The Problem with Punishing Parents
Stories of child abuse or the death a child shock us, and they should. But how much do you know about the systems that are supposed to prevent this? We talk to several moms who went through New York's "child welfare system" wringer. They decided to do something better to support parents and became part of the community at Rise. These moms and our other guests talk about why our "family policing" system doesn't work. And how we could replace it with strategies that actually support safe and healthy families.
View on Zencastr
Listen to the episode here.
Useful Links:
The parents we heard from are from Rise. The organization used to be called Rise Magazine, but they are more of an organizing project. You can read one of the interviewed mothers, Shakira Paige’s story in the magazine here.
jasmine Sankofa is the director of the Movement for Family Power.
Jesse McGleughlin is with the Bronx Defenders Family Law Practice.
How does cash assistance make a difference? Here’s the pilot project in Washington DC that jasmine mentioned. Here’s a study from the Center on Budget and Policy priorities from 2023 showing that cash assistance reduces risk of involvement in the child welfare system. Here’s an article from Columbia Journal of Race and Law (2022) on how guaranteed basic income can and should be a policy priority to end the child welfare system.
What’s with New York’s especially high rates of system involvement? First, here’s a February 2025 report from the NYC Administration of Children’s Services to see the current scope of the system, and an even more recent publication in Gothamist about NY’s high rates and racial bias.
Here’s a 2024 report from the New York Family Policy Project showing that New York screens out fewer hotline calls than most other states, which contributes to NY’s extremely high investigation rate.
Here’s testimony from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) in 2024 about the scope and consequences of the State Central Register (SCR).
Here’s the Surgeon General’s 2024 advisory on parental stress which jasmine and Kathleen mention.
Here’s a report from the Schuyler Center for Analysis and Advocacy on the trauma of the current system with other policy recommendations.
Transcript :
Kathleen (host): This is the Problem with Punishment Podcast. Spoiler alert: the problem with punishment is that it doesn't work. But the bigger problem is that we turn to punishment in every aspect of our lives, from our families to our neighborhoods, our boroughs, our city. We keep expecting punishment to make things better, when for the most part, it makes whatever problem we're addressing worse. Every time punishment fails, it hurts. Some people have taken the pain of that failure and turned it into purpose. I'm your host, Kathleen Pequeño, and I'll be talking with a range of New Yorkers who have experienced firsthand the failure of punishment and who found or created something better to do instead. From gun violence to child abuse to drug addiction, New York can lead the way in actually solving some of our most pressing problems. But first, we have to talk about the problem with punishment.
Welcome to this episode, which is about the family policing system. If when I say that you don't know what I mean, don't worry, I'm going to explain over the course of this episode. You can think of it as the problem with punishing parents. I'm going to start this episode with a story in early 2024, I was home one evening with one of our kids, other mama was out taking care of our other child, and there had been a pee pee accident at school, by which I mean pre-K. By which I mean you're learning to like, you know, put away toys and wash your hands. It's not exactly school, but you know, and she'd had an accident. It was a weeknight, I'm still like, we're going to eat. We're going to get time together. I got to do laundry. It's all going to work out. I'm going to do it. And I'm starting laundry, getting some food in the oven. We're negotiating. Let's watch a show. We're trying to pick a show on Disney that's short enough that we can get to bed at a decent hour, but we both want to watch--the really important work of parenting. And the doorbell rang and I was like, oh, it's a package getting delivered. I'm going to ignore it. So we continued our dinner prep and important show negotiations, and then the doorbell rang again, and I was like, oh, someone's selling something. I'm going to ignore it. And we were really kind of settling in, figuring out like, okay, food's ready, pull it out of the oven. I think we had almost settled the show debate. And then it rang a third time, and I was like, fine, y'all are determined to interrupt our family time. And I go to answer the door, and there's someone there. She says, "Hi, my name is so-and-so. I'm with the Administration for Children's Services, and we have accepted a complaint through the complaint line. I need to talk to you, and I need to see your children."
