Download This PaperDisrupting Carceral Logic in Family Policing
28 Pages Posted: 3 Oct 2023 Last revised: 4 Oct 2023
Date Written: September 29, 2023
Abstract
Among a growing consensus that the criminal legal system is oversized, racist, and ineffective at preventing harm, the “child welfare”/family-policing system continues to be praised for protecting children from “bad” parents. The tremendous harm the system inflicts on millions of families and communities—particularly low-income populations and communities of color—is ignored. So, the violence of the multibillion-dollar system continues unabated: separating children from their families of origin mostly based on a family’s poverty or the system’s culturally biased judgment of parenting; siloing children in often long-term and high-risk foster “care”; and sometimes even permanently orphaning children via the termination of parental rights. As a growing body of research, scholarship, and, most importantly, lived experiences of impacted people reveals, the punishment and family separation of poor, Black, Native, and other marginalized families is central to the American project of maintaining white supremacy, as well as other hierarchies along divisions such as class and gender. Like the criminal system, the family policing system is driven by, and in turn perpetuates, carceral logic—an array of legal practices that operate to police, discipline, and most importantly, subordinate a given population in the name of safety or protection.
In her excellent new book, TORN APART: HOW THE CHILD WELFARE SYSTEM DESTROYS BLACK FAMILIES AND HOW ABOLITION CAN BUILD A SAFER WORLD, Professor Dorothy Roberts takes a monumental step toward illuminating the harms of the family-policing system and remedying the false narrative that it helps families and protects children. It is difficult, if not impossible, to overstate Professor Roberts’s contributions to this field, not to mention numerous others. Twenty-one years ago, Roberts published SHATTERED BONDS: THE COLOR OF CHILD WELFARE, the first full-scale examination of the system by a legal scholar. In the intervening decades she has continued to document the system’s harms and to inspire and support other scholars, lawyers, and advocates (including me) to consider how this system operates in parallel to the criminal system and overlaps with it to surveil, separate, and punish Black and other marginalized families. In TORN APART, Roberts deftly combines a growing body of research into racialized social control and the harms of the family-policing system with her groundbreaking past work and her theoretical framework of abolitionism. In so doing, Professor Roberts has produced another iconic work that will shape the fields of family law, poverty law, and criminal law for years to come. To be clear, I mean shape both the scholarly and the practical/advocacy realms; one of Roberts’ particular skills is bridging the oft-criticized gap between legal scholarship and law on the ground. Her work will influence not only how people think about and teach family law, but also, hopefully, how families interact with and are treated by the state.
This Review aims to use TORN APART as a springboard to further explore the carceral logics of the family-policing system and, particularly, the role of lawyers in maintaining and legitimating these logics. Drawing in part from my own experiences representing children and teenagers in family court, I follow Roberts’s thread of the complicity of system actors to delineate how lawyers for children and lawyers for parents (albeit perhaps unwittingly) participate in the system’s silencing and dehumanizing logic.
Keywords: family policing, child welfare, lawyers, carceral logic, abolitionism
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