Incarcerated parents are disproportionately at greater risk for the termination of their parental rights. A new report hopes to fix that.
The report, entitled “Incarcerated Parents and Termination of Parental Rights in Connecticut: Recommendations for Reform,” was published on Friday. It is a joint effort between Connecticut Voices for Children and the Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic of the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services Organization at Yale Law School.
The report can be read here.
The report offers an explanation of “the unintended impacts of ASFA,” the Adoption and Safe Families Act, along with recommendations about how to protect both the rights of incarcerated parents and the welfare of their children.
“Many of [the recommendations] can be implemented without putting a strain on the state budget and some can be implemented with reinvestment of budget savings from the closure of prisons,” the report reads.
In a Friday morning press online conference, Allison Durkin, Destiny Lopez, and Eleanor Roberts of the Criminal Justice Advocacy Clinic and Lauren Ruth and Emily Byrne from Connecticut Voices for Children briefly presented the report’s 18 recommendations.
Durkin specifically noted statistics indicating that over half of all incarcerated people are parents, and TPR, or termination of parental rights, disproportionately affects them, specifically incarcerated people of color. Black children, she added, are 3.77 times more likely than white children to experience TPR.
ASFA, which Lopez said has “enormous” “unintended consequences,” incentivizes states to terminate parental rights by giving more federal funding to adoptions, rather than families that unify.
But, she added, states have “wide discretion” in which statutes they choose to enact. The report’s recommendations would allow for Connecticut to preserve its federal funding while creating “meaningful changes.”
Their recommendations fall under four main categories: prevent TPR, support communication between incarcerated parents and children, mitigate harm, and promote awareness of the rights of parents and the harm that TPR can cause.
Specifically, recommendations include establishing a racial equity commission to study racial disparities in TPR, reinvesting funds from prison closures towards a full-time social worker that can assist incarcerated parents, passing legislation that would allow for free prison phone calls, the right to appeal TPR when incarceration is a cause, written and verbal notice to incarcerated parents of their rights, training programs for lawyers, judges, and case workers on TPR exceptions, and more.
The report will be presented in coming weeks to the Connecticut Department of Children and Families and to legislators.
Durkin said that the pandemic has exacerbated some of the problems they hope to fix, such as limits on communication between incarcerated parents and their children.
“The status quo is harming families and harming children,” Durkin added.
This is the type of news report about advocacy research and reporting in support of "families" that drives me up a wall. To avoid writing anything rash, I have set aside two days for a self-cooling off period. To share some background info, I worked for over a decade as a private, contract attorney accepting state appointed cases to serve as a defense attorney for parent(s) or guardians, or as an attorney for the child(pen) or as a guardian ad litem. In all TPR trial cases, I defended or participated in, the State Connecticut had almost 100% chance of winning in court. So, the question is why bother having a legal process that is one sided when DCF acts as the social welfare advocate and care provider for these at-risk individuals (mothers usually) and their families from the beginning of a referral, and then after collecting extensive private and intimate information about those individuals, turn around at the end of the 15-18 month ASFA period, and use all that "evidence" against them in a TPR trial. It never made sense to me. I will leave that aside for someone else to sort out that lunacy. In most drug/heroin related cases, my primary focus as Connecticut's Mr. Heroin (Themis Klarides "guv soon" knows this) has always been why not think out of the box, and try something REALLY different. If a mother is a heroin/drug dependent at pregnancy to birth to age 18? Why not do everything to keep the mother and child together, including allowing the heroin-dependent mother to participate in a heroin-maintenance program, if need be, and avoid severing the mother-child relationship at all cost. It's the only and last common sense alternative to the STATUS QUO. Today, we see politicians fighting each other to be the first to sell/tax marijuana when a few years ago, I had clients lose a TPR trial for smoking "recreational marijuana" in their homes. No harm to others. In 1996-99, I was a Navy vet in the War on Drugs, and that was counterproductive and wasteful.