Ending Family Separation

Right to Hug

Across the United States in the last 10 years, most jails have eliminated in-person family visits. This has devastating consequences for the people who are in jail (mostly people awaiting trial), but also for their children and loved ones.

Children whose parents are stuck in jail because they can’t afford to pay cash bail are routinely thrust into the foster system and subjected to all of the attendant harms and injustices of that form of family separation, including increased risks of homelessness, unemployment, and physical and mental health problems. One multi-state study found that 74% of male children who “aged out” of foster care were incarcerated by the time they were 26.

For-profit prison telecom companies realized that they could earn more profit from phone and video calls if they eliminated free in-person visits. So, these companies offered sheriffs and jails across the country a deal: if you eliminate family visits, we’ll give you a cut of the increased profits from increased calls. This led to a wave across the country, as local sheriffs sought to supplement their budgets.

Family Policing

There is no distinction between the family policing and criminal policing systems. They are two sides of the same coin, acting together to destroy Black and poor families. Both systems are manifestations of state repression, and they are inextricably linked to each other. CRC’s work in this area advances the twin objectives of the movement to abolish family policing and to reimagine child and family well-being in this country.

The government and multi-billion dollar foster care industry justify unprecedented levels of family separation by saying they are acting in “the best interests of the child.” But history tells a different story. As law professor Dorothy Roberts has explained, “From the beginning the child welfare system was designed to oppress politically marginalized and disenfranchised communities, mainly Black and Native communities.

CRC’s work in this area aims to

1. Help build a national, cross-sector coalition against corporate-state repression that joins the power of the health, labor, teaching, immigration, social worker, and other social justice sectors;
2. Shrink the size and power of the family policing bureaucracy by demanding the redistribution of funds from the family courts and foster system to families;
3. Create a vision for child and family health and safety and a plan for implementing specific policies at the local, state, and federal levels;
4. Fundamentally change the way the public thinks about the “child welfare” system, and raise awareness about the harms inflicted by the family policing system and the relationship between the movement to abolish this system and other movements to radically reimagine health and safety;
5. Reduce the ability of corporations and governments to generate revenue and profit from the foster and family court systems.