people – must evaluate how they benefit from a racist society, even if they’re not outwardly racist. They must examine the ways they are complicit in the plight and death of Black people. You are complicit if you are silent, if you look away, if you fail to educate yourself about why Black life isn’t valued in this country. You are complicit if you are more worried about the businesses being burned down when Black lives are torched on a regular basis. You are complicit if you are a business that benefits from Black consumers and employees but will not use your platform to speak out against injustice. You are complicit if you don’t try to connect the immediate causes of the protest to the systemic ones. You are complicit if you have not questioned why a protest against police brutality is met with rubber bullets, tear gas, more brutality and death, police SUVs running over people like trash, the insertion of the National Guard, curfews, and more surveillance.

What can you do? Listen to those directly impacted. Read so that you’re informed on the history of race, white supremacy and anti-Blackness in this country. Examine your own bias and privilege. Learn what it means to be an anti-racist. If you want to be an active ally, consider advocating for political change. We must unseat prosecutors that fill jails and prisons and increase the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, replacing them with those who will use their power wisely and fairly. We need to end broken windows policing that leads to over-policing and surveillance in poor and minority neighborhoods, and end cash bail that perpetuates poverty and incarceration. We must divest funds from bloated police department budgets and invest in social programs and adequate funding for housing, schools, and health services.

Remember that for lasting change, we need sustained action by the collective. Remember that if there is no justice, there is no peace.

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I Moved Into a Domestic Violence Shelter and Haven’t Seen My Son In Weeks

Sylvia A. Harvey — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 13:19:12 +0000

Life in the Time of Coronavirus is a GEN series where we are interviewing people across the country who have had their lives upended or are experiencing the stress of the unknown.

Nathalie K. is a 32-year-old mother living in a domestic violence shelter in Benton, Arkansas. Her four-month-old son is in foster care, pending an administrative hearing, but the coronavirus outbreak has meant that she hasn’t been able to see him in person.

My son was born in November. His huge dimples and blue eyes greeted the world just after 4:00 in the morning. I was in an abusive relationship at the time with a partner who sold and used drugs, but once I learned I was pregnant, I quit using cold turkey. I’d hoped I could get my partner to join me on my new path, but he didn’t quit, and things didn’t get better. When I went into labor, he didn’t even take me to the hospital; I managed to get there on my own. After the baby was born, he showed up at the hospital, and I felt obliged to go home with him. I should have asked one of the nurses for help, for a way to move forward without him. But I didn’t.

The abuse against me led to my son being placed in foster care. Once that happened, I knew I needed to get away from my toxic relationship. A woman I’d become friendly with helped me find a domestic violence shelter—a place that would support my sobriety and, hopefully, help me get my son back.

I’m supposed to have four-hour visits with my son each week. I hated sitting in the disgusting visiting room at the Department of Human Services. It was small, with one window. Food littered the floor, and it reeked of something awful. Still, I’d sit there holding my baby the entire four hours. But then the coronavirus arrived, and everything changed.

I was supposed to have an adjudication hearing on March 17 to determine whether my son would remain in foster care or if he would be returned to me. It was originally scheduled for February 18 but got delayed. Now, because of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s been pushed back another month, to April 21. According to DHS, parents are normally supposed to have the adjudication hearing within 60 days of removal. So far, I have lost two months of being in my newborn’s life because of this.

As if that weren’t bad enough, my caseworker informed me that my in-person visits have been cut. Instead of the four hours per week I used to be able to spend with my baby, I now have to make do with 30-minute to one-hour video chats over FaceTime or Skype. I suspect it’s because my son’s foster mom doesn’t want to bring him down to the DHS office for visitation because of coronavirus fears, but a video chat doesn’t allow for substantial bonding.

I have asked numerous times for my baby to be put into my care at the domestic violence shelter here in Benton, which has put various health and safety protocols in place to safeguard against the coronavirus. But instead of being with me, he’s being fostered by a woman who, albeit nice, leaves him in daycare while she’s at work. They are taking precautions at the daycare; car seats and the children’s personal items aren’t allowed inside. The parent has to walk the baby in, and then the baby is wiped down and given to a daycare worker. Later, when the baby is picked up, the daycare worker brings the child outside to the parent. But it still feels like a health risk to me.

I feel like these impersonal video visits are making me lose my connection to my son. His foster mom can’t make him look at the phone. He’s a baby; FaceTime is no better than watching a video of him. I need more. It’s the worst feeling, not being able to hold him. When we had in-person visits, he got excited at my presence; he knew who I was. I don’t want to become a stranger to my own baby.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The post I Moved Into a Domestic Violence Shelter and Haven’t Seen My Son In Weeks appeared first on Type Investigations.

Stepping Up

Sylvia A. Harvey — Thu, 13 Dec 2018 23:25:45 +0000

A clean dusting of snow coats the hoods of cars parked along Philadelphia’s West Norris Street. The trees are mostly bare, withered leaves buried in the corners of benches. This winter morning, the massive rust-brick complex, a low-rise housing development known as the James W. Johnson Homes, is serene. The complex, which stretches for blocks, comprises 522 apartments spread across fifty-nine buildings. The front doors form a confetti of colors—vivid yellow or faded blue, forest green or desert brown.

Shirley Johnson, seventy-eight, emerges from behind a crimson door, closing it and the steel security gate behind her.* Her white puffer coat is zipped up against the cold. The platform lift is broken again, so she inches down the stoop, gripping the iron handrail with both hands, until she is standing in front of her apartment, leaning on her walker. She appears even smaller than her true five feet. In a few minutes, the free shuttle arrives, and she’s off to the senior center.

Key Findings

An estimated 2.7 million children in the United States have a parent behind bars.
42% of mothers in state prisons, some 50,000 in 2004, identify their child’s grandmother as the current caregiver.
Grandparents face two primary paths in caring for these grandchildren: legal guardianship or foster parenting.
Legal guardianship allows the incarcerated parent to retain parental rights, but offers zero financial or social supports.
Foster parent status provides grandparents with a substantial stipend and access to day care, after school programs, and more.
But to gain foster care status, a grandparent must first abandon the child to the child welfare system, and risk losing custody entirely.
Grandparents who become foster parents are ultimately asked to adopt, making the parent a legal stranger to the child.

When she arrives, she settles in at a table with two of her sisters and several friends. Johnson sips her coffee and carefully pulls apart a cheese Danish; she’ll spend the day exercising, having lunch, and talking smack about who’s going to get a “head rub” or lose one of many intense games of pinochle. For a decade or so, this tribe and these meals have been her respite. She returns the favor by volunteering to call bingo on Wednesday nights.

On most evenings, Johnson makes it home by five to find her teenage granddaughter, Kayla Davis, watching TV or texting. Johnson will settle down on the couch, ask Kayla about school, though the girl will usually brush those questions aside to ask about the senior center, if Johnson made a new painting or sculpture, or if she happened to bring home a sampling of that night’s dinner. Sometimes it’s baked fish, sometimes chicken cheesesteak or shrimp fried rice. “I don’t do all that cooking no more,” Johnson says. “If she wants to eat, she cooks.” Kayla can hold her own now in the kitchen, having served as her grandmother’s sous-chef for years. She was only ten when she learned how to fry chicken without getting splattered by the oil, as Johnson, fighting arthritis, directed her from a chair. She now has her own rhythm in the kitchen.

On this winter night, Kayla sits in the kitchen dicing blocks of cheddar for macaroni and cheese. With each ingredient—milk, butter, eggs, seasoning—Kayla calls out to her grandmother for the exact measurements. Finally, she whips the mixture until it braids together. “I have to do it like you do it, Mommy, or else it ain’t gonna taste right,” Kayla says.

Johnson is Kayla’s paternal grandmother, but she’s been a live-in parent to Kayla since she was an infant. Johnson’s son, Trevor, was serving a three-year prison sentence when Kayla was born; her mother, Ebony, was, according to Johnson, battling drug addiction and cycling in and out of jail. After a few years of raising Kayla informally, a judge granted Johnson permanent custody, at which point Kayla joined her sister, Shantelle, who, as a grade-schooler, had already been living with Johnson for several years. Over the years, Johnson has cared for four of her son’s children for various stretches of time. Shantelle and Kayla are the last of the grandchildren living with her.

“My children, my mother’s children, my sister’s children, my children’s children. All my life I’ve been watching children.”

Johnson is one of thousands of grandmothers across the country raising a second generation of children while their parents sit behind bars, an unintended consequence of decades of mass incarceration. As of 2010—the most recent data available—an estimated 2.7 million children in the United States had an incarcerated parent. Studies show that when fathers are incarcerated, their children generally live with their mother, but when mothers are incarcerated, their children mainly live with grandparents and other relatives, with an emphasis on grandmothers. According to a 2018 report, for every child in foster care with relatives, there are nineteen being raised by grandparents or other extended family, informally, outsidethe foster-care system.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 42 percent of all mothers in state prisons—some 50,000 of them in 2004—identify their child’s grandmother as the current caregiver. Incarcerated women now comprise a larger proportion of the prison population than ever before, showing a more than 700 percent increase, from 26,000 to 215,000, between 1980 and 2016. In 2016, almost two-thirds of women incarcerated in state prisons were in for nonviolent offenses, many of them drug-related crimes. Sixty-two percent of women in prison, and nearly 80 percent of women in jail, are mothers. As the number of incarcerated mothers climbs, a vast burden has settled on the shoulders of women like Johnson.

These grandmothers form the fragile nucleus of families torn apart by incarceration. Some take on the role of foster parents, a path that comes with significant financial and social support but requires families to first surrender custody of the child to the state. (Later, as the state seeks a permanent home for the child, it will usually ask the grandparent to adopt, which involves the wrenching decision to permanently sever parental rights, making the mother a legal stranger to her own child.) The rest, grandmothers like Johnson, take care of children as legal guardians, which preserves the mother’s parental rights but leaves thousands of grandmothers in a precarious position, raising young children as they themselves are aging, without any financial or institutional support.

“My children, my mother’s children, my sister’s children, my children’s children,” says Johnson. “All my life I’ve been watching children.”

When Johnson tells the story of Ebony’s battle with addiction and incarceration, she speaks frankly. She describes Ebony as being doting and affectionate with her daughter, but prone to disappearing for weeks or even months at a time. Sometimes, Johnson, says, these disappearances would be followed by collect calls from the county jail. On at least one occasion, Johnson says, she found herself having to scrape together bail. Sometimes, Ebony would appear at Johnson’s home to see Kayla and would eventually take her to see other relatives who lived nearby. Sometimes they would return, but on many occasions, Ebony would leave Kayla at someone else’s home, usually in the neighborhood. Johnson says it would have worried her more had they all not already known where Kayla actually lived.

Johnson says that the real impetus to seek custody came one day when she left Kayla with Ebony so she could run an errand. While Johnson was out, Ebony took Kayla to visit her maternal grandmother. Night came, without word. Johnson began calling around, only to discover that Ebony had disappeared again, leaving Kayla in the care of her sister. Not long after that, Johnson went to court to petition for custody. Kayla was two.