I'm gonna pause the story there and say that I had heard stories like this for many years from an organization called Rise, actually from several organizations doing amazing work in New York State. But one of the first ones I had done a little bit of volunteer work with was Rise Magazine, which worked to do leadership development and storytelling development, which, of course, I love a good story. I love a good story for social justice. I love a good story for change. And Rise Magazine had been working with parents to tell their stories of what was happening when they were in contact with the administration for Children's Services for many years.
When I talk about people feeling the pain of punishment and turning that pain into purpose, I am really thinking of folks like the parents at Rise, mostly moms who have had experience with ACS and have really then sought to take the best lessons from that experience and do what they can to help other people in the same situation. So with that, I want to go ahead and let you get to know a little bit about Rise by hearing from three of the parents who work with them.
Shakira K: Everyone's situation varies. However, in ACS's eyes, they look at all of us the same because we all genuinely get treated the same.
Kathleen (host): So that's Shakira. Shakira is a mother of three from Brooklyn, and also, by the way, she's a she's a dog mom, I can relate.
Shakira K: Whether your situation is just genuinely needing help or if in any other case, you get that same sort of distraughtment and I had that within myself. I was judged by how I was looked and how I perceived. I'm a Black young woman with dreads, so to me, ACS treats parents as if they're a damnation, as if they are just genuinely a problem, and they should not be raising their children. And that is very wrong. It's completely wrong.
Kathleen (host): When I was at Rise, I was also meeting with Shakira Page. She's the mother of six. She first came to Rise as a parent in 2019, when ACS took her children, and she's actually told the story of what happened with her ACS involvement in Rise Magazine. We're going to drop a link to it in the notes. A really amazing story. Really, really amazing mom.
Shakira P: And the punishment that they give us, honestly, is not even close to how they take our kids away from us and give us the punishment. But honestly, the kids still get punished either way. They get punished in the system. While they're in that system, their lives change just as much as our lives change. We shouldn't be punished because we're trying to be the best parents that we can be.
Kathleen (host): And Shanene. Shanene is from the Bronx, and she was introduced to Rise through the Child Welfare Organizing Project. And she also was involved with ACS and had to deal with removal, all three of them great moms here's Shanene.
Shanene B: And like what Paige [Shakira P] said, the children is the one that's getting is more traumatized behind it. So, removing children, but the big challenge is when the children and the families come back together. That's still punishment because of what the families have to go through with returning back home to their children.
Kathleen (host): There are support groups that run at Rise. On a Saturday afternoon, they sat down with me in the conference room, kind of talked through their experiences with with ACS, their experience working with parents. I mean, all three of them have been through this meat grinder of a system, and they're really clear. They've all managed to really keep perspective about what parents need, how to help parents, and what it means to have ACS, a really large bureaucracy, suddenly just come crashing into your life,and your family's life in their cases, take their kids.
Shakira K: And it's very messed up that on paper I can look like a complete monster. My case as well was also I had a drug case, a marijuana case, which was very frustrating for me because my entire case was illegal. They used a prior case from my mother to get a case on me. So, to go through all of that illegal loophole to learn if I was in a different state, this would have never been the situation for me. I have to wonder, is it because of my skin color? Is it because of where I live? Or is it just because these people are reading what they want on paper? Because I have a past history of something.
Kathleen (host): Now Shanene's situation is a little bit different. You know, she was basically being punished by the system for having drug issues. And she's really clear what she needed was help.
Shakira P: I know that I had to go and seek help to do what I need to do. If you understand what I'm trying to say between, you know, can it be helpful or can it in this case, for me, it was helpful for me, but along other ways and other things down the line I believe it was it wasn't good at all. But that part, I just knew that I had to take the first step, and I already knew what was going to happen after that.
