Citizens Demanding Justice from CPS, Social Services, Courts, Elected Officials and Governmental Agencies Judges, and attorneys that are corrupt and failing to protect us.
CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD PERRY/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
In this week’s New Yorker, I wrote about a sixteen-year-old boy from the Bronx named Kalief Browder, who was accused of robbery and confined on Rikers Island. He stayed there for three years, waiting for a trial that never happened. For the majority of that time, he was in solitary confinement, locked in a cell all day every day, with little to do besides read, sleep, mark the time until his next court date, and listen through a vent to his mentally ill neighbor talking to himself. On Sunday, the Times reported that the New York City Department of Correction is planning to eliminate solitary confinement for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds by the end of 2014. This decision marks the most significant step yet taken by the New York City jails commissioner Joseph Ponte to “end the culture of excessive solitary confinement,” which was the promise he made six months ago, when Mayor Bill de Blasio appointed him.
In recent years, jail and prison systems elsewhere in the country have reduced their use of solitary confinement, but New York City moved in the opposite direction. The total number of solitary-confinement beds grew by sixty per cent between 2007 and 2013. And in early August, the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York released a devastating report in which it criticized jail officials for using solitary “to manage and control disruptive adolescents” by locking them in cells for twenty-three hours a day, “at an alarming rate and for excessive periods of time.”
Browder was one of these adolescents; between 2010 and 2013, he spent about two years in solitary. Most often, he was imprisoned in Rikers’s main solitary-confinement unit, which is officially called the Central Punitive Segregation Unit, but which everyone on Rikers refers to as the Bing. The Bing has four hundred cells, laid out along two-story tiers, each cell about twelve feet by seven. Bing inmates rarely step out of their cells except to go to court, to the shower, or to the visit room. Bing inmates are supposed to be allowed to go outside for an hour of recreation every day. But, as Browder explained to me, this wasn’t really the way it worked, at least not in the time that he was there.
For Bing inmates, “rec” took place outdoors, in an empty twenty-two-by-eleven-foot metal cage, each inmate locked in by himself, with nothing to do except shout to other prisoners and count the weeds. Many Bing inmates skipped it, since they had to be standing at their cell door at around 5:30 A.M.in order to flag down an officer when he walked by. “You take a step away from your cell door to use the bathroom, and you just see a shadow speed walk by. Then you go to the door, and you try to tell him you want to go to the yard, and he’ll say, ‘I passed your cell already,’ ” Browder told me. “I used to say to myself, What’s the point of putting up with that? I’m just going to go to sleep.”
In the past six months, I spent hours listening to Browder describe his days in the Bing. He was arrested for robbery in the spring of 2010, ten days before his seventeenth birthday, when a stranger pointed him and his friend out to the police, accusing the pair of robbing him a week or two earlier. Browder insisted that he was not guilty, refused multiple plea offers, and finally had his case dismissed—but only after he had endured more than a thousand days on Rikers. Even though I had written about the Bing in the past, and visited it some fifteen years ago, I found many of the stories Browder told me about his time in solitary not only deeply disturbing but also surprising.
Browder’s experience was not so unusual, though. A July report by the Board of Correction, which monitors conditions in New York City’s jails, found that less than ten per cent of the Bing’s prisoners went outside on any given day. “While some prisoners are passing up the opportunity to participate in recreation—principally because there is virtually nothing to do outside other than stand around—many more prisoners never even have the opportunity to decide whether or not to go outside,” the report stated.
Then there was the matter of phone calls. Browder said that Bing inmates got one six-minute call a day. If you called your mother or your girlfriend or your lawyer, and the call went straight to voicemail, too bad; there was no second call. You had to wait until the next day, when the officer brought you the phone once again. During one of his stays in the Bing, Browder told me, there was an officer who he’d clashed with who would taunt him through the cell window. “He never used to let me use the phone,” Browder said. But then, one day, he came to the door and said, “Do you want to use the phone today? Enjoy your phone call.”
At first, Browder didn’t think anything was amiss. Then he tried to call his mom, and discovered that he could not get through. It seemed that somebody had reprogrammed her number. Instead of his mother’s voice, he heard someone “asking me about what DVDs I wanted to order.” He recalls, “It got me mad, because we get one phone call a day, and I wasted the phone call calling—I think it was Netflix.” Afterward, he says, the officer came to his cell window once again: “He was like a little kid, coming to my cell. ‘Did you like your phone call?’ ”
Again, Browder wasn’t the only inmate who had this experience. A new report by the Bronx Defenders, a nonprofit organization that represents poor defendants, recounts similar tales. “Lacquan, a 20-year-old client with a history of mental illness, discovered on multiple occasions that correction officers had reprogrammed his mother’s phone number to fast-food restaurants,” the report states. “When Lacquan protested, they would taunt him and then tell him that his phone call was over.”