Ebony’s struggle with addiction and sex work stretched across the next decade. “She was gone almost a whole year one time,” Johnson recalls. “Came out, did good a month. Right back in the same stuff. She don’t get locked up for stealing, robbery, or nothing. On the corner. She stays on the corner.” Once, Johnson suggested to Ebony that she switch corners, away from officers who recognized her—a form of harm reduction, in Johnson’s mind, since a new spot might mean fewer arrests, and perhaps a little more time with Kayla.

Over the years, Ebony’s addiction slowly closed its grip on family life in all too familiar ways. Johnson was often worried. “I was always thinking that somebody would catch up with her,” she says, “that they would kill her or harm her or something.” Whenever she returned from a stint in jail, Ebony would come to see Kayla, upbeat and visibly healthy, sharing a meal with her daughter, vowing to stay clean, and only later would it become clear that she was using again. She’d be skinnier, jumpy, slurring. Johnson remembers a few visits that ended with Ebony slipping out with a trench coat, or a bedspread sewn by the church mothers, or a box of food.

Once, when Kayla was an infant, Johnson took her to visit her mother in jail. She wanted to keep them connected but found the initial visit too invasive and never returned. After that, letter writing became Ebony’s primary love language. Over the years, Kayla would come to expect mail from the county jails as a sign of her mother’s safety. There, Kayla thought, her mother was clean.

“My children, my mother’s children, my sister’s children, my children’s children. All my life I’ve been watching children.”

In the days before Johnson knew her parenting arrangement would be permanent, she enrolled Kayla in preschool without any trouble. But she quickly realized she’d need some legal standing in order to do much more. She filed for custody of Kayla, an arrangement that allowed Ebony and Johnson’s only son, Trevor, to maintain their parental rights and visitation privileges. In becoming Kayla’s legal guardian, Johnson took on full responsibility for Kayla’s care but lost any possibility of support from Philadelphia’s Department of Human Services (DHS). Instead, she and her granddaughters would survive on her Social Security benefits, with modest state assistance for Kayla—roughly $200 a month sent via Pennsylvania’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF). “Welfare, that’s it,” says Johnson. “You just got welfare.”

Later, Kayla began receiving Social Security disability benefits through her father—roughly $535 a month. Shantelle, meanwhile, was waitressing and reporting her tips as income. These contributions to the family income were a great help, but they also led to a 55 percent cut in Johnson’s food stamps, as well as a 64 percent increase in rent, to $420 a month. Today, their combined household income is around $1,600 a month, which still places them under the federal poverty guidelines level of $20,780 for a family of three.

Johnson could have alleviated some of this financial pressure by applying to become what’s known as a “kinship caregiver” through Pennsylvania’s child-welfare system, a status that triggers a stipend to help cover the cost of raising the child. Kinship caregivers, however, run significant risks through their loss of autonomy, since they are essentially contracted by the state to provide the child a temporary home until DHS can find permanent placement for the child. Alternatively, they can petition to become legal guardians through family court without child-welfare involvement, or simply continue parenting without any formal legal status.

As legal guardians, caregivers gain legal standing, with full decision-making power on behalf of the child they care for. They can seek medical care, enroll the child in school, even register for benefits if the child is eligible. They maintain control over day-to-day parenting decisions that would otherwise be forfeited in the child-welfare system. Prior to the recent enactment of Act 75, in 2015, which gave foster parents more parental control, kinship caregivers had to seek DHS approval for everyday activities such as permissions for field trips, sleepovers, or joining a sports team.

Had Johnson pursued the path of becoming a kinship caregiver, she not only would have received a foster-care maintenance stipend, but also access to a whole range of support for Kayla, from subsidized day care to after-school programs to summer camp. As a high school student, Kayla would have had access to the agency’s discretionary funds to cover the costs of class trips, school photos, even a prom dress.

Johnson says she was never informed that being a kinship caregiver was an option. But even if she had known about it, she would have had to take a considerable risk to qualify. In order to become a formal kinship caregiver, a candidate must first surrender custody of the child they care for to the state. While this does not necessarily affect any living arrangement, it does lead to temporarily surrendering all decision-making power over the child to the state, taking a gamble that a judge will allow her to keep the child once the probationary period is complete.

It isn’t just a matter of waiting out the process, but qualifying under tight scrutiny in order to become what is called a “resource parent”—a foster parent or kinship caregiver. For the safety of the child, to be certified as a kinship caregiver in Philadelphia, applicants must pass a medical exam, get child-abuse and criminal-history clearances, and participate in training programs and parent preparation. Then, a DHS social worker conducts a full inspection of the home, known as a “home study,” describing the family’s strengths and noting any problems, including potential safety hazards. DHS then follows up by interviewing references outside the family. If a prospective parent is approved, a social worker is assigned to the family and begins a series of visits at least once a month. (For younger children, the visits are usually weekly.) These visits, in turn, are supplemented by review hearings before a judge every three months.

Many caregivers told me they consider these requirements intimidating, invasive, and constrictive, limiting the way they raise their kin. They describe the visits as feeling more like surveillance. With a few perceived wrong turns, a child can be removed. Advocates say the prospect of losing custody is grandparents’ biggest fear. Counselors with the Family Advocacy Unit at Community Legal Services (CLS), which represents parents involved with DHS, have watched relatives come forward to take in a child only to have DHS reject them as kinship caregivers and send the child to foster care.

“I can think of cases in which the issue was the number of bedrooms, and where the issue was the criminal record of individuals living in the home—even when the offense was not a prohibited offense,” says Maggie Potter, a social worker at CLS. “There have also been more nebulous, discretionary-type cases where the worker had concerns that the relative was going to let the parent visit when they weren’t allowed to, or that the caregiver had some type of mental-health issues.” Potter says kinship is, however, considered a best practice and the least restrictive setting in general. Once children are placed with a family member in kinship, the court will not want the child’s placement to be disrupted.

For decades, structural inequality has exacerbated racial disparities in the child-welfare system. According to the Disparities & Disproportionality in Child Welfare report, children of color are moved between various foster homes more often than white children, are placed in group homes more often, are less likely to find permanent placement, and are less likely to be reunited with family. These facts exasperate already-anxious communities that have substantial anecdotal evidence of children being ripped from homes in their neighborhoods.

Philadelphia’s DHS has taken steps to allay the community’s longstanding fears of losing their kin to the system through an initiative that consolidates case management with providers in the child’s own neighborhood and keeps more children in permanent homes with family members. Deborah Croston of Turning Points, a community agency that partners with DHS, says the system has made an about-face in the last few years by formally supporting the idea that children in foster care need to be with family. “We do things for kinship in order to keep the family together,” she says. This includes a budget and the flexibility to purchase a bed or a fridge or any other necessities to get a home up and running. The numbers suggest that these interventions might be helping families stay together: Between 2013 and 2017, use of kinship care in Philadelphia rose by 12 percent.

“If you would share the rights for that little bit of time, that couple of years, you could lock yourself into support for the duration of raising the child,” Croston tells grandparents and other relatives seeking to become resource parents. “The difference between formal and informal is that you have those people that you know that you can call. Yes, it feels invasive in the beginning, but if you get to a point where you feel like a team, it does provide you lots and lots of support.”

At the federal level, reforms included in a February 2018 spending bill, and originally scheduled to go into effect in October 2018, redirect federal funds to keep children out of foster care and in their homes, thus allowing foster agencies to spend money much earlier in the process on such preventive measures as mental-health care and addiction treatment.

Even at its best, with all these supports in place, the partnership between parents and the child-welfare system is not an equal one. “Essentially, I just see the judges having a lot of power,” says Potter. “The power to make decisions about where the child lives, with whom. And what’s in the child’s best interest is in the hands of the judge and the court, instead of in the caregiver’s hands.” With legal custody, Potter says, “you don’t get that financial assistance,” but at least “you have the decision-making authority.”

Kayla is demure until she’s not. We’re tucked away in a booth at Old Country Buffet, where the air is thick with the scents of cinnamon and fried chicken. She talks about life with her grandmother while slowly pushing her salad around her plate. “It’s never boring with my grandma,” she says, smiling. “Ever,” she follows up, in case I’m not convinced. “It’s just always fun, it’s always something to look forward to every time you wake up.”

Every morning, around 5 a.m., Johnson calls out Kayla’s name, sometimes ten times before her granddaughter actually moves. If that doesn’t work, Kayla feels the gentle poke of a cane; Johnson only has to reach across the bed—Kayla long ago abandoned her own twin bed in the room to crawl in bed with her grandmother every night.

Shantelle, now twenty-four, insists on having her own bedroom, which means Johnson and Kayla must share theirs. The Housing Authority won’t grant the family a three-bedroom unit, since regulations stipulate that children of the same gender must be at least ten years apart to warrant separate rooms, and the two sisters are separated by only seven. So the women make do. Johnson spends most of her evenings downstairs—watching a Western, or digging in a bag of crafts, lining up the beads, placing them on a stretch string one by one, making earrings, necklaces, and bracelets—while Kayla tucks away in their bedroom, seeking privacy, talking on her cell phone with friends. “This little crowded cubby hole,” Johnson says. “We don’t have nowhere to put nothing.”

Prior to what Johnson calls “this matchbox,” the family spent thirty-six years in a four-bedroom house as part of a scattered-site housing program comprising individual units dotting several city blocks. She recalls suddenly being forced to move. “They lied,” she says with a hearty laugh. “They told us that the building might cave in at any time.” Sure, a few bricks were loose under the window, but she thought it was an easy repair. “You know why they wanted me out?” she asks, leaning in as if to tell me a secret. “Because it was too much room for me and two kids that was all left there.”

If Johnson hadn’t immediately agreed to take the two-bedroom she’s in now, she says she would have had to relocate with Shantelle and Kayla to a shelter until her name was called from a housing waiting list. She was sixty-eight at the time, which made her eligible for both eldercare living facilities and senior homes, but neither facility accepted children, a nonnegotiable restriction.

Their apartment is small, but they’re all together—the one thing Johnson can control. She remembers the time that control was shaken. When Kayla was about eleven years old, a DHS investigator knocked on their door. Someone had called the child-abuse hotline, triggering an investigation of Johnson for neglect. Standing in her doorway, she went numb. He wanted to check that her home was clean and had hot running water. “I took him upstairs, showed him the bedroom, showed him the bathroom and the water,” she recalls. The most devastating part for Johnson was when she learned that, earlier that day, the DHS investigator had pulled Kayla out of her sixth-grade classroom in order to question her. Nothing came of the accusations, but the experience was enough for Johnson to be glad she never got Kayla involved with the foster-care system, regardless of the financial support she’d had to forgo. It was hard for Johnson to shake the feeling that Kayla could have been taken from her that day. As a result, “I have no dealings with DHS.”

