Burning Down The House
There is ongoing fiscal incentive by the American government to destroy families. It needs to stop.
The Most Racist and Dangerous Profession On Planet Earth. Part I: Systemic Racism 101.
In an excellent and eye opening article I discovered on Medium, author Tony Hynes details the interplay of race and the adoption industry here in the United States. He points out that the Adoption and Safe Families Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton on November 19, 1997 “created compelling financial incentives for states to reduce their foster care populations by promoting adoption rather than offering cash, food, housing, or childcare assistance to families. Ultimately, this shift in policy disincentivized states to keep families together.”
Mr. Hynes then drops the bomb observing that “Under the Safe Families Act, states receive 20 million for exceeding the average number of adoptions their states complete in specified years.”
Yes, you read that right. The dollars and cents afforded by the Federal Government to States increases when the prosecution wins.
What this essentially means is that there is an ongoing fiscal incentive to destroy families. The more that parental rights are terminated, the more money the State receives from the Federal government.
Here’s data from a report dated November 8, 2004; Child Welfare: Implementation of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (P.L. 105–89)
“ASFA authorized annual incentive payments to states that exceeded their highest previous number of foster child adoptions in a given year, with larger payments for adoptions of children with special needs. Congress reauthorized and revised this program in 2003 (P.L. 108–145), to create separate incentives for adoptions of older children. For adoptions in FY1998-FY2003, states “earned” a total of $178 million (of which $17.9 million were earned by 31 states and Puerto Rico for adoptions finalized in 2003). HHS data indicate approximately 52,500 children were adopted with the involvement of public child welfare agencies in 2002, for an increase of nearly 70% since 1997.”
As a result, it hardly matters if parents caught in the web of family services adhere to service compliance (usually in the form of something called “parent education” among other so-called services). The parents will always find themselves subjected to multiple psychological evaluations by the prosecutions “expert” who often seems predisposed to issue a report proclaiming that the client remains unable to parent. This opinion often rendered regardless of the parent’s compliance with Court Ordered services and proof of parental readiness or capability.
Because I currently consult as expert witness on behalf of the Public Defender, I am first hand witness to the misuse and abuse of psychological instruments in what amounts to overt racism employed by the psychological experts hired by the prosecution. Specifically, the Family Court and termination of parental rights of the States most vulnerable citizens; its ethnically diverse (i.e., Black and Latino) clients.
I have often found the experts examination of the parent to be biased, misleading and dishonest. They are also frequently unethical and run counter to the American Psychological Association (APA) ethical guidelines for professional conduct.
For example, as I write this I am in the process of preparing to provide rebuttal testimony on behalf of the defense to a prosecution experts psychological report which claims that an African-American mother of three is intellectually and cognitively challenged and subsequently is unable to parent. This same psychological expert also claims that this parent has little insight despite that fact that the expert has no psychometric data to support any of his claims and in fact, he himself presents data in his report that contradicts his very own “professional” opinion. The expert, a white male psychologist, nevertheless, doubles down on his unproven claims in spite of his own contradictory data (his testing of the client found no evidence of cognitive impairment)and also despite the fact that the client has completed all Court Ordered services including parenting education, counseling sessions and therapies, has steady employment, has obtained a new car to travel back and forth to work sites, has sustained her residence for three years without default, and, get this, has been parenting her youngest child with no involvement from family services for well over 3 years.
The motive and desire on behalf of family services and the prosecution for the State is made more clear once one understands that the Safe Family Act of 1997: “stipulates that courts terminate the rights of birth parents whose children are in foster care within two years.” As Tony Hynes points out in his piece “this mandate hampers birth parents from regaining their parental rights even when they are in positions to provide a safe, permanent home environment for their children.”
Psychologists for the prosecution/family services rely on the “concept of permanency” to support the two year time frame for children placed in foster care and they have many tricks in their bag to essentially run out the clock on parents fighting to reunify their family. One of the methods they use is to mis-characterize the concept of Bonding to the Family Court where they will attempt to flip the script so to speak; they attribute genuine descriptions of Bonding to the resource or foster parents and relegate the child’s attachment to the natural parents to a status perhaps best described as non-primary, unhealthy and/or developmentally deviant. This despite all documented evidence that exists to the contrary from descriptions of parent-child interaction during supervised visits.
I have seen and dealt with thousands of psychological reports like this over the course of my involvement and I am convinced that it boils down to a numbers game. It’s often about the Benjamin’s and doing whatever it takes to meet quota in order to obtain surplus for the State; to increase the Federal allotment through the tool of family services. It is the dark side under the veneer of slogans in the public sector about “saving families and rescuing children.” And clinical psychology is the sharpest and most lethal weapon used to execute the termination of parental rights.
This is the first installment in a series of articles that will expose, from my personal experience, how clinical psychologist hired by the prosecution to serve as expert witnesses, often lack cultural competence in their training and use tools that are inappropriate and inherently biased, employ racist tropes in their reports, and misuse tools of assessment to influence Court decisions. This series will canvass topics in the areas of Youth and Family Services and describe Bonding assessment and Measures of Parenting; The Inkblot test; Measures of Personality and IQ testing and how they are weaponized. This series will also include discussion about neuropsychological testing of Black professional athletes in the NFL and the phenomenon of “Black norms.”
References:
I Am the Black Adoptee of White Parents: What George Floyd Taught Me About Race and the Adoption Industry. Tony Hynes.
Thank you for reading.
© 2021 Andrew P. Brown III, PhD. All rights reserved.