Kathleen (host): When Shanene says, "I knew what was going to happen," it's that she was at that point really determined to change and to get herself the resources that she needed. And this is something that all three of them described, the pain of separation from their kids, which I find unimaginable. The frustration of feeling like you're being judged and punished and then something else is happening at the same time as well, which is someone interacting with them, not focused on what rules did they break and do they need to be punished? But what support do they need to do the work they need to do for themselves? I want you to get to hear a little bit more about this.
Shakira P: What brought me to Rise was definitely this beautiful, sweet old lady who I adopted me and basically became my aunt. Her name is Robin. But also in the same breath, what also brought me to Rise is seeing the family unification that Rise has at the workplace, where they make you feel like you're home even if you're not home. So even if your life is in a disaster, in shambles, you still have a place where you can come and feel loved and feel respected and feel heard. So that's one of the strongest things that I love about Rise.
Shakira P: When I came to Rise. I was able to advocate for myself so well that I got my kids back at eight months. So I think that people should have, like I said, parenting. If they put a lot of things in place for parents, instead of thinking about putting these things in place _after_ they get our kids removed, I got lucky to have a respectful foster in the foster care agencies to have somebody that understood the situation and respected me enough to be like, "no, I think you're better than this."
Shakira P: They made me, you know, made me see me for me and not me. Because I think if she didn't see me for me, I don't think I would have my kids back now because I would have seen myself as the worst parent in the world. I don't want my kids no more. Y'all make me feel like this is hell, that my kids are never coming back. When they come back, they're going to hate me. They're not going to love me. So I think if I didn't have that person say that you're advocating, you're listening. You're doing what you need to do to get those babies back. And actually, like, like I said, come in here. And she's here now, like she follows. She came to Rise, left the foster care agency, and we work together. So just having that relationship still with her is amazing for me. She taught me that I shouldn't have to listen to nobody, just listen to my kids. And I did just that. And it works out for me. And it works out for my family. And it works out for me having a team that they, you know, right now, being a peer, being a peer trainer, we actually try to sever the bonds and have parents understand that we care before you even catch a case.
Kathleen (host): Right. I mean, let's talk about before you catch a case. Being a parent is hard. Parents listening to this are like, yeah, I know. The folks who aren't parents yet or maybe will never be are saying, "Oh, I know, I know, it's so hard." I'm like, no, it's hard, it's so hard. The US Surgeon General issued a bulletin in 2024 talking about how stressful it was, how it was a level of stress that was just almost at a crisis point for so many parents. And the thing is, the interventions are there. This idea of being able to talk to people who are peers, who can genuinely say, I know what you mean about how hard this is, and understand your struggles. It can make such a difference in breaking isolation. If we're going to talk about supporting parents, parents are gonna play a role in that.
Shakira K: It should not be up to one to a couple of people who've never experienced that. In terms of a person, a parent who's dealing with mental health issues, and even asking for help or not. There should be a therapist and a person who is trained in that, whether they have the experience of that, getting over their mental distraught and coming to a better standing within themselves, where they can be productive in society, and can now help others who've had that same mental struggle. Everyone is different, so it should not be the same set of people who've never gone through these things, who don't have children, who haven't done these sorts of drugs, who've never been in an impoverished area in their lives. I've never come from a place of living in two homes, so I don't expect someone who who grew up their life going on vacations, having vacation homes. You didn't live the same life I've lived. So you telling me to just get over it and find a job, or just get through it and do these programs. You don't know the struggles I've had as a person, so I think everybody should be detailed different. It should not be the same amount of caseworkers. You should have therapists involved.
