Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World

Roberts (Killing the Black Body), a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, offers a searing look at racial injustice in the U.S. child welfare system. Alleging that “more than one in ten Black children in America will be forcibly separated from their parents and placed in foster care by the time they reach age eighteen,” Roberts explains that government funding for foster care far outstrips funding for family preservation efforts, that children are often placed in group homes or residential treatment centers instead of with families, and that abuse in these “prisonlike facilities” is rampant. Horror stories of parents trapped in the bureaucracy of the system include one cancer-stricken mother whose child wandered off in a park during a family picnic, causing a passerby to call the authorities. When a caseworker later knocked on the mother’s door and she didn’t answer right away, the police arrived and proceeded to hog-tie and arrest her, dislocating her shoulder in the process. Roberts buttresses her impassioned call for dismantling the child welfare system by skillfully situating it within a larger web of institutions intended to surveil, control, and punish Black Americans. This illuminating and alarming study shatters the “facade of benevolence” surrounding foster care. Agent: David Halpern, the Robbins Office. (Apr.)