"Dismantling Structural Racism in Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare"

Timebanks USA 2009 Conference, by A. David Dahmer

Experts gathered from around the nation and world to join in the TimeBanks USA Colloquium "Dismantling Structural Racism in Juvenile Justice and Child Welfare" June 26 at the Madison Concourse Hotel & Governor's Club.
As a part of TimeBanks USA 2009 Conference "A Time For Justice, A Wealth of Opportunity," the colloquium on racial disparities in the criminal justice system hoped to spearhead a new initiative to dismantle the structural racism that pervades the juvenile justice and child welfare systems and to propose potential legal remedies and community-based alternatives.
The conference brought together hundreds of people from around the world to explore the many ways that TimeBanking is being applied to community-building, social justice, health promotion, and humanitarian goals. It was attended by a group of thought leaders, practitioners, subject matter experts, administrators, advocates, legislators, legal professionals, youth from the system, and other stakeholders that came from as far as Great Britain, Israel, and Ghana.
The welcoming message of the Racial Justice Initiative Colloquium was given by Edgar Cahn, the founder of TimeBanks USA, which was followed by various panels and then action planning groups.
 Dana Newman, Deputy CEO and President of the Youth Advocate Programs Inc. for New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.; Cathy Ciano, Parent Support Network in Rhode Island; and Matt Fraidin, a professor at UDC David A. Clarke School of Law led a panel titled "Alternatives that Work."
Newman explained that the Youth Advocate Programs Inc. is in 16 different states and that they had 125 programs nationally and overseas.
"We work with kids in the communities where they live," Newman said, "and we work predominantly with youth of color. We know the way to reduce recidivism is simply to go way beyond what restorative justice requires."
Newman talked about Disproportionate Minority Confinement (DMC) and how it impacts the community and does more harm than just to the individual youngsters. "What you're doing is taking young adults out of the community, incarcerating them, and then not giving them the opportunity to increase their competencies," Newman said. "You're pulling a potential strength out of the community and weakening it."
There are many kids who are just doing childish things in the community that haven't really decided to offend yet that could be potential positives in the community with just a little bit of direction,” Newman said. "They could or could not end up in trouble, but they believe that it really doesn't matter because everybody that they know is in prison anyways. It's a cycle of despair that DMC creates."
Seventy percent of youth in detention have either a father or a mother who has been or is currently in prison. "We have to understand how incarceration deprives a youngster of community, not just in terms of resources, but from a psychological viewpoint as well," he said.
Warren closed showcasing some specific numbers on a giant whiteboard.
"These are difficult economic times so if you want to get into the head of a policymaker, you have to talk about costs," Warren said, pointing to the numbers he had written. "We spend $200-300 a day to keep a kid in placement. On average, the youth Advocate Program charges about $60.
Warren’s big posterboard read:
365 x $200 a day = $73,000 per year
365 x $60 a day =  $21,900 per year
"For the cost of detaining one youngster per year, you can actually work with way more youngsters in the community," he closed. "That … is significant."
Warren thanked people for hearing him speak at the Racial Justice Initiative Colloquium, which is part of the collaborative development of a new legal strategy to redress racial disparity in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Involvement in these systems can cause traumatic and crippling injuries with lifelong consequences for the young people, their families and the broader community. The critical barrier to past judicial relief has been the requirement to prove government officials' intent to discriminate.
The Racial Justice Initiative Colloquium topics included:
•  documenting the injuries for young people, their families and the broader community;
• highlighting the social and economic costs of maintaining the status quo;
• and showcasing what works to secure just outcomes for young people, their families, and the broader community.
Ciano, the executive director of the Parent Support Network in Rhode Island, is the parent of five. She said one of her sons who has bipolar disorder, now 28, was first hospitalized at age 12, he spent four years in institutional care, including the Training School.
 "From 13 to age 18, my son was in institutions," she said. "He will tell you himself that it didn't help him, it made him sicker, and it isolated him from his friends, school, community, and family."
When he finally came home he said he didn't know how to be a part of a family anymore and lacking crucial support services, his parents couldn't manage him at home.
At 19, he moved out and got hooked on drugs. "I'm very lucky I didn't lose him to drug overdose or suicide,” Cianoi said, “but he is alive today and relatively well. I call him my miracle child.
"He is so strong; he is a survivor, but I will tell you that my son is so traumatized from his experience,” she continued. “It's impacted him in a way that he will never get over. To this day, he has nightmares about his time in jail — the juvenile corrections facility.
"If we could've gotten respite services, that would've made a big difference," she added. "We needed mentoring. We needed outreach and tracking. It wasn't just clinical services."
Matt Fraidin opened his talk by asking: How do we have fewer minority youth in the child-welfare system?
"One, we need to put fewer kids in foster care and two, if they are in there, take them out more quickly," Fraidin said.
Fraidin cited a pioneering study done by Joseph Doyle, an economics professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management who studies social policy, who determined that children whose families are investigated for abuse or neglect are likely to do better in life if they stay with their families than if they go into foster care.
 "The goal of foster care is to improve a child's life. What Doyle found in the first study following 15,000 children and another following 23,000 children is that similarly maltreated children have better outcomes if they stay at home rather than foster care," Fraidin said.
One of the problems, Fraidin contended, is that the financial incentive to states is in favor of taking the kids out of their homes.
“The state can get a substantial amount of reimbursement for keeping a child in foster care from the federal government," Fraidin said. “They cannot get reimbursed for prevention and preservation services.”
That's a huge obstacle.
"Doyle's research shows us that many of these removals are unnecessary if our goal is to improve children's lives," Fraidin said.
For the last year, Fraidin's own students in Washington D.C. have been exclusively representing parents whose children have been taken away by their local child welfare agencies. "Sixty percent of the children involved in our cases were never determined to be neglected," he said. "Talk about your budget crisis. That's a lot of money being spent and a lot of children's lives being upended needlessly."