Kathleen (host): So we're going to take a step back for a moment from our time with the parents at Rise to take a look at the big picture. Rise is one of a number of organizations operating on the local level, and New York State is lucky to have a few of them where people are questioning why there is so much money and resource for investigating families, for separating families and not enough money and resource for fully supporting families. On the national level, there's Movement for Family Power, and this is an organization that's bringing together different grassroots organizations, promoting healing justice, helping organizations on the local level with their work by connecting them to the national movement. And I was very lucky to get some time with jasmine Sankofa, the director, and she talks about the big picture in which these local grassroots groups are operating. I'll let you listen.
jasmine S: The key takeaway is just that kids are not made safer by the criminalization of their parents. And if we want to keep babies safe, we have to take care of their parents. You know, I think there's this false dichotomy that exists that it's children versus parents, parents versus children, and that is not the case. And, you know, in order to move forward, in order to truly keep families safe, in order to have thriving communities, we must invest in them. The war on drugs, like we're seeing like this federal drug control funding increased by 400%, right? Where went from $4 billion in 1982 to $20 billion in 2003, and then during the same period right from 1982 to 2003, we're seeing federal funding for removing children from their homes increased by 20,000%. And I'll say that again, where federal funding for removing children from their homes increased by 20,000% between 1982 and 2003. So from $25 million to $5 billion. So the family policing system is a multi-billion dollar industry. And instead of investing those resources into families directly, this is where we're choosing to place those funds.
And now to your point around harm reduction, what I would want folks to know really is that using drugs does not define a parent's ability to care for their child. And the stigma that we see around parents using drugs has roots in the racist drug war, right. So as the civil rights movement progressed and governments began creating and expanding carceral systems like the family policing and criminal legal systems, we're seeing that at the same time, the government was enacting the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which is the federal legislation that created the modern family policing system. There's these manufacturing of demonizing myths about Black mothers. You know, myths that have since been disproven, but the stigma they created still exists at the core of our policies.
Kathleen (host): That stigma is absolutely at the center of these policies, policies which disproportionately target Black and Latíne families. And target them specifically for the threat of removal or the reality of removal. Let's say for a second that we were like, oh, what you really want to do is to help families be safe and successful. Why would removal be so high up on the list of options, right? Who asks for help when the option of getting help might mean that your family gets completely broken up? You know, I want to go back to the Rise moms who are going to talk a little bit more about this.
Shanene B: I want somebody for once to say removal is not an option. I would love for that to be said, that a removal is not an option, that we have other you know, we have other options.
Shakira P: I swear, because that's that's it.
Shakira K: You know, it's true.
Shakira P: When you go to ACS, they'd be like, oh, we got a parenting class for you. Oh you're angry. Yeah. We think you should go to anger management. Oh, you're depressed now. I'm depressed because my kids are in care. I'm angry because you're talking to me like I'm crazy and I don't know what I did.
Kathleen (host): All right. And this is where we also have to talk about one big thing here, which is that most of these cases are not about abuse. They are about "neglect." I'm making air quotes right now. "Neglect" is a code word for poverty, and this is an issue that jasmine and Movement for Family Power have raised a lot and correctly.
jasmine S: When families have resources, they are better off and the system does not do anything, right? --in interrupting any of the harm that might happen within families. And so thinking creatively and having space where folks can talk about, you know, their struggles without feeling as if that information can then lead to a child being separated. And meanwhile, the family policing system uses poverty as a reason to kidnap children from their parents.
Kathleen (host): Now, kidnapping is a really loaded word, right? Why call it kidnapping? Well, let's think for a second. If your next door neighbor thought there was a problem with your parenting, came over, took your kids, took them to their house, insisted you couldn't see them. You would call that kidnapping because when kids are removed from families and then it turns out the case is unsubstantiated--that there wasn't a justification for it--the system is just kind of like, oh, okay, well, I guess I was wrong. No harm, no foul. There is no compensation. There is no formal apology. They just took the kids. And then they think they can just give them back. In any other circumstance, we would talk about that as kidnapping. And let's bring this back to: we all want children to be safe. All reasonable people can agree that we want children to be safe. jasmine and Movement for Family Power talks about that. So does Rise. But I'm going to let jasmine sum it up really well.
jasmine S: Protecting children requires that parents have access to the life sustaining resources that truly keep families safe. And this includes permanent housing, culturally competent and non-compulsory medical health services, voluntary substance use treatment programs rooted in harm reduction practices, sustainable education and gainful employment, affordable child care and respite care, and direct cash assistance.