“A lot of us are low income and we can’t afford to take in the kids, paying rent, paying for school uniforms, paying for food, different things like that.”

Many grandparents raising the children of incarcerated parents are low income, and their homes may not fit DHS’s middle-class standards. Potter, who has been helping parents navigate those standards for years, has come to think of them as neither culturally sensitive nor even achievable in many cases. One standard reads, “No unsuitable area such as a hall, stairway, unfinished attic or basement, garage, bathroom, eating area, closet, shed or detached building may be used as a sleeping area for children.” But Potters asks, “What defines unsuitable? Could some of those things be suitable if that’s the standard of living for that family? Like, if their children are already sleeping in an area that is jointly used as a living space and a bedroom, does that necessarily mean that they couldn’t take on their grandchild and also have that child sleep in an area that’s sometimes used as a living area and sometimes used as a bedroom?”

Johnson’s aversion to foster care comes from lived experience, from decades of entanglement with the system. She was only seven years old when, after their parents had separated, she and her four siblings were first thrust into foster care, bouncing from house to house for nearly a year. Her father, however, visited them often. During one visit, he discovered that one foster parent had locked his son in a closet. Furious, he packed up Johnson and her siblings and put them on a train to South Carolina, where he settled Johnson and one sister with his mother and placed the other three siblings with their aunt. Johnson’s father returned to work in Philadelphia, but regularly sent money to his mother and aunt to help support his children.

To Johnson’s surprise, she didn’t stay homesick for long. She enjoyed the open air of the country, the open fields, knocking nuts from trees, and baking fresh fruit pies with her grandmother. With a few exceptions, like purchasing wheat and flour, everything else seemed to be within reach thanks to her grandmother’s land. Johnson watched in wonderment as okra, tomatoes, corn, and watermelon sprouted from the soil. Any time she wanted a snack, she grabbed a stick and threw it up to a pear, apple, or fig tree and down tumbled a ripe piece of fruit. Her grandmother’s pigs were one source of meat. Her uncle also went fishing and hunting, often returning with rabbit, squirrel, possum, or turtle. “We really lived off the land,” she chuckles. “We really did. It wasn’t too much buying that my grandmom had to do.”

By the time her father arrived to collect her and her siblings, she didn’t want to leave. When she returned to Philadelphia, the city felt strange; she found herself yearning for the open space and fresh air of her grandmother’s. She was also far less protected in the city. A year after they arrived, when she was twelve, Johnson was raped and became pregnant. The birth of her daughter, Casandra, brought a new crisis: City caseworkers deemed her father’s apartment too small, and she and her newborn were placed in foster care. In junior high school, she met an older boy, “and I got pregnant again,” she says. At sixteen, her third daughter was born. Shortly after, she got a job waitressing and finally managed to leave foster care. She moved in with her stepmother and father, who had become disabled. Her three daughters, meanwhile, remained in foster care because her father’s home was not big enough to keep them all. Two years later, pregnant again, she moved in with her mother.

At eighteen, Johnson had her only son, Trevor—Kayla’s father—her only child who never entered the system. For years, she continued working and living with her mother, saving money and making plans for her independence. It took until her midtwenties to rent an apartment of her own. She started bringing her girls home every other weekend, and soon made plans to bring them home permanently. She brought her youngest home first. Then, her oldest because her situation became urgent: Casandra, by then a teenager, had been fending off sexual advances from her foster father, Johnson recalls. DHS policy is to remove a child from a foster home whenever an allegation of abuse is made, while an investigation takes place. But as soon as Johnson heard, she simply swooped in to remove her.

One by one, she brought her children home. And in light of her experience, keeping Kayla out of foster care was more than an easy decision: It was a deep commitment. “It didn’t work for me when I was little,” she said. “And then my children wind up in it. So that was it. Nobody else.”

Johnson’s long history with foster care surely influenced her apprehension toward DHS. Yet advocates say that as they step into parental voids left in the wake of incarceration, many grandparents feel alienated from the very system that was intended to support them. “A lot of grandparents don’t want them in the system,” says Jean Hackney, a volunteer leader of Grands as Parents, a small nonprofit that supports and informs Philadelphia grandparent caregivers. She recounts a conversation with one member, an informal kinship caregiver like Johnson, who told her a DHS worker responded to her concerns by saying she should feel “honored” to be able to take care of her grandchildren. “It wasn’t about the honor,” says Hackney, a grandparent caregiver herself. “It’s that she couldn’t afford it. A lot of us are low income and we can’t afford to take in the kids, paying rent, paying for school uniforms, paying for food, different things like that.”

Hackney says hosting fish fries and selling $12 bags of used clothes helps the organization keep the phone bills paid, the lights on. “You know what it means if I’m not getting paid,” she says, leaning her head down to look at me above her glasses. “My hips and my knees are killing me, but I come in here every day.” Hackney says that when grandparents who are informal caregivers seek a way to become formal kinship foster parents and encounter a DHS representative who is judgmental or dismissive, it alienates them. “When we are old, and we get these kids, we need somebody we can really sit down and talk to and not someone that will talk at us,” she says, arguing that caseworkers need to be retrained to approach caregivers with more sensitivity. “Some of them are so cold. That’s what I’ve seen and heard from members.”

Regardless of the degree of legal formality, in many cases involving parents in trouble, grandparents are simply expected to step in, regardless of the personal cost. Donna Oxford, a grandparent caregiver just outside of Philadelphia, was on her way to work in the summer of 2008 when she received a call from her newborn grandson’s maternal grandmother. The baby’s mother had been arrested for violating probation, and Oxford’s son was in and out of jail; the maternal grandmother was already caring for one grandchild and said she couldn’t keep the baby, Michael, just three months old.

Oxford says those first days were hard. She had just started her own wedding-planning business, a longtime dream, pulling off her first wedding the Saturday before she received that call. “My life totally changed,” she says, explaining that, in order to avoid the risk, she put her own business on hold in order to take a job as a receptionist. She loathed the prospect, but it was steady work. “I have a college degree and a partial master’s,” she says. “I hated doing that. It was demoralizing, but I was just like, ‘I want something that’s not stressful.’” The pay, meanwhile, was “awful.”

“If there are any resources, whatever it is, if it’s a pencil, I want to be able to tell my people they can get a pencil for the kids, too.”

The loss in earnings was catastrophic. Oxford had previously filed for bankruptcy, and in order to avoid foreclosure on her home, she had been making monthly payments while saving up for a balloon payment that was coming due. “I had the funds put away, but had to use them to support us.” She says Michael had health problems and needed around-the-clock care. “I ended up losing my home, which was really, really difficult. I’d lived there for over twenty years, and raised my kids there.” Eventually, she and Michael moved into an apartment.

At one point she’d asked a caseworker about the possibility of being a foster parent and was told, “‘Oh, trust me, you don’t want us in your life all the time.’” The comment may have been made in jest, but at the time it deeply discouraged her, and so she never pursued it.

Like Oxford, many grandparents step in to help at the first signs of trouble, unaware that this risks locking them out of substantial future financial support. “The problem is, they rescue them,” says Chartan Nelson of Grand Central, a kinship-care resource center in Philadelphia. Later, when they want to become kinship foster parents, they’re already too late. If a grandmother learns her daughter abandoned her children, she’s not going to call for help, Nelson says; she’s going straight to the kids. Even if a grandmother immediately calls DHS to say the children have been abandoned, they are, by virtue of being with a grandparent, technically considered safe with family.

Nelson says some workers take a shortcut, telling grandmothers to apply for food stamps first and then apply for custody later through domestic-relations court. If that happens, Nelson says, “you’re done for sure.” Once grandparents have swooped in and sought custody of their grandchildren through the courts, the children are outside of the foster system, and the grandparents are ineligible to become resource parents and receive the financial and social supports they need to raise their grandchildren. “We’re here to really say, ‘Don’t rescue them,’” she says. “You have to play hardball. Tell DHS to take the kids.” Nelson admits this is a tough scenario to navigate, and doesn’t recommend it when young children are involved. But in the end, her main concern is ensuring that grandparents are not locked out from support.

Nelson, a former foster parent herself, sits on several foster-care boards and keeps her ear to the ground for any resources she can direct toward the grandparents who inadvertently end up as informal caregivers. “If there are any resources, whatever it is, if it’s a pencil, I want to be able to tell my people they can get a pencil for the kids, too.”

When Oxford stepped up, she lost nearly a decade of earning power. Last year, she finally started her own business again, and gets by on that income plus $250 a month in Social Security disability benefits Michael gets through his father. It’s not the life she once had in mind, but, she says, “I think I’m making it work.”

Most informal grandparent caregivers, however, are barely making it. Philadelphia has a high poverty rate—higher than any other large American city—and an affordable-housing crisis, with more than 42 percent of families paying more than half of their income in rent or living in subpar conditions, which Potter says makes it hard for grandparents to obtain housing that would pass DHS standards. Potter believes a real solution lies in beefing up antipoverty programs. “We need preventative services in place for people who are in poverty—child care and housing assistance could prevent many children from entering the system,” she says. “Solutions lie in better housing subsidies, programs for people who are at risk of entering foster care, and more shelters. I also think if you could just give people more money to live on—like TANF—if you just give parents more money, they will be able to bring their family’s standard of living to such a significantly higher level.”

Kayla has learned to view trips to the movies or the mall as teenage luxuries, not necessities. Every cent counts. With the extra income from Social Security, she pays her cell phone bill, and buys school clothes and shoes on occasion, but after helping with groceries, she tries to save the rest. “I just stash that away. But then we wind up needing it for something else.”

Kayla sometimes wishes she had bus fare to meet up with her friends who live across town, or could buy a new dress for the spring dance. But, if she had that kind of money, she says she’d rather spend it doing something special for her grandmother. “She really deserves it. Everything she’s been through. Not just raising me, but raising everybody else.” She imagines taking her out “to some place she’s never been before, let her try some different foods. See if she likes it. See her face if she doesn’t like it. Keep her excited.”

Kayla says it’s difficult not having her mother around. But her grandmother’s vital role is not lost on her. “I’m grateful to actually be living with a family member rather than in a foster home with a bunch of people that I don’t really know,” she says. Lately, she’s been thinking a lot about life without her grandmother. “I don’t know why I’m always thinking this, but I’m always thinking that I’m going to wake up and one day she’s going to be in the bed and she’s not going to wake up. And I’m really scared that I’m just going to have to like—me and my sister are going to have to leave. It’s terrifying to think about it, but you got to think: When she does go, where are we going to go?” Kayla pauses, slowly stirring a bowl of ice cream. “We’re crazy about her.”

The thousands of dollars a year she could have received through DHS isn’t enough to convince Johnson that she made the wrong choice.