Jail officials say that there are now fifty-one inmates in solitary confinement between sixteen and seventeen years old. By January 1st, that number should be down to zero, if jail officials follow through on their promise. Meanwhile, the months that Browder spent locked in the Bing left him with his own theories about the power dynamics of solitary. In his view, its very setup insured that guards who wanted to dole out extra punishment to inmates—deprive them of the phone or rec or even food—could get away with it. Among the general jail population, Browder said, “they’ll do their job, because they know the inmates will jump on them. But in solitary confinement, they know everybody is locked in, so they curse at us, they talk disrespectful to us, because they know we can’t do nothing.”
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California's Crisis: 1 Out of Every 4 Children in California’s Foster Care System are Prescribed Powerful Psychiatric Drugs Including Dangerous Antipsychotics
Join me for this important radio show with Sonya Muhammad. Please share this with friends and family. We must stop this trend...that is hurting our children.
With alarming frequency, foster and health care providers are turning to a risky but convenient remedy to control the behavior of thousands of troubled kids: numbing them with psychiatric drugs that are untested on and often not approved for children.
A new report issued from the Bay Area News organization, raises the alarm on mass prescribing of dangerous psychotropic drugs to California's foster care children. Among the findings of the investigation: Nearly 1 out of every 4 adolescents in California foster care system is being drugged , 3 times the rate for adolescents nationwide. Even more alarming is that of the tens of thousands prescribed psychiatric drugs, nearly 60% were prescribed powerful antipsychotics which have been documented by 72 international drug regulatory warnings to cause heart problems, stroke, diabetes, convulsions and sudden death.
The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a mental health watchdog organization responsible for helping to enact more than 150 reforms against abusive mental health practices, says this treatment of children is medical neglect, and reforms must be enacted to protect this vulnerable population. CCHR has experts in the field of California Foster Care who are available for media interviews, as well as Doctors who can speak to the dangers of the drugs being prescribed to children, not only in foster care, but nation wide.
According to IMS Health, the leading vendor of all US prescribing data, nearly 9 million children currently being prescribed psychiatric drugs—with more than 1 million are under the age of five. Click here for the exact breakdown of age groups being prescribed psychiatric drugs http://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/children-on-psychiatric-drugs/
Sonya Muhammad's holds a Master's degree in marriage, family, and child counseling from Pacific Oaks College, in Pasadena, California. As a marriage, family, and child counselor for more than twenty years, Ms. Muhammad has provided counseling services to children of all ages, varied cultures, and varied socioeconomic status, as well as, their parents and other concerned persons.
During the last twelve years employed by Los Angeles County Office of Education/Foster Youth Services, Ms. Muhammad also served as a community liaison between assigned foster youth, local school districts, and related social service agencies in Los Angeles county.
Sonya Muhammad has been an advocate for children for many years. She was introduced to the fraudulent practices of those who diagnose and prescribe dangerous mind debilitating drugs to children, some as young as ages 3,4,and 5, by Dr. Fred Baughman, author of "Diagnosis for Dollars and ADHD Fraud.
Ms. Muhammad's work environment allowed her the opportunity to become familiar with these practices of drugging California's foster youth. And she continues to be willing to do her part in bringing these practices to the attention of the world community. "Drugging children should be a crime against children and determined, Chemical Child Abuse, punishable by law. Nothing less will deter."
When I was growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, the police were shooting us and the fire department was bombing our churches and homes, there was no one to call. This was in the 1950's and 1960's...
American foreign policy supported the Apartheid government in South Africa. Our government provided intelligence to South African authorities to allow the arrest of Nelson Mandela. Dr. Kings activities were thwarted by police, FBI and CIA. MANY civil rights leaders were arrested and killed by law enforcement...MANY remain in jail TODAY...in solitary confinement...where they have been for more than four decades.
Who do you call when the police and government officials do not do their job..in fact...they harm the public instead of protecting them?
My father had to become part of armed citizen patrols that patrolled our neighborhood to fight the police and fire department as they came in to murder us and blow up our homes and churches.
I continue his legacy...as a watch dog via the Internet.