By punishing families, the fear right the threat of family policing interventions is what is keeping folks and deterring folks from seeking support, right? We're turning any institutions of help and support into carceral systems, right? And that includes our healthcare system that includes other social services. And instead of supporting folks, we've created and constructed a system that responds with punishment and responds with forced family separation instead of support.
Kathleen (host): So, I mean, it would be possible to create these systems. And part of the reason we know why is organizations like Rise, where the community comes first. The opportunity to talk about what the situation you're in without judgment. The opportunity to get assistance comes first. And it's not that removal and punishment are the first things on the table. Let's go back to Shanene from Rise.
Shanene B: With parents, you know, nobody wants to ask for help. Nobody. Sometimes people don't know how to ask for help without being judged. What should be done instead of them being punished? You know, it starts with community.
Kathleen (host): After spending an afternoon with the Rise parents, and after talking with jasmine, I still had questions. Once you catch a case, you could wind up in the courts, and I wanted to understand what that looked like. So I talked with Jesse McGleughlin, policy counsel at the Bronx Defenders family defense practice. Jesse's been working with parents involved in the family policing system since she was a law student. And I asked Jessie what she and her colleagues are seeing in the cases where they're representing families.
Jesse M: I think it's a system that's really designed to surveil, punish, control, and separate poor Black and Brown families under the guise of child welfare and child well-being. And I think at its core, there's this really fundamentally untrue and racist idea that Black communities, poor communities, cannot effectively parent their children. And what we see is poverty is often conflated with neglect. And we see essentially the destruction of poor Black and Brown communities under the guise of child welfare. And, you know, that's why me and my colleagues, my colleagues and I, we talk about the system not as a child welfare system, but as a family policing system and a family regulation system. It's regulating and controlling and policing poor Black and Brown communities.
Kathleen (host): And Jesse's not just talking to me on a podcast about this. Jessie and other folks testified to the legislature in late 2024 about the scale of this problem.
Jesse M: The problem starts with the reporting hotline. In New York State, people can anonymously call the state Central Register to make reports of alleged abuse or neglect with respect to children. What we know is that New York State is rejecting only about 25% of calls alleging maltreatment, which is far lower than the national average. And this isn't because there's more abuse in New York. This is because New York's State Central Register is not appropriately screening out calls, and all the calls that the State Central Register gets and screens in essentially have to be investigated. In New York City, where I practice as a public defender, in 2023, there were 53,000 cases; only 23% of those cases were substantiated. So what that means is that nearly 75% of the cases and investigations that ACS, the Administration for Children's Services in New York, is conducting are unsubstantiated. What that means is that families are being investigated, asked to do services, and threatened that if they don't do services, their children will be taken away. All that is true because we have a system that is essentially allowing surveillance of mostly Black and Latine people without any real guardrails. And what we know, and there's tons of testimony about this, is that the State Central Register is weaponized. People are calling, you know, a person who's abused another person might be calling in a report, a landlord who might want to evict their resident calls in a report. People are using the State Central Register to harass people, and then these calls are not being appropriately screened out. Investigations are taking place, those investigations are coercive, and families where there is actually found to be no harm, no abuse, and no neglect are having a massive overreach. And those are Black and Latine families.