Johnson doesn’t know Kayla has this fear tugging at her. As of late, she’s preoccupied with Kayla’s acts of teenage rebellion, defying her grandmother’s wishes, even skipping church. Still, some days Kayla will surprise her grandmother like she did on Thanksgiving eve. While Johnson settled into a chair in the living room, Kayla prepared the entire Thanksgiving dinner, calling out for the correct measurements of flour, sugar, milk, and nutmeg. “I was amazingly shocked because she don’t do all that,” recalls Johnson. “She would help me cook Thanksgiving dinner, but I didn’t really have to do anything.” At a family gathering that day, Johnson bragged to everyone about how proud she was.

The thousands of dollars a year she could have received through DHS isn’t enough to convince Johnson that she made the wrong choice. As for Kayla, she basks in being her grandma’s baby. But she also admits to feeling bouts of sadness when she considers what her life could have been with her parents, or when her friends talk about their experiences with their own mothers. Over the last four years, Kayla has managed to visit her mother in jail fairly often, through a Girl Scouts program known as Beyond Bars. Over time, she’s developed a relationship with her mother, embracing her resilient cheerfulness, the way she seems to cherish the moments they do share. When she talks to her mother about a break up, they’ll embrace, and her mother will tell her a story or try to make her laugh. “Don’t worry,” Ebony will say. “He must be crazy not wanting to be with you anymore.” Those moments are magic for Kayla, and too rare. “She’ll comfort me, and we’ll just talk and talk and talk all night.”

Last year, Kayla was admitted to the hospital when, during a wisdom-tooth extraction, the dentist identified an irregularity in her heartbeat. This landed her in the ICU. As she lay in the hospital bed, her phone rang. On the other end was Ebony, sobbing. “She thought something really, really, really bad was happening,” Kayla says. “She thought I was gonna need surgery or something.” Her condition was, in fact, serious, but she was practiced enough to know to try to quell her mother’s fears, since she was helpless in jail. “Well, they said it wasn’t really that serious,” she told her. “I just need to calm down, take pills and stuff.” Ebony assured Kayla that she’d be home within weeks and would enter a drug-treatment program in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Ebony came home, sought treatment. Kayla visited her in Erie. Not long ago, Ebony left the program and asked Johnson if she could move in. Johnson refused, but then called around to see if anyone might be renting a room. Eventually Ebony ended up living with her sister, who lived nearby. Not long after that, she and Kayla spent the weekend together.

Johnson says she hopes Ebony can finally stay clean for her daughter—for their daughter. “I’m hoping this is a big turnaround,” she says. “I know for Kayla it would be, because she’s crazy about her mom. She’s crazy about her mom regardless of what she does or what she did. She loves her mom. And that’s good. That’s good.”

Johnson says she’ll take as many nights with Kayla next to her in the bed as she can, but her mothering duties stop with her. Johnson has seventeen grandchildren, some thirty great-grandchildren, and about twelve great-great-grandchildren. I ask her how she feels about spending her life raising her grandchildren and she gives me the raw truth.

“Like I feel I don’t never want to go through it again,” she says seriously. Caught by surprise, I laugh, and she joins me. “I told ’em, ‘You know what you can do? Y’all can have all the babies you want and bring ’em by and let me see ’em. But when you leave, take ’em with you,’” she says, still chuckling.

“‘Don’t even go to the store. Take it with you,’” the joke continues. “Might go to the store and don’t come back for two days or more. And I know I’d be having a fit. Oh, no. Take it with you!”

“I tell them,” she says, still laughing, “I’m so done, I’m burned up.”

This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, now known as Type Investigations, where Sylvia A. Harvey is a reporting fellow.

The post Stepping Up appeared first on Type Investigations.

The 20-Week Abortion Ban Bind

Sylvia A. Harvey — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 11:00:26 +0000

Lynae feels a wave of nausea at the scent of baking bread drifting from a Subway she passes on her way to the hospital clinic. Still, it's no match for the excitement she feels from the stirring in her belly. When she arrives at the clinic, she's met by her husband, Paul. (Lynae and Paul asked that we use only their first names.) They lock hands and sit amid the hum of the waiting room, making bets on their baby's gender. Lynae, then 34, wants a boy; Paul, then 32, suspects it's another girl — a sister for their daughter Avery, then 2. Lynae is here for her 20-week ultrasound, the moment when many expectant parents learn the gender of their child. Finally, she's called.

Lynae lies on the examining table, feeling giddy as the ultrasound technician squeezes jelly onto her swollen belly. Her ears perk up at the thump of a heartbeat. She and Paul have their eyes fixed on the monitor: head, arms, legs, stomach — their first glimpse of their future child.

The sonographer moves down for the reveal. It's a girl. They look at each other and laugh.

Fifteen minutes into the ultrasound, the technician lingers around the baby's head.* She's having trouble getting a measurement and calls for help. The couple exchange reassuring smiles. The second tech enters; she has a stern demeanor and quickly takes over. She asks if they had any preliminary genetic testing. “Of course,” Lynae replies. “Everything was normal.” Panic crawls into Lynae's chest. The first tech attempts to calm her, saying the hospital does longer ultrasounds these days.

Key Findings

Sixteen states, including Indiana, have 20-week abortion bans
Women who learn of potentially lethal abnormalities at or after their 20-week ultrasound face limited options.
The pro-life movement inspired a massive wave of state-level abortion restrictions in recent years.

When the exam is over, Lynae, who works as an epidemiologist in the same Indianapolis hospital, retreats to her office upstairs. She greets a coworker, but she's unable to concentrate. Her phone rings. It's her ob-gyn; the clinic has phoned her. Lynae bursts into tears. Her fetus has an increased nuchal fold, an excess of fluid on the back of her neck — an abnormality associated with congenital heart disease and a range of serious chromosomal defects.

Lynae's legs feel like jelly as she tries to stand, so her boss and a coworker escort her to her ob-gyn and set her down on the doctor's brown leather couch. “Hopefully this is just a shadow,” her doctor offers. Once Lynae calms down, she calls Paul at work. “We don't know yet,” he will often say to Lynae in the days ahead. “Nothing is wrong, everything is fine.” With each movement she feels in her belly, Lynae wonders if it's true.

Prenatal screenings are among the most agonizing and anticipated moments of a pregnancy. A clear result means you can rest easy until the next round. A problem sets off a cascade of procedures — some providing clarity and peace, others only perpetuating uncertainty. A pregnant woman typically has routine bloodwork done during her first prenatal visit, which can identify such risks as anemia or diabetes. Many women, due to maternal age or family history, go on to do additional bloodwork between 8 and 13 weeks to screen for genetic disorders. When one of those screens flags an elevated risk, doctors will conduct additional screenings (amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling, more commonly known as CVS) for Down syndrome, spina bifida, and other serious anomalies.

Still, certain abnormalities can't be detected until the mid-pregnancy ultrasound, usually performed at 18 to 20 weeks, which reveals details of the fetus's growth and anatomy. As with genetic screenings, if a problem is found on this ultrasound — as it was for Lynae — a woman is often offered amniocentesis. Results can take up to two weeks. Any positive result from the amnio means a referral to a specialist for further testing, which can take several more weeks to complete.

In a growing number of states, pregnant women who find themselves in Lynae's position simply cannot wait. Almost from the moment they learn of potentially fatal abnormalities, they're up against a clock, with an ever-narrowing window of time to consider all their options.

“The emotional impact of knowing that your baby will die is different for every woman.”

In 1973, Roe v. Wade established the constitutional right to an abortion prior to a fetus's viability outside the womb, typically 24 to 26 weeks. But in 2010, Nebraska became the first state to pass a law banning abortions after 20 weeks. Since then, according to the Guttmacher Institute, 15 more states have enacted similar laws. Generally, these laws permit an abortion after 20 weeks only in very specific cases: if the woman's life is endangered, for example, or if the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest. Eleven of these states do not provide an exemption for women whose fetus is diagnosed with a fatal medical condition.

These laws effectively mean that many women who learn of potentially lethal abnormalities at or after their 20-week ultrasound face extremely limited options. They can travel hundreds of miles across state lines to seek abortions — often not a practical or financially feasible option. The Indiana ban, says Dr. Katherine McHugh, an ob-gyn who works in Indianapolis, “doesn't give [a mother] very much time to prepare.” McHugh often has to send women to Chicago — Illinois allows abortions up to 24 weeks — which means her patients have to scramble to cover the costs of child care, travel, and lodging.

Or a woman can carry her non-viable fetus to term only to face a stillbirth or watch her infant die soon after being born. “The emotional impact of knowing that your baby will die is different for every woman,” says McHugh. For those who choose to carry their fetuses to term, McHugh offers perinatal hospice care: Once born, the babies at such hospices are fed and cared for, but invasive procedures that might prolong suffering are not performed.

In the last presidential debate, when Donald Trump was asked about so-called partial-birth abortions, he claimed that a doctor can “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day.” This does not happen. But the small number of women who seek late-term abortions each year expose a little-explored corner of the debate over reproductive rights: laws that take a profound toll on women, like Lynae, who want to be mothers but who have been dealt a cruel hand denying them that possibility. These are women who did not envision themselves considering an abortion, until a complicated pregnancy made them confront its financial, emotional, and political impact.

Days after the ultrasound, Lynae finds herself at the mercy of time. A perinatologist — an obstetrician who specializes in high-risk pregnancies — does an emergency follow-up ultrasound, but reports inconclusive results. It could be a cystic hygroma, an abnormality that occasionally resolves on its own, or it could signal a serious problem and a poor chance of survival. The perinatologist performs an amniocentesis, and Lynae has to wait for those results. “It's hard to do anything” when you're waiting, Lynae tells me when I meet her at her home in July. “It's hard to eat, it's hard to sleep.” Lynae's face is smooth and bare, her brown hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. She wears jean shorts and a T-shirt that's the same color as her green eyes.

Doctors inform Lynae and Paul of Indiana's 20-week cutoff. If she wants to terminate the pregnancy within the state, she has days to decide. She and Paul discuss it briefly, but they feel unable to make a decision until they know exactly how grave the problem is. “We weren't ready to give up,” she says.

Lynae reaches out to a cadre of specialists and learns that a fetus with an increased nuchal fold has only a small chance of survival. One doctor also warns Lynae that if she wants a termination, she'll now have to travel to Illinois, where abortions are legal up to 24 weeks. “If, you know, our amnio came back positive with a fatal genetic condition or a condition that would severely limit the child, then we would have terminated,” Lynae says. “But not knowing kind of threw us.”

“Every dream you have is about the baby. Nightmares about the baby. And there is nothing you can do to help her.”

At 23 and a half weeks, Lynae recalls, the amniocentesis results come back normal, though this indicates only that her fetus doesn't have any of the genetic disorders the amnio tested for — which may or may not be connected to the abnormal growth on the back of the neck. She's relieved, yet terrified. Despite the normal amnio, subsequent ultrasounds show that nothing has changed. The scans continue to show the same abnormality on the neck.