We must learn from history's lessons.
The patriots that defended America from Britain have now become a world police force that kills at will...assassinating world leaders as it chooses and destroying countries that will not adopt it's religious, political and commercial viewpoints.
The Jews that suffered horribly at the hands of Nazis have now become a brutal military force that kills children in schools and women in shelters...innocents on the streets...at will.
America has NEVER been the land of the free. It has been a land of genocide and slavery...both 18th century style and 21st century style. The slaves of today...do not even know that they are slaves to the 300 people who run this planet.
They charge higher and higher prices while paying us the same or less. They ship our jobs overseas and enslave impoverished people.
They develop ever more effective killing systems while our education, arts, civility...wane in the distance of a destructive war machine.
Our neighborhoods are made unsafe by drug laws that incriminate a very high proportion of our population...more than ANY other country....and these people ARE NOT given a chance to repair their lives and to improve them....so...they become career criminals while the injustice system makes a profit.
The concrete industry makes a lot of money from the building of prisons.
The judges, lawyers, public pretenders, bail bondsmen, arms manufacturers ...make a huge profit while employing rural Americans to warehouse urban victims of the justice system.
As America supported slavery....genocide of the Cherokee, Black Feet, Seminole, Creek, Choctaw, Comanche, The Californios...and others...it support genocide against Africans, Palestinians, Iraqis, Iranians, Libyans, Lebanese, Tunisians, ...and others.
Police are supported in the killing of our youth...Trayvon Martin....the recent killings in Missouri, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York...on and on.
So I plead with you authorities...stop killing us. I plead with the general public...get involved..do not allow them to get away with this.
Lets take a good look at our history and be critical where we can..corrective where we need to be and praise where we need to. Not all officials are bad. Not all citizens are bad...not all people in prison are guilty....we have to be brutally honest.
We need citizens oversight committees all over the country to monitor police activities and the activities of our elected officials. They must be accountable to US...not...WE become the victims of them...the ones in power....WE HAVE THE POWER...we must harness it.
We must know our history.
We must not allow division on topics.
We can all agree that abortions are hideous...but...lets not block a woman's right to choose...lets eliminate the reasons that women have to get them.
We can agree that crime is horrible...but...lets develop opportunities for youth and previously convicted people...not just lock them away.
We can provide help to people with mental illness...not with drugs and prison...but with therapy and compassion.
We can agree that taxes are too high and no one should live off of the labor of others...but....lets make sure that people have their basic needs...that they can get jobs or run businesses...so they can pay taxes and make a living...lets make sure that people make a living wage and that workers are more important than stockholders.
We can make sure that our communities are more important than profits.
Everyone deserves a home, health care, food, sanitary conditions, safety. Lets not allow any other choice. Lets build a nation of civility, love, compassion...instead of competitiveness, callousness, war and disregard for our environment.
Lets focus on ethics instead of morality...we all may differ on morality..but...we all have the same ethical concerns.
Lets separate religion and government.
Lets stop the slow strangling of our schools, and other public institutions that are being allowed to starve...so that those who want to privatize can have and excuse to sack our systems...in the name of profit.
Lets have a maximum wage and demand that ALL SHARE in the growth and prosperity that the universe has to offer us. NO ONE SHOULD WORK FOR LESS THAN A LIVING WAGE.
Money must be made plentiful.
Education must be free to allow the cultivation of all minds.
We need law enforcement. We need a partnership. We need protection..not wholesale murder by police officials with no accountability. The American people are not going to tolerate this....the world is not going to tolerate this.
The black and white pics above come from my home town of Birmingham in the 1960's. The police under Bull Connor thought they could get away with murdering us. After they arrested our parents and killed many of us...the kids hit the streets and protested. When they began beating us...people came from California...Ohio...New York...France, England...and beat the CRAP out of our police...that ended Jim Crow laws.
The color pics are of more recent conflicts between law enforcement and citizens.
You see, lessons learned have been forgotten. So many people today do not know who Angela Davis is. They do not know that my church...Sixteenth Baptist...was the meeting spot for Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference....we met there on Mondays...before going to Kelly Ingram Park...them marching down Sixth Avenue in Birmingham...this is where you see the dogs and people being attacked by dogs...
Then as now...citizens are not going to tolerate the wholesale murder of our neighbors and kids...the WORLD WILL NOT TOLERATE IT.
Lets take our case to the international courts. Lets document the abuses using social media, Internet TV and Radio.