Kathleen (host): So in 2023, the last complete year of stats that Jesse was talking about when she was providing testimony, there's over 53,000 investigations in New York City, and less than a quarter of these cases wind up with a finding. So that's 37,000 cases without a finding. When there are findings and those less than 25% of the cases, they're most often for neglect. jasmine brought this up. Jesse brought this up. The moms at Rise brought this up. We're going to talk about that while these investigations are going on, by the way, and some of the cases, the kids have been removed. They've been taken from their parents. But yeah, 37,000 times in that year, there was no finding. I'm not going to say that means there was nothing going on for the kids, because we know that this system misses abuse and neglect. I read those cases in the papers as well when the worst has happened. They're excruciating. Any parent, any reasonable adult, wants to take time and effort and money to protect children, but a system that's on its baseline is threatening tens of thousands of families with breaking them up, separating the kids from their parents. That's not an approach that's going to get parents to ask for the help that they need. It's not a system that has the resources left to give parents what they need. You could fill Yankee Stadium with the number of New Yorkers who've caught a case in any given year. ACS investigates, and then the case gets closed. We're draining our resources for providing great support for parents by spending so much time and energy investigating to try to decide who might need to be punished.
Jesse M: But what we know is that family policing does not prevent abuse and trauma. It just doesn't. And what we also know is that the vast majority of people, families who are ensnared within the family policing system, are for neglect, not abuse. So abuse is a very small number of those cases. But we also know that the surveillance system isn't working, right? You know, in the same way that many of us would, would say that, you know, police often come after a crime has occurred, right? They're not preventing a crime from happening. This is the same, like family policing is not actually dealing with the harm.
Kathleen (host): The surveillance system Jessie's talking about includes mandatory reporters. And this is not just a New York problem. It's happening all over the country because mandatory reporters are threatened with punishment if they don't report something, and a harm happens to children later. This creates an incentive for folks to report parents for the most minor things. Or by the way, if you are concerned that a family needs resources, you file a report, you're required to. Again, if you don't, you'll be punished. Now, they might get the resources they need, but the only thing you know they're getting for sure is the threat of removal, the threat of their children being taken from them. But the threat of punishment is just hanging over all the interactions. The mandatory reporters might get punished, the parents might get punished. The kids might get punished because, in fact, being taken from your parents is no bowl of cherries. All of this just comes back to people can't think for the fear of punishment. Now other states are dealing with this. They are looking at reducing the number of calls that turn into investigations. This is a place where New York could be leading more than we are.
Jesse M: You have to call that into the state central register by law. I think there's a growing movement to end that practice based on the idea that, you know, people are making calls because of a fear that they'll be prosecuted if they don't make calls. And these calls are resulting in unnecessary investigations, which are deeply harmful for families. And so some of the pushback we get to that is, well, then people won't report. And I mean, that, of course, is not true. Like if a person has a credible concern, they'll probably make a report or they'll think about what are the things I could do instead of making a report. Could I connect this person to housing? Could I connect this person to other resources? Would this person go to therapy? I can make that referral. Whatever it is. Thinking about solutions as about community networks of care. If our first response is, you know, I have to make this call to the police, that's a really different response than I see that there's an issue. What do you need to solve this issue? And are you willing to do the things that you might need?
Kathleen (host): Parents need resources. This comes back to what we talked about earlier in the episode, the Surgeon General saying it's a complete state of stress to be parenting your children on any day that ends with a Y. And then, you know, for parents that are that are poor. It's even more stressful. It would be so much more straightforward to focus on resourcing families. jasmine talks so much about this. I want us to listen to her for a minute.
jasmine S: Well, the solutions, they're not rocket science, right? I think we can all agree that resourcing folks is the best way to ensure that, you know, they're not in a cycle of criminalization, that they have everything that they need, and so that impacts their stability, their mental wellness, and the overall wellbeing of families. We could be investing in families directly, and we've seen that with cash assistance through universal basic income programs. There's been several pilots, one of them that's operating in Washington, DC by the Mothers Outreach Network, there is directing cash payments to folks in order to interrupt the family policing system's involvement, right? And so we see with these programs that when you provide regular amounts of money for folks, when they have access to these resources, they're not scrambling. They're able to buy groceries, they're able to have stable housing. We know that these solutions work. We know that families are better off with them.
Kathleen (host): And when she says, we know, it's not a figure of speech, Jesse, the attorney, and I also spoke about cash assistance.