Over the next few weeks, new issues emerge: an enlarged heart, decreased lung size — problems that rule out the idea that this could resolve on its own.

Lynae's home becomes a hideout, a place she can escape the gleeful attention that pregnant women inevitably attract. On a quick shopping trip to Kohl's, an older woman notices her belly and cheerfully asks what she's having. Lynae is tall and curvy, yet she's no longer proud of the way she fills out her maternity clothes. She can barely hold back tears. “I just wanted to crawl into a hole,” Lynae says. “You can't hide as a pregnant woman…Everyone thinks that you're going to be thrilled.” Experiencing a pregnancy when you're worried the baby is suffering is harrowing, she says. “Every dream you have is about the baby. Nightmares about the baby. And there is nothing you can do to help her.”

At 31 weeks, a doctor new to Lynae's team discovers that her fetus is severely anemic. A blood transfusion, an attempt to correct the anemia, is a success, and everyone is briefly hopeful. Then the anemia returns, and one doctor notices that in every ultrasound, the fetus's tiny hands are clenched in a fist, a sign of severe brain damage resulting from a lack of oxygen (a consequence of the anemia). At that point, the doctors know that the baby won't survive. “We were just waiting for her to die,” Lynae says.

Desperate for resolution, Lynae asks her ob-gyn to induce her labor. She's firmly denied. That, she recalls being told, would be against the law — it would constitute an abortion.

Paul and Lynae name their daughter Annesly. They wait.

I spoke with many women who found themselves in a situation similar to Lynae's. In March of this year, 15 weeks pregnant with her first child, Amber Kepperling learned there was a clot on her placenta. Her unborn daughter, already named Taylor, had an accumulation of fluid around her brain, indicative of a serious defect. A few days later, after seeing a perinatologist, Taylor was diagnosed with skeletal dysplasia and given, Amber recalls, no chance of survival.

A week later, while Amber, 30, was still waiting on results from a follow-up amniocentesis, Governor Mike Pence, the current Republican nominee for vice president, signed into law a bill — HEA 1337 — that prohibits abortions at any stage if they're based on the fetus's sex, race, color, national origin, ancestry, or disability. (The bill has since been temporarily blocked by a judge.)

One night, while Amber was anxiously awaiting the results of more tests, she poured out her soul in a Facebook post. Would Taylor die in her womb? Worse, would she have to face the “nauseating decision” of termination? What really shook Amber was the thought that politicians wanted to take “ownership” over her “overwhelmingly personal grief.”

Amber was receiving her care at Catholic hospitals, and throughout the testing, she recalled, none of her doctors informed her about Indiana's 20-week abortion ban. (Neither hospital responded to queries.) “[W]e may soon not even have the choice to carry this nightmare out on our own terms in the state of Indiana,” she wrote in the Facebook post, referring to HEA 1337. The passage of HEA 1337, she told me in August, felt like a “dismissal of our daughter's suffering.”

AMBER KEPPERLING/ELLE

Amber Kepperling.

Finally, at 26 weeks, her doctor confirmed that her amniotic sac had ruptured, which, she learned, could potentially provide legal grounds for a termination in Indiana because of the risk it would pose to her physical health. But within days, Amber started to hemorrhage and was given an emergency C-section. While her ob-gyn finished and stitched her abdomen closed, a nurse placed Taylor on Amber's chest. Amber lay in silence, rubbing her daughter's forehead. Her husband, Dave, picked up Taylor to show her the White Sox game on TV and profess his love. Then he returned her to Amber's chest, where, a few hours later, Taylor died.

Cyndi, a 36-year-old data analyst from Indianapolis who asked that we use only her first name, can recall her 22-week ultrasound in 2013 as if it were last week. She was told that something was wrong with her fetus' heart. From a specialist, she and her husband learned their unborn boy had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a rare defect in which the left side of the heart is severely underdeveloped. They were given a 50 percent chance that the child could survive to age 5 — if they put him through three high-risk surgeries. They were told that medical care for the condition would run close to a million dollars, an amount they couldn't imagine affording.

Cyndi wanted to fly to Philadelphia and Boston to speak with doctors who have more experience treating this condition. But she felt cornered by the 20-week ban. “There is no time to process and make an informed decision; you're forced to act,” she said to me when I met her in Indianapolis last summer, pushing the locks of her dark blond bob behind her ears. “By the time they started talking to us about how many surgeries he would need, and what his chance of survival was, we had kind of decided already.”

Cyndi and her husband booked a hotel room in Chicago and arranged for someone to watch their daughter for a few days. Cyndi spent the majority of her time in Chicago crying. “You don't know whether your child is going to do well,” she said, or “if you're going to put him through all this medical stuff, and then they do pass away anyway, and you've put them through all that pain.” Cyndi clutched a copy of her son's footprints and headed home. Just one week passed between the initial diagnosis and the termination.

Cyndi said she made the best decision for her family that she could, given the circumstances. Yet she was still reeling from the experience when I met her. “I was just in a fog for a month,” she said, shaking her head. “Everything has to happen so fast. ... I really would have liked four more weeks to explore options. … But once you get past that 24-week mark, if you choose to end the pregnancy you're looking at flying to Colorado.”

Combined with the rapid erosion of reproductive rights at the state level, the rise of the 20-week abortion ban has meant that a handful of clinics in states that do allow later procedures receive a constant stream of women from out of state. The Women's Med Center in Dayton, Ohio, where Dr. Roslyn Kade practices, is one of them; Boulder Abortion Clinic, headed by Dr. Warren Hern in Colorado, is another.

Kade's clinic offers abortions up to approximately 22 weeks in the case of fetal anomalies. The women she sees have often traveled for hours to reach her, yet before they can start the two-day procedure, they have to contend with Ohio's own regulations: state-scripted counseling and a waiting period of 24 hours. “I can assure you, that does not change people's mind,” Kade told me. “By the time they walk in our door, they have…thought long and hard about the decisions that sit in front of them.”

Learning of an anomaly is already life altering, Kade says; abortion restrictions just serve to make the experience more daunting. “It feels like an emergency to them,” she said, but the restrictions make time crawl. A patient who arrives at her clinic on a Friday, for instance, often has to wait until the clinic is open again on Tuesday of the following week to start the procedure. “The time from when they find out until they seek resources and seek care, it's really a horrible, horrible experience for them. The state makes such an effort to condemn them. And they feel that.”

Women who wait a few extra weeks — whether to complete additional tests or to make travel arrangements — often find themselves at the Boulder Abortion Clinic. Hern's clinic is one of only three in the country that perform abortions after 26 weeks. (The others are in Maryland and New Mexico.) There used to be another, in Wichita, Kansas, until that provider, Dr. George Tiller, was assassinated in 2009. Hern said he wakes up every day expecting to be shot.

Hern is tall, with a head of silver hair. He's been performing abortions for 45 years and says he sees a great many women from the states that have imposed 20-week bans. He estimated that of the several hundred patients he sees a year, more than half come from out of state and because of severe fetal anomalies. Most women fly into Denver and make the one-hour drive to Boulder, a route that offers sweeping views of the Rocky Mountains. The clinic is a nondescript, beige brick building with a bulletproof entryway — an unsuspecting refuge for women denied care in their home states. A sign warns that cell phones, cameras, and computers are not allowed in order to protect patient privacy.

“No reasonable person would do this,” Hern said to me. “What does that tell you about me?” He's committed to a simple idea: “that women can be complete human beings, that they're more than objects for pleasure and having babies.” The women who come to him, he said, have often “spent many days and weeks trying to find someone who will help them.” Some health care providers actively withhold information, he says; others are unaware that services like his are available “and tell patients they have no option.”

A third-trimester abortion — any abortion after the end of the 27th week — is a four-day outpatient procedure, beginning with the administration of medication that brings the fetus' heart to a slow stop. The first day, women are taken to a warm room where East Asian art adorns the walls, cushions rest on wicker chairs, and tissues are readily available. There, counselors make sure each woman is ready to take the first step. “How does it feel now that you're in the clinic — now that it's real?” a counselor will ask. Some of the women say they feel relieved, others are mainly scared or anxious.

The day I visited the clinic, a 32-year-old woman named Michelle had just received an injection of digoxin, the first step in terminating her 29-week pregnancy. She and her husband Josh, 32 (not their real names), traveled from Ohio, where they both work as therapists. The young couple never envisioned themselves in Boulder under these conditions. But like most of the people who visit Hern's clinic, they felt they lacked any other options.

The couple found out at their 18-week ultrasound that their fetus had enlarged brain ventricles, which put him at increased risk for numerous medical complications. At 20 weeks, a specialist diagnosed other brain abnormalities: The fetus didn't appear to have anatomical features critical to proper brain function. At first, they thought their baby would have a disability, and they prepared themselves for that reality. At 23 and then at 27 weeks, Michelle and Josh sought additional screenings, which confirmed what they feared: If he survived, their child would have seizures and require a feeding tube. He would also be taken away immediately after being born for brain surgery. “We knew the baby wouldn't have likelihood to feel emotion or have any higher thinking,” Michelle said. “Living in spite of a disability and having zero quality of life are very different,” Josh added.

They talked about what their son's soul would experience. “It facilitated the conversation about what life is,” Michelle said. They asked themselves, “Is it more than just breathing and eating?” The couple said their parents helped them think about their lives as well as their unborn son's. In the end, they decided to terminate.

By the time they made the decision, Hern's clinic was the only plausible option. They had to take two weeks off work and rely on family to make the trip a reality. Their siblings chipped in for the costs of a rental car, gas, food, and a hotel; their parents paid for the procedure. It was “hard carrying a child that I knew was going to die,” Michelle said. “It made it hard for me to get up in the morning, to go to work.”

In a private office at Hern's clinic, the couple came to terms with this stage of the process. “It was hard going into it,” Michelle said. Josh handed her a tissue and squeezed her hand. “I've been attached to him since the beginning.” She has learned, she said, to honor contradictory emotions — grief-filled sadness and, hopefully, eventually, peace. In a situation like this, they know now, there are no easy choices.

After learning of Annesly's fatal diagnosis, Lynae took a few days to process the news. She began to think of ways to induce labor on her own — throwing herself down the stairs, or getting into a car accident. “A lot of terrible things go through your head,” she said, her eyes welling. “I just wanted it to be over. I didn't want to have to wait for her to die. I didn't want her to die inside of me.”

A week later, an excess of amniotic fluid forced Lynae into labor at 32 weeks. Her doctor performed an emergency C-section to give Annesly the best chance of survival. Annesly was born with a heartbeat, but despite intense efforts by the delivery team, Lynae said, “she never stirred, she never took a breath.” The couple chose “comfort care” — no ventilator.

Lynae held Annesly and said good-bye. Afterward, Avery climbed up on the hospital bed, where her mom explained why the sister who had been growing inside Mommy's tummy wasn't coming home. “We wanted her to do more than just survive,” said Lynae. “I wanted her to live.”