Participate in the process...vote...get involved...keep your elected officials afraid of YOU...not the other way around.
This will take courage...tenacity.
We can use boycotts...it will be painful and inconvenient..but...not as bad as seeing YOUR baby shot in the head....YOUR MOM BEATEN...my father was murdered..my 67 year old grandmother beaten by police.
So...I am not afraid to stand up.
I served the country for more than 25 years in the US Navy.
I did not fight to see the American people mistreated in the way they are now.
I am committed to justice, fairness....love and compassion....I am dedicated to my community..
I love the people of this country and the world.
I want to be a responsible world citizen...I only ask...that our government and authorities understand...that they must also be responsible.....WORLD CITIZENS.
The lame stream media will not tell our stories. WE must do that. Join me...in the Citizens Internet TV and Radio Network. Lets pool our stories..our assets.
Lets tell our own stories with advantages that were not even THOUGHT OF in 1960.
We will win...We will over come...we Demand JUSTICE...hence...the name of this blog...Please share this. If you want to join me in the Citizens Internet TV Network...email me at WalterDavisGlobalBroadcasting@Gmail.com.
I am committed to freedom, justice, civil rights, human rights...and the environment.
Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, boxer wrongly convicted of murder, dies . Another example of how our injustice system does not work. My father was murdered...and I do not believe in the death penalty for this reason.
It amazes me how these child protective services workers are so quick to rip children away from their natural parents. They care more about their jobs than they do about the psychological well-being of the child. Attachment and a sense of belonging is vital to the well being of a child and when a child is adopted out unnecessarily or estranged from family members so quickly and readily then they fail to realize the damage that is done to this child. The child will always seek out its natural parents whether they are aware of it or not. My stance is that we abolish Child Protective Services and allow parents to make decisions for their children whether it's bad or good. Cut out the middleman because these big bureaucracies have become nothing but a "kids for cash" operation. There is copious data that points to the inefficiencies of this cash cow and the accounts of many families worldwide that have been devastated. If you watch the Kids for Cash movie you will get a glimpse of what is happening to children and families worldwide. www.kidsforcashthemovie.com
In 1690, in what is now the United States, there were
criminal court cases involving child abuse.[1] In 1692, states and
municipalities identified care for abused and neglected children as the
responsibility of local government and private institutions.[2] In 1696, The
Kingdom of England first used the legal principle of parens patriae, which gave
the royal crown care of "charities, infants, idiots, and lunatics returned
to the chancery." This principal of parens patriae has been identified as
the statutory basis for U.S. governmental intervention in families' child
rearing practices.[3]
In 1825, states enacted laws giving social-welfare agencies
the right to remove neglected children from their parents and from the streets.
These children were placed in almshouses, in orphanages and with other
families. In 1835, the Humane Society founded the National Federation of Child
Rescue agencies to investigate child maltreatment. In the late-19th century,
private child protection agencies – modeled after existing animal protection
organizations – developed to investigate reports of child maltreatment, present
cases in court and advocate for child welfare legislation.[4]
In 1853, the Children's Aid Society was founded in response
to the problem of orphaned or abandoned children living in New York.[5] Rather
than allow these children to become institutionalized or continue to live on
the streets, the children were placed in the first “foster” homes, typically
with the intention of helping these families work their farms.[6][7]
In 1874, the first case of child abuse was criminally
prosecuted in what has come to be known as the "case of Mary Ellen."