Jesse M: If you give people cash, financial assistance, there's research that says that that's actually lessening, has a has a result in lessening, the number of fatalities and families.
Kathleen (host): And this is where we come back to if, in fact, the most important thing is preventing the worst forms of harm, then why not just focus on resourcing families? Why do we have to say, oh, but I need to be, but we need to be sure punishment is in this mix? We don't. We just keep choosing it.
jasmine S: How are we addressing that and able to have real conversations about what folks are navigating? You know, the coping mechanisms that people are using just to survive. But because we have such a system of punishment and control and surveillance, because there's so much stigma and shame around parenting, it really is preventing us from having these kinds of conversations candidly and supporting people as they need it, right? And meeting them where they are. And so once we're able to get rid of these systems of punishment and control and simultaneously really start to build up with folks who have experienced harm within their own families, folks who have done harm within their own families, where we can really talk about and build up those tools and those levels of support and breaking down the isolation that exists, then we'll be able to truly cultivate family safety within our communities.
Kathleen (host): This all comes back to what jasmine talked about. If you want safe children, it's because you want safe families. Parents and children can be safe together, and that can be the focus of the time and money that we're spending in these systems. I'm going to wrap up this episode by circling back to what happened when our family court case in 2024.
So it started on a random weekday evening. We were picking out a show and pizza, you know. Suddenly, ACS is at the door. We had our first sit down meeting with them actually, the next morning. We brought an advocate with us. We came to an agreement with the worker that we would enter the CARES track, which is something that New York State offers. That is not that we're being full-on investigated, but if at any point we decline to participate, we could be full-on investigated. So it is a deep motivation to participate in the CARES track exactly as they want you to. The worker was always respectful. One of the first things she told us was that the report had specified that our kid had two mamas. We were really lucky to catch a worker who didn't see that as a reason to question our parenting or our family. You know, when I asked people as part of the research for this episode, how many queer families were caught up in this system, no one could tell me. There's no research in New York State on that. There's no tracking. But our worker was certainly aware of the fact that the report didn't have a lot of information about the supposed neglect, but had information about the two mamas.
You know, she was really respectful. And as respectful as a person can be in this situation, it's just not the basis of a trusting relationship to know that at any time, one person in this can order the full force of the state to take away your kids. At the end of the 60 days we spent in the CARE track, she told us to our face. And then we also got a letter from the state. All done. Go about your business. So many times in that 60 days I would lay awake at night thinking, "Oh my God, are they gonna take our kids?"
It doesn't make sense that the system acts as if parents and children are in a zero-sum game when it comes to being safe. Parents and children are going to be safe together. Or probably not at all. And there's a real problem with punishing parents. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode. This podcast was produced in Brooklyn, New York. The unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape and Canarsie people. We thank all the ancestors for caring for this land over the generations, and we're committed to the work of creating a shared future that includes the native communities that are still here, and all the people who call this land home.
Thank you to the team at Rise for letting me spend a Saturday afternoon with them. Thanks to Shakira Kennedy, Shakira Paige, and Shaneen Bryant and Jeanette Vega for connecting us all their amazing moms. And you can learn more about their work at risemagazine.org. Thank you to jasmine Sankofa of the Movement for Family Power and Jesse McLaughlin of the Bronx Defenders Family Law Practice for taking time out of their busy schedules to explain family policing and the law without sounding too much like lawyers. And to Nora McCarthy of the New York City Family Policy Project for helping us get the numbers right. We've got links to all of these groups on the episode page of our website. Thanks to our podcast team Doctor Candace King, Reverend Doctor Sharon White-Harrigan, and Tess Weiner. Thank you to our resident production team, including our creative partner for this episode, Anna Warrell. I'm your host, Kathleen Pequeño. This podcast is a project of the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, with support from Trinity Wall Street. You can learn more about the collaborative and our other creative projects at BeyondPunishment.Org.