In debates between “pro-choice” and “pro-life,” Lynae said, people often talk about a baby's heartbeat as a sign of life. But Lynae has come to think of things differently. “A baby's heartbeat doesn't mean there's life. … It is a sign of life, but to live, you need to be able to breathe. You need to be able to have a neurological function.”

Lynae's first foray out of the house after Annesly's death was to get a pedicure — a futile attempt to relax. It was the middle of the day, and Lynae explained to the technician that she was home from work because of a surgery. When the technician asked what kind, Lynae felt trapped, and said that she had gotten a C-section. Immediately, the tech congratulated her. Lynae wanted to bolt, but she was captive in the chair for the next half hour, lying — “Oh, thank you, she's doing well” — to avoid spilling out her grief.

This would become a recurring theme. At work, her boss tried to tell people for her so she wouldn't have to repeat the story. Still, other coworkers rushed up to her and asked for photos. “You don't know how to handle those questions,” she said. “No one has taught you.”

Some women who experience a miscarriage, a stillbirth, or the loss of a newborn call a subsequent healthy infant a “rainbow baby.” Lynae got pregnant with hers, a boy, nine months after Annesly died. “The first time I got a positive on a pregnancy test, I sobbed,” she said. “Not out of happiness, but out of fear.” She and Paul are both working parents; they worried about the implications of caring for a severely disabled child. “I wouldn't want to go through that again,” Lynae said. “To not have an option, but to live day-to-day waiting for your child to die.”

The 20-week abortion ban may not stand up to legal scrutiny in coming years. With Roe, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional to ban abortions before viability, typically 24 to 26 weeks. Similar bans — in Arizonaand Idaho — were struck down by federal courts in 2013 and 2015, respectively. And in Georgia, the American Civil Liberties Union is currently appealing a ruling upholding the law. But new states are pushing the bans: Bills are under consideration in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. If passed, this would extend 20-week abortion bans to a total of 19 states.

When I visited Lynae, now 38, a swing set with swings for two stood in the backyard. A toy lawn mower, race car, dinosaur, and truck were scattered across the grass — signs of their two-year-old son Rowan, their rainbow baby. Paul lay sprawled on the cream-colored rug; Rowan was jumping from the couch into his arms. Lynae watched, smiling.

In some ways, Lynae was one of the slightly more fortunate ones: She never had to travel to get an abortion or carry an unviable pregnancy to term. But no woman in this position is lucky; none are protected from the emotional assault that these 20-week bans inflict. “Our grief will change as we get older,” Lynae said to me when we first spoke, “but it will never go away.”

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, where Sylvia A. Harvey is a reporting fellow.

*A note about terminology: The vocabulary we use to describe the unborn is inevitably charged. Wherever possible, we have attempted to follow the lead of the subjects and have used the terms that they themselves used to describe their fetuses or unborn children.

The post The 20-Week Abortion Ban Bind appeared first on Type Investigations.

What About Us?

Sylvia A. Harvey — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 01:00:23 +0000

My small feet thump the concrete as I hurry toward the door. My four older brothers trail closely behind. Upon entering, we disappear into the apartment and excitedly explore every corner. We peek out the window at our new playmates. By morning, the scent of bacon wafts into my bedroom. I look over at the floor beside my bed, where I’d asked my dad to sleep the night before. He’s not there. I don’t cry this time. I suspect he’s nearby, in the kitchen, responsible for the clanging pots. I venture out and there, amazingly, he is: my dad, standing over the stove, pushing frozen hash browns from side to side in the skillet. My brother is whisking eggs in a bowl, and I arrive just in time to put the biscuits in the pan. When breakfast is ready, my dad locks his hazel eyes on us and says, “You kids eat first.”

I was almost 4 when asthma finally sucked the last breath from my mom. After that, Dad made this ritual of “big breakfast” a weekend tradition. This weekend with him was special, though; we lived with Grandma by then, and we were visiting him in a furnished apartment on the grounds of Soledad State Prison as part of the California Department of Corrections’ Family Visiting program.

At least four times a year, my brothers and I were allowed to spend a weekend there with my father, who began serving 16 years to life when I was 5. The night before our visits, I anxiously folded my new pajamas; my grandmother refused to let me sleep in my usual oversize T-shirt while visiting him. Those weekends rate as some of the best moments of my childhood.

Key Findings

Sylvia A. Harvey uncovers the history of racism that has shaped prison visitation policies for a century.
Over half of incarcerated adults are parents – yet only 4 states widely offer extended visitation for families.
In Mississippi, family visits were abruptly stopped in 2012; erosion of visitation rights fractured family ties.

Going to prison is often an isolating event. It is assumed that once a person is incarcerated, their former life will simply vanish. But for the kids they leave behind, it doesn’t work that way: That prisoner remains a parent. Among the many collateral consequences of mass incarceration is its impact on children, and the number who are affected is staggering. According to a 2010 study (the most recent data available), 54 percent of the people serving time in US prisons were the parents of children, including more than 120,000 mothers and 1.1 million fathers. Over 2.7 million children in the United States had an incarcerated parent. That’s one in 28 kids, compared with one in 125 about 30 years ago. For black children, the odds were much worse: While one out of every 57 white children had an incarcerated parent, one out of every nine black children had a parent behind bars.

After my own father’s sentencing, our love was cocooned in collect phone calls, pictures, weekly letters, and cards on special occasions. These are the fibers that now connect a child to an incarcerated parent. The extended family visits that allowed my brothers and I to have “big breakfast” with Dad are fast disappearing from state corrections systems. Nine states once allowed them; today, they are widely offered in just four. In 1996, California eliminated visits for families like mine; I was 15 at the time. In Mississippi, where “conjugal” visits debuted almost a century ago, the corrections system ended the last of its family and spousal programs last year. A once extraordinarily progressive policy has been sacrificed due to prison overcrowding and state budget cuts — as well as to racist ideas about black sexuality.

Victoria Phillips, of Raleigh, Mississippi, calls out to her sleeping daughters and gives them a gentle nudge. “It’s time to get up,” she says. “Mama, we going to see Daddy?” the girls mumble, still groggy. Soon they’re getting dressed and heading out to the car. Phillips nods to the dark sky and eases her tan Impala onto the lone highway for the three-and-a-half-hour drive to the prison in Parchman. She turns on the radio as they pass several country towns dotted with catfish farms, cotton fields, and cow pastures.

Prison visitation varies from state to state and prison to prison. Typical visits, called “contact visits,” take place in designated areas with tables, chairs, and vending machines filled with junk food (and, in some cases, games to play). These visits take place under surveillance and allow extremely limited physical contact — usually just a hug and a kiss, lasting under 15 seconds, upon entry and exit. Children often make long treks for that fleeting moment — on average, 100 miles.

CAROLYN DRAKE/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Victoria Phillips with her daughters Amari (right) and Rihanna. Phillips takes the two girls 180 miles across Mississippi so they can visit their dad in prison.

Phillips describes her daughter Amari, 8, as a “daddy’s girl.” Amari speaks to him regularly by phone, gushing about her day at school or asking for a new doll. But the only time she ever sees or touches her father, who is serving a life sentence in the Mississippi State Penitentiary 180 miles away, is during these monthly contact visits.

They arrive by 7:30 am, so the wait in line is only 30 minutes. Bashful and petite, Amari rubs her eyes, shakes her russet ponytails, and smiles as she eases out of her seat belt. Once inside the prison, she walks through the metal detectors with familiarity. She knows it’s the only way she can see her dad, and she’s happy to oblige.

I remember rebelling at this process when I was her age. “Why do I have to take down my hair?” I demanded as my brother helped undo my new braids. But it was a requirement to get past the prison deities. They didn’t care that I was a small child; my father was in prison, so surely I could have small vials of heroin tucked in the folds of my French braids.

Amari doesn’t seem aware of the prison guard’s watchful gaze, which follows her as she moves around on her father’s lap. But Phillips always feels the stare. Amari sits with her dad, sharing a bag of chips while writing down the words she has recently learned to spell. Phillips says that standard visiting facilities at Parchman lack the coloring books, games, and outdoor activities that the last prison offered, so she now takes the girls there only once a month and reserves one additional Sunday just for her and her husband.

Until September 2012, the family had access to something else entirely: Mississippi’s Extended Family Visitation program. They made unsupervised visits that lasted for three to five days and took place on the facility grounds, in small apartments like the ones I remember from my own childhood.

Interviews

Harvey was interviewed on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show and PRX’s Radio Curious.

“It was more like you were at home,” Phillips recalls wistfully. “It was more freedom.” She and her husband participated in the program for nearly six years, first as a couple and then, once their children were born, as a family. They barbecued together under the Mississippi sun. Amari played basketball with her dad and challenged him to cartwheel sessions. Etched in Phillips’ memory is the sight of Amari lying on her father’s chest watching cartoons after breakfast, or the nights when she helped him wash dishes and later fought sleep as he read her bedtime stories. Those visits were an essential part of Amari’s life.

It was here in Parchman, no later than 1918, that the Mississippi State Penitentiary — 18,000 acres of delta plantation that was then devoid of high walls or gun towers — became the birthplace of conjugal visits, which led the way to extended family visits. Started informally, these visits weren’t originally intended to unite spouses or connect families, but rather were based on racial stereotypes. Black men were thought to have superhuman strength and uncontrollable libidos. So conjugal visits were introduced to tame them and make them work harder at slaughtering hogs and picking cotton in the prison’s farming operation, according to historian David M. Oshinsky’s book Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. At the time, marriage wasn’t a prerequisite, and prostitutes visited the prison on Sundays. Beginning in the 1930s, white men were also allowed conjugal visits, and by 1972, women were too.

In 1961, inmate construction crews began building new conjugal-visiting facilities, and in 1963 the prison added marriage as an eligibility requirement. Back then, state prison officials reasoned that “a man and his wife have the right to sexual intercourse, even though the man is in prison,” according to Columbus B. Hopper’s 1962 study of the program. Prison officials believed that allowing these visits helped to ensure inmates that their families were well. “One visit in private is better than a hundred letters because he can judge for himself,” said one corrections officer, according to Hopper’s report. Hopper noted that, “with adequate facilities, careful selection, and appropriate counsel, it is possible that the conjugal visiting program in Mississippi could be developed into one of the most enlightened programs in modern corrections.”

In 1974, Mississippi arguably did just that when it launched the Family Visitation Program. These new visits lasted from three to five days and were open to parents, siblings, and children as well as spouses. The program, an effort to rehabilitate inmates and strengthen their family ties, made use of small apartments furnished by donations from the prisoners’ families and local stores. A 1975 letter from a Parchman prison superintendent to a community-relations associate touted the institution as among the most progressive prisons in the country. “The fact that conjugal visiting is believed to help in keeping marriages and families from breaking up makes the people of the state not only accept the practice but take pride in it as well,” it read.

As Linda struggled to stitch together her separated clan, family visits were the seam.