Outrage over this case started an organized effort against child
maltreatment[8] In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt convened the White House
Conference on Child Dependency, which created a publicly funded volunteer
organization to "establish and publicize standards of child care."[6]
By 1926, 18 states had some version of county child welfare boards whose
purpose was to coordinate public and private child related work.[7] Issues of
abuse and neglect were addressed in the Social Security Act in 1930, which
provided funding for intervention for “neglected and dependent children in
danger of becoming delinquent.” [8]
In 1912, the federal Children's Bureau was established to
manage federal child welfare efforts, including services related to child
maltreatment. In 1958, amendments to the Social Security Act mandated that
states fund child protection efforts.[9] In 1962, professional and media
interest in child maltreatment was sparked by the publication of C. Henry Kempe
and associates' "The battered child syndrome" in JAMA. By the
mid-1960s, in response to public concern that resulted from this article, 49
U.S. states passed child-abuse reporting laws.[10] In 1974, these efforts by
the states culminated in the passage of the federal "Child Abuse
Prevention and Treatment Act" (CAPTA; Public Law 93-247) providing federal
funding for wide-ranging federal and state child-maltreatment research and
services.[11] In 1980, Congress passed the first comprehensive federal child
protective services act, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980
(Public Law 96-272), which focused on state economic incentives to
substantially decrease the length and number of foster care placements.[12]
Partly funded by the federal government, Child Protective
Services (CPS) agencies were first established in response to the 1974 CAPTA
which mandated that all states establish procedures to investigate suspected
incidents of child maltreatment.[13]
In the 1940s and 1950s, due to improved technology in
diagnostic radiology, the medical profession began to take notice of what they
believed to be intentional injuries.[14] In 1961, C. Henry Kempe began to
further research this issue, eventually identifying and coining the term
battered child syndrome.[14] At this same time, there were also changing views
about the role of the child in society, fueled in part by the civil rights
movement.[7]
In 1973, Congress took the first steps toward enacting
federal legislature to address the issue of child abuse. The Child Abuse
Prevention and Treatment Act[15] was passed in 1974, which required states
"to prevent, identify and treat child abuse and neglect."[8]
Shortly thereafter, in 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act
(ICWA) was passed in response to concerns that large numbers of Native American
children were being separated from their tribes and placed in foster care.[16]
This legislation not only opened the door for consideration of cultural issues
while stressing ideas that children should be with their families, leading to
the beginnings of family preservation programs.[17] In 1980, the Adoption
Assistance Act[18] was introduced as a way to manage the high numbers of
children in placement.[7] Although this legislation addressed some of the
complaints from earlier pieces of legislation around ensuring due process for
parents, these changes did not alleviate the high numbers of children in
placement or continuing delays in permanence.[17] This led to the introduction
of the home visitation models, which provided funding to private agencies to
provide intensive family preservation services.[7]
In addition to family preservation services, the focus of
federal child welfare policy changed to try to address permanence for the large
numbers of foster children care.[17] Several pieces of federal legislation
attempted to ease the process of adoption including Adoption Assistance
Act;[18] the 1988 Child Abuse Prevention, Adoption, and Family Services Act;
and the 1992 Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, Adoption, and Family Services
Act.[19] The 1994 Multi-Ethnic Placement Act, which was revised in 1996 to add
the Interethnic Placement Provisions, also attempted to promote permanency
through adoption, creating regulations that adoptions could not be delayed or
denied due to issues of race, color, or national origin of the child or the
adoptive parent.[20]
All of these policies led up to the 1997 Adoption and Safe
Families Act (ASFA), much of which guides current practice. Changes in the
Adoptions and Safe Families Act showed an interest in both protecting
children’s safety and developing permanency.[20] This law requires counties to
provide "reasonable efforts" (treatment) to preserve or reunify
families, but also shortened time lines required for permanence, leading to
termination of parental rights should these efforts fail.[7][20] ASFA
introduced the idea of "concurrent planning" which demonstrated
attempts to reunify families as the first plan, but to have a back-up plan so
as not to delay permanency for children.[21]
PHOENIX — Gov. Jan Brewer abolished Arizona’s beleaguered Child Protective Services on Monday, immediately transferring the task of safeguarding abused and neglected children to a new cabinet-level division over which she will have direct oversight.
The move, unveiled at the governor’s State of the State address, is part of an overhaul aimed at fixing the problems that have plagued the state’s child welfare system for years, though none of them quite like last month’s revelation that more than 6,500 complaints of abuse received by the agency’s hotline had been shelved before any investigation.
Ms. Brewer has been under intense pressure from child welfare advocates, as well as legislators from both parties, including some of her closest allies, who have long sought the reorganization of Child Protective Services under a separate structure. The agency operates under the largest of the state’s bureaucracies, the Department of Economic Security, which oversees dozens of safety-net programs, including cash assistance and health care benefits for the poor.
“It is evident that our child welfare system is broken, impeded by years of structural and operational failures,” said Ms. Brewer, a Republican.
The change requires legislative approval, but it is unlikely to face significant opposition, given that it is the type of reorganization that most of her critics had sought. Ms. Brewer did not say how the agency would be funded.
The new agency, the Division of Child Safety and Family Services, will handle complaints and investigations of abuse and neglect, which have hit record numbers since the state’s economy crashed in 2009, as well as foster care and adoption.
Charles Flanagan, director of the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections, will be in charge. He leads the team of legislators, prosecutors, child welfare advocates and state officials overseeing the inquiry into the ignored hotline complaints.
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