Contents

CUF in the News

	Will East Harlem's La Marqueta Rise Again?, Grub Street New York, August 19, 2010
	Deal to Put Slots at Aqueduct Paves Way for a New York City Casino, The New York Times, August 12, 2010
	Local Biz Booster, New York Daily News, August 11, 2010
	The truth about commercial rent control, Crain's New York Business, August 10, 2010
	Spinning It Bloomberg Style, Huffington Post, August 9, 2010
	Group says state should 'step back' and dump plan for Aqueduct racino, New York Daily News, August 8, 2010
	read more>

Center for an Urban Future
is a New York City-based think tank that fuses journalistic reporting techniques with traditional policy analysis to produce in-depth reports and workable policy solutions on the critical issues facing our cities.

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New York by the Numbers

Economic snapshots of the 5 boroughs

This month's data... This edition of New York by the Numbers reveals that nearly a third of all adult workers in New York City are employed in low-wage jobs. While the percentage of low-wage workers is high across the city, the Bronx is in a league of its own, with 42 percent of the boroughs workers in low-wage jobs.

Family Court

Overburdened and inequitable, New York's Family Court system isn't working for the children, the parents, or the city it was designed to serve.

By John Courtney, Wendy Davis, Peggy Farber and Alyssa Katz

February 1999 | DOWNLOAD PDF

Thanks to a recent lawsuit, the doors of Family Court have been flung open to the public and press.

Child Welfare Watch used the opportunity to monitor numerous abuse and neglect cases in four boroughs. The courts themselves are nothing special-the children are rarely there when their fates are decided. But we noticed one striking feature: The mothers almost always went home without their children.

In the fourth edition of Child Welfare Watch, we examine this brand of justice and its impact on the parents and children who endure months of separation while their case grinds through an overburdened, overstressed court system.

In the course of preparing this report, Child Welfare Watch conducted well over 100 interviews with lawyers, judges, parents and experts. We examined reams of court data and dozens of research reports.

Based on our work, we conclude that Family Court is failing-failing to force the city to provide services to at-risk families, failing to process adoptions rapidly and, most important of all, failing to fulfill its mandated mission of working to keep families from being split apart forever. A lot of these failures stem from Family Court's inability to cope with the Giuliani administration's crusade to bring more neglect and abuse cases to court.

We want to make one thing clear: We are not saying the court needs to be lenient in pursuing allegations of child neglect or abuse. As we have stated in our previous reports, the process of rooting out the facts in child protection cases is a complicated, delicate and fundamental function.

We are not saying it shouldn't be done. We are saying that we need to explore ways of doing it better-which might include alternative, non-adversarial court structures.

Our research shows that child protective cases are being investigated slowly, inefficiently and without enough consideration of the impact on families that need help.

In this issue, we document how want of adequate funding for children's attorneys leads to huge caseloads and compromised representation.

We find the quality of parent representation even more questionable. Attorneys are selected on the basis of an antiquated ad hoc system. They are poorly paid, have no organizational support and can't easily access expert witnesses. As a result, mothers often have no continuity in their representation-many never spend enough time with their lawyers to remember their names.

In addition, we discover that many judges, motivated by the spate of recent high-profile child-abuse cases, have become reluctant to release children to their home.

We also have included an analysis of the impact of the new federal adoption law, which could dramatically accelerate Family Court's timetable for terminating parental rights.

But our most important findings center around the city's stepped-up policy of taking children out of their parents' care, which has increased the total number of new cases by 55 percent over the last three years. In interviews with lawyers, judges and the city's own employees we encountered escalating criticism of a policy that puts more emphasis on the courtroom than good casework.

One attorney who recently resigned her post at the city's Administration for Children's Services (ACS) told Child Welfare Watch: "I think that [caseworkers] just remove way too quickly, without any investigation. And once they remove and you're in court, then they never do an investigation."

Caseworkers and lawyers also say there needs to be greater access to services-drug treatment, counseling, coping skills and material assistance. "There are cases where services aren't given for years," the former ACS lawyer adds. "A lot of the parents get very frustrated because they don't get the services, so their kids have to stay in care longer."

"Stay," of course, is too tame a word.

We are talking about forcibly removing children from their parents' care. At a time when government intervention is less and less tolerated by the public, it's hard to understand how this policy-the deepest possible intrusion into people's lives-is allowed to expand without much scrutiny.

We hope this report will help spark a debate on the issue.