Seeking both to strengthen the family and to quell prison upheaval, a number of states followed Mississippi’s lead in the coming decades. In 1968, California launched its Family Visiting Program at the California Correctional Institution at Tehachapi and soon expanded the program throughout the state. South Carolina introduced family visits around the same time. New York started its program in 1976, and Minnesota began its own in 1977. Similar ones followed in Washington, Connecticut, New Mexico, and Wyoming in the early 1980s.

Family and conjugal visits were never handed out like Halloween candy. In Mississippi, for instance, only minimum- or medium-security inmates who demonstrated good behavior were eligible to participate. They had to be tested for and free of infectious diseases. They couldn’t have any “sex-related” convictions on their records. Conjugal visits were permitted only for married inmates, once a week, and only for a single hour.

Still, the steady movement toward keeping families united in spite of incarceration began to reverse in the 1990s, when a new, more punitive approach took hold in corrections. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which implemented mandatory-minimum sentencing enhancements, the widened use of the death penalty, and limited amenities and services for prisoners, including access to higher education. The following year, the No Frills Prison Act eliminated such prison “frills” as weight-lifting equipment, most unmonitored phone calls, hot plates, and personal clothing. In 1996, Congress awarded grants to states that made prisoners serve as much of their sentenced time as possible.

The mid-1990s also marked the elimination of several conjugal and extended-family visiting programs. With a ballooning state-prison population, resources were scarce. In 1994, South Carolina’s conjugal visits appeared to have been the first to go. “As our new era in corrections begins,” read an annual corrections report, “the South Carolina Department of Corrections has taken note of the growing trends for tougher restrictions on inmates.” When Wyoming closed its Family Visiting Center in 1995, the prison warden said: “Times and conditions have changed since the program was first implemented. With the increasing population, greater security responsibilities, and limited budget, utilizing employees and other resources to maintain the family visiting program can no longer be justified.”

Over the next two years, Washington and California initiated severe restrictions on family visits, disqualifying a large population of inmates. In California, anyone with a life sentence who didn’t have a release date within three years was excluded. For me, that meant the end of privacy with my father. Not even my father’s written love tribute, “nakupenda malaika,” was private; the language lessons he sent me in Swahili were flagged and read by the sergeant. At least, I figured, the sergeant would know how much my father loved his angel.

Mississippi, where it all began, ended extended family visitation in 2012 and conjugal visitation in 2014. Today, only California, Connecticut, Washington, and New York continue to offer family visitation widely. South Dakota, Colorado, and Nebraska have a very limited visitation policy: only for female inmates, and focused on those with young children.

Phillips never received an official notice that family visits had been eliminated, although this meant a radical reshaping of her family’s life. Instead, a memo taped to the visiting-room wall announced the change. “I was mad!” she recalls. But instead of anger, her voice now aches with disappointment. “It felt terrible, because you don’t get that one-on-one time — you don’t get to wake up near your spouse.”

Christopher Epps, then the Mississippi corrections commissioner, explained in a press release that he’d cut the program for budgetary reasons, citing costs like building maintenance and the time that staffers spent escorting inmates to and from the visitation facility. Then he pivoted to another concern: “Even though we provide contraception, we have no idea how many women are getting pregnant only for the child to be raised by one parent.” Epps concluded that “the benefits of the programs don’t outweigh the cost.”

Keshawn Green: “Some people in [prison] may never get out, and they need another piece of them out here living.”

Asked about New Mexico’s decision to end family visitation last year, Alex Tomlin, the corrections department’s public-affairs director, inadvertently described what was, to me, the beauty of the program: “The majority were not spousal visits — they were [visits] with children or parents.” For example, she offered, “an offender and his children, they would play football in the front yard.” She added that only 200 of the approximately 7,000 state inmates were eligible, a population too small to be worth the $120,000 annual cost. And yet, in 2014, the program accounted for less than 1 percent of the department’s $293 million budget.

“If we could show it actually reduced the recidivism, then we would have kept it,” Tomlin said. But while there’s no study using a strong research design that specifically links extended family visits with either reduced recidivism or stronger family bonds, a number of studies have consistently linked regular visits with both. In 2011, for example, the Minnesota Department of Corrections conducted an in-depth study that tracked over 16,000 offenders released from the state’s prisons between 2003 and 2007. When other factors were controlled, the study showed that prisoners who received visits were 13 percent less likely to be convicted of a felony after their release, and 25 percent less likely to have their probation or parole revoked. Another 2009 study evaluated the effects of prison visitation in the Florida correctional system and found that prisoners who received visits were less likely to recidivate.

Some states have acknowledged these positive outcomes. The Washington State Corrections Department, which continues to offer extended family visits, has said that they “support building sustainable relationships important to offender re-entry and to provide an incentive for those serving long-term sentences to engage in positive behavioral choices.”

With studies indicating such striking benefits, and with such a small financial savings at stake, what is really at work? The debate in Mississippi is telling. Take Richard Bennett, a Republican state representative who for three straight years wrote bills seeking to ban conjugal visits, before the corrections department finally decided to end them on its own in 2014. “It’s unfair to have a child without a parent,” Bennett contends. “Taxpayers are paying for it. I don’t think it’s right. I think you’re in prison for a reason — you’re in prison because you did something, and there is a price to pay, and that’s part of the punishment.”

Amari Phillips is too young to comprehend that she was conceived in prison. But Keshawn Green, 20, has thought a lot about what it means for him that he, too, was conceived during a prison visit — and also what it means for his father, who has served 34 years of his life sentence. And in Mississippi, a “life sentence” means just that: to the end of a prisoner’s natural life span. “God gave me this life,” Green says, holding my eyes with a steady gaze. “Some people in there may never get out, and they need another piece of them out here living.” Green views his parents’ four-decade union as a “blessing” despite the barriers imposed by father’s incarceration. But he suspects that corrections officials have no idea what it’s like “when you can’t tuck your kids in or know that your wife is safe.”

Keshawn’s mother, Linda Green, was pregnant and had a 9-year-old son when her husband Charles, then a construction worker, went to prison. She had no plans for a third child, but 14 years later, she learned that she and Charles were again expecting. “I was 40!” she says with a chuckle. As Linda struggled to stitch together her separated clan, family visits were the seam.

CAROLYN DRAKE/MAGNUM PHOTOS

Linda Green, was pregnant and had a 9-year-old son when her husband Charles, then a construction worker, went to prison.

Linda is a reserved woman. Just over five feet tall and with a bob haircut, she speaks slowly and deliberately. She met Charles at a movie theater in Jackson, and the two got married while still in high school. After he went to prison, Linda moved in with her mother and went back to school. “Between canteen, collect calls, and visiting, don’t ask me how much I’ve spent,” she says. “I know it’s enough to buy a car or a small house.” She peers over her eyeglasses as she searches through a box of photographs and pulls out one of her sons with their father. “It kept me looking forward to [the future],” she says of the extended visits. On holidays, Linda brought the ingredients to make traditional Southern Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners — turkey, dressing, greens, macaroni and cheese — as if the family were all at home. Other times, they would head outside to the picnic table and play a game of spades with other married couples. “It made the boys feel closer to Charles,” Linda recalls. “It wasn’t like they didn’t know their father — they made memories every visit.”

Keshawn remembers visiting as a toddler, hopping on his father’s back to go for a walk, or standing in front of a stately tree picking pecans. As a boy, alongside his older brothers, he kneeled in front of the big lake on the prison grounds as his father showed him how to hook bait onto his fishing pole. “I ain’t never know how — I was young,” Keshawn says with a Southern twang, twisting his coiled locks of hair around his fingers. He looks at his mother on the other couch. “My momma ain’t never showed me how to skin one.” She interjects, laughing: “Naw, because I don’t do that.” Some thing were a father’s duty. Green says his father, who’s a big sports fan, often challenged him to a game of basketball during their visits. “I got better,” he says. “At first, I couldn’t dunk or beat him, but then I started beating him.”

Ann Adalist-Estrin, who directs the National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated at Rutgers University, says extended visits are the most helpful developmentally for kids. They allow kids the opportunity to see their parents as real and human and take away the strain of making each visit perfect. “During regular visits, kids are monitored seriously,” she explains. “They’re in very uncomfortable visiting arrangements, with hard seats, limited time face to face, can’t touch each other. It limits the child’s ability to go through cadence.”

“Cadence” refers to the series of group developmental stages that some therapists have dubbed “form, storm, norm, and perform.” Initially, the child is elated to see his or her parent. But during longer visits, there’s greater room for upheaval: Kids feel comfortable broaching difficult topics involving sadness or anger, because there’s more time to recover and return to normal. “In a short visit, if kids are beginning to ‘form’ and ‘norm’ the relationship, they will not do the ‘storm’ part, because they don’t feel comfortable,” Adalist-Estrin says. “They don’t have the time to resolve it before they leave.”

Linda Green agrees. “[Charles and I] fussed a little bit,” she admits. “It showed Keshawn how a couple could be.” Her son had a chance to see firsthand that love and commitment are complicated.

Today, Keshawn lives with his mom in a terra-cotta brick single-family home in Jackson with a sprawling, manicured lawn. Around the time he turned 16, his “family house” trips died down. They were getting boring for him; no teenager wants to be stuck at home with his parents for a week. Keshawn started working and establishing his own independence. He feels that he finally achieved it “when I stopped asking my mom for money or rides.” Still, he continued to speak with his father by phone and visited him twice a month, building on the bond they created in family house and forging a connection that prompted him to heed his father’s advice from a distance.

“I still view Keshawn as a baby,” Charles says. “He thinks he’s grown, but at 20 he still don’t know nothing. We have talked about safe sex, girlfriends, staying in school, and becoming a man.” The conversations that Charles had with his son years ago in family house are continuing and deepening. The Greens both recall Keshawn having several girlfriends. “He brought a few of them around here to meet me,” Linda says, “but this last one met the mark, and Keshawn said he was going to introduce her to Charles. That was a big deal for him.”

First, Keshawn let his girlfriend speak to his dad on the phone, and later she put in an application to visit. “He’d never brought a girl to meet me,” Charles says. “I’d been telling them how to get along over the phone for a while, but that visit was real important.” It was more than a phone call, more than a picture. “You could see that she cared a lot about him,” Charles continues. “Keshawn wanted to play Mr. Tough Guy in front of me, but I knew she was the one for him.” During their visit, he recalls the two talking about money. “The young lady said, ‘Keshawn, your money is our money, and my money is our money. We split everything 50/50.’” Charles told his son that if they decided on a partnership, this was indeed the way it should go. “She’s good for him,” Charles says happily. “I’m not going to choose who he’s going to love, but I’ll guide him to make smart choices.”

Amari Phillips can’t articulate her feelings about her relationship with her dad yet. She knows he’s in prison, but she doesn’t comprehend it. In a soft voice, she tells me that he has a “trailer house,” and that she’s “sad” and “mad” that they won’t be able to play in it together anymore. But she doesn’t understand why.

Corrections policies focus on the 2.2 million adults behind bars, not the 2.7 million kids who lose their parent.

Briana Olsem Winter, 11, who visited her mother in family house, understands more. She says the state’s decision to stop allowing visits from families is “just wrong.” When children can’t see their parents, “they won’t know ’em,” she says, looking down at the concrete.

Briana’s mother, Cristina Winter Pierre, 29, was once among the 7 percent of prisoners in Mississippi who are women. She says family house allowed her to be a mother and gave her daughter comfort. During regular contact visits, “you can’t hug on them like you would want to. And you really just can’t talk, because you got everybody in your business.” Pierre, who lost custody of four of her five children when she went to prison, says family house saved her relationship with Briana, her eldest daughter. “She would probably not know me,” she says, looking at Briana. “When you have that big of a space between you and your children for all them years, they do forget, if they’re young. And everybody says they don’t, but yes, they do, because my other children have no clue who I am.”

In June 2013, Sesame Street’s Sesame workshop launched the initiative Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration, which offers a number of free multimedia resources for families with young children affected by a parent’s imprisonment. Most notable among them was the introduction of Alex, a blue-haired, green-nosed Muppet, whose eyes are shaded by a gray hoodie. Like Amari, Alex has a father in prison. In a typical scene, Alex and two other Muppets are admiring toy cars, when one of them suggests asking their dads to help them build similar cars so they can all race together. “I don’t think so,” Alex mutters. “Oh, come on,” his friends insist. “It’ll be fun.” These simple words send Alex reeling. “He can’t do it,” says Alex, with his head bowed. “He’s not around right now.” They ask if he’s visiting a friend or on vacation. Alex just says his dad is “somewhere else.” Finally, he gives up, saying, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and then retreats to a stoop. Later in the scene, Alex admits he doesn’t want people to know that his dad is in prison or that he broke the law. This allows Sofia, the adult character, to teach the Muppets about incarceration and shame.

When I first meet Amari and her mom, they arrive as I’m ending my interview with Xacey Willis, 8, and her mother. Immediately, the gregarious Xacey directs her doe eyes at Amari and smiles widely. She runs over to her, offers some of her Funyuns, and asks her name. After the girls share that they both have a dad in prison — something they don’t reveal to classmates — they become inseparable for the next two hours. They sit next to each other at the table, laughing and coloring together, playing hand games, and finally striking a pose for my camera. Xacey, who pretends Amari is her younger sister, always takes the lead.

Xacey is a young prison activist. She wears a T-shirt with prisoners’ faces on it — her father’s included — and will quickly tell you that she’s “fighting for civil rights” and for her uncles and father to get out of prison. However, she keeps her dad’s incarceration a secret at school: “No, I don’t tell [my classmates]. I just tell them that he at work. I don’t like to tell them about my family a lot.” Xacey says she has a cousin in her classroom. Her usual booming voice drops to a whisper as she explains, “Her dad’s in prison too, but she don’t won’t nobody to know that. She think people gonna make fun of her.” Adopting a singsong voice and wagging her finger, she mimics the dreaded taunt: “Na-na-na-na-na-naah, your dad’s in prison, your dad’s in prison.”

Unfortunately, Amari and Xacey have never seen Alex; the character doesn’t appear on PBS. Rather, Sesame Workshop distributes the kits through criminal-justice groups, social workers, after-school programs, and state corrections departments. Part of a patchwork of nonprofit efforts to help kids with incarcerated parents, community programs are the only such resources available in Mississippi: There are no state-funded programs that focus on parental incarceration.

In 2012, the White House created a federal interagency working group, Children of Incarcerated Parents, to evaluate the federal programs and policies that impact these children. COIP is conducting research and running public-education initiatives, but federally funded programs to aid children like Amari and Xacey directly are hard to find. Though the Justice Department awarded $53 million in grants to reduce recidivism in 2015, just three grants, totaling a little more than $1.2 million, were committed to programs dealing explicitly with children of incarcerated parents. Of the three grantees, which run programs that focus on counseling and mentoring, only one has some aspect of assistance for visitation. Meanwhile, the Administration for Children and Families has no grants available for serving kids with parents in prison.

“There is so much more focus nowadays on the incarcerated individual, rather than also considering the impact that an individual’s incarceration may have on those he or she touches in his or her community or family life,” says Jeanette Betancourt, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president for community and family engagement. Several studies that show a correlation between regular inmate visitation and reduced recidivism also indicate a link between prison visits and family bonding. The New York State Department of Correctional Services recognizes these findings, describing its Family Reunion Program as an effort to “preserve and strengthen family ties that have been disrupted as a result of incarceration.” But in general, corrections policies are focused on the 2.2 million adults who are currently locked up in federal and state institutions, not the 2.7 million children who have been cut off from access to a parent.

“I also think racism enters into it,” says Adalist-Estrin, who is also a child and family therapist. “We’re talking about disproportionate numbers of people of color. It’s easier to say we don’t want to give them that privilege, we don’t want them having children.”

Tracey Chandler, whose husband is serving life in prison: “Everybody needs a hug. I know I do.”

I know I wasn’t better off without my father. Children are forgiving; they recognize human error. My father explained his crime, his imprisonment, and the necessity of his punishment, and I was grateful for the opportunity to exist somewhat wholly with my family. In fact, it wasn’t the barbed-wire gates or the officer holding a rifle in the gun tower that frightened me as a child. The frightening part was my father’s inability to step past a painted red line on the floor during regular contact visits or, worse, my own fear of touching him. Once, I watched his eyes well up as we mourned the death of my eldest brother, and I broke the rules and laid my hand on his. Most frightening of all, though, was the vitriol I saw in the eyes of the corrections officers, the belittling way they spoke to the prisoners and to us, their families. What was terrifying — and cutting — was that my dad was not perceived as human.

No one ever gave me permission to wear this uncomfortable truth. In most cases, our families live in the shadows, until we refuse to do so any longer. For Keshawn, that moment came in high school, when he realized that lying about his life wasn’t going to change it and that he didn’t care what people thought. “It got to a point when I stopped lying and told the truth,” he shrugs.

After family visits were taken away in Mississippi, conjugal visits were ended too. “We go in there to hold one another, hug one another, lift each other’s spirit,” says Angela Daniels, of Mississippi Advocates for Prisoners, whose husband is serving 40 years for attempted armed robbery. She thinks the view that conjugal visits are all about sex devalues the human need for privacy. “It’s not about just fulfilling the flesh,” she says. “We’re creating emotional stability. A man is not going to cry in front of others. Some will, but most won’t. We’ve taken our private time to share with one another, share our experiences, cry with one another. I was able to go in and relieve myself through tears and through prayer together in private.”

Xacey’s mom, Tracey Chandler, started the group Mississippi Southern Belles to support prisoners and their families. Her husband is serving life in prison, and she says that conjugal visits, which often happen as a part of regular day visits, helped maintain her family’s cohesion. On those occasions, her husband, who also has a 17-year-old daughter from a previous relationship, would share his own pain. “He missed Xacey’s first day of kindergarten, and my stepdaughter is going to graduate high school in May. He talks about missing all the important things in his children’s lives.” Chandler was able to comfort him: “Everybody needs a hug. I know I do.”

On a warm, sunny afternoon in late April, about 25 demonstrators gather on the steps outside the federal courthouse in Jackson to protest prison conditions, corruption, and visiting limitations. Among them is Linda Green, coming from her graveyard shift at work. She’s wearing a Mississippi Advocates for Prisoners T-shirt and holding a sign that reads Pro-Conjugal. It wasn’t until a few days later that Green realized the significance of the sign. “I’m such a private person,” she says. “It’s going to be some people asking, ’Why was she protesting for inmates? She must have someone in prison.’” Green participates in a prison ministry and recently gave a talk about the impact of incarceration on her family, but a TV appearance is a different level of publicity. “Charles said a lot of the inmates saw it,” she adds with a chuckle. “He was happy and proud of me. It made me feel good knowing I could be a voice for him on the outside.” She also feels that she doesn’t have a choice: “We’ve got to do this,” she offers.

As Keshawn thinks about the time his brothers served, he realizes that he was one of the lucky ones: He made it. Having a connection with your father is vital for every child, he says. He imagines that kids growing up now with a parent, but without extended family visits, will intensely feel the sting of their separation. Even with family house, it was hard for him. On the worst days, he felt so alone, he says: “No brothers, no dad. Me… just me. One person.”

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, now known as Type Investigations. The photos were made possible by support from the Puffin Foundation.

The post What About Us? appeared first on Type Investigations.

Sylvia A. Harvey – Type Investigations

When the Clock is Cruel: Parents Face Pandemic Hurdles as They Race to Keep Their Kids

The Backstory: Sylvia A. Harvey

How a Trip to Prison Cost Kenneth Clark His Right to Be a Parent

Key Findings

Kenneth Clark tried to help his friend during an assault. Those efforts ended up landing him in prison. And thanks to the Clinton-era Adoption and Safe Families Act, it also ended up costing him his children.

Key Findings

Under the law in Arkansas, where Clark lives, foster care agencies are required to begin terminating parental rights whenever a child has lived in foster care for 12 of the last 22 months. That put Clark on an almost impossible timeline.

Key Findings

The law requires child protective agencies to make “reasonable efforts” to keep children with their parents. But Clark and his lawyers documented how the state had given him almost none of the services he would have needed while in prison to hold on to his parental rights.

Reflections on Rage and Reform

I Moved Into a Domestic Violence Shelter and Haven’t Seen My Son In Weeks

Stepping Up

Key Findings

An estimated 2.7 million children in the United States have a parent behind bars.

42% of mothers in state prisons, some 50,000 in 2004, identify their child’s grandmother as the current caregiver.

Grandparents face two primary paths in caring for these grandchildren: legal guardianship or foster parenting.

Legal guardianship allows the incarcerated parent to retain parental rights, but offers zero financial or social supports.

Foster parent status provides grandparents with a substantial stipend and access to day care, after school programs, and more.

But to gain foster care status, a grandparent must first abandon the child to the child welfare system, and risk losing custody entirely.

Grandparents who become foster parents are ultimately asked to adopt, making the parent a legal stranger to the child.

The 20-Week Abortion Ban Bind

Key Findings

Sixteen states, including Indiana, have 20-week abortion bans

Women who learn of potentially lethal abnormalities at or after their 20-week ultrasound face limited options.

The pro-life movement inspired a massive wave of state-level abortion restrictions in recent years.

What About Us?

Key Findings

Sylvia A. Harvey uncovers the history of racism that has shaped prison visitation policies for a century.

Over half of incarcerated adults are parents – yet only 4 states widely offer extended visitation for families.

In Mississippi, family visits were abruptly stopped in 2012; erosion of visitation rights fractured family ties.

Interviews

Harvey was interviewed on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show and PRX’s Radio Curious.