SEVEN

CROSSOVER KIDS

When I went into foster care, it was the worst day of my life. It was worse than being abused. I swore I’d never let that happen to my kids. Then it happened.

—MELODY DAWSON

I’m listening to the familiar disembodied message—computer generated—informing me that an “inmate at Los Angeles County jail” is calling. After accepting the collect-call charges, which will be exorbitant, I’m on the phone with Melody Dawson, a woman I know from Jordan Downs, a public housing development in Watts. She’s crying, and all I can make out between her sobs is that the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) paid a visit to her neighbor, Ginger, who’s been taking care of her two daughters while Melody’s been locked up. Ginger had told the girls their mama would be back soon, but the DCFS social worker disagreed, insisting there was no way of knowing how long Melody would be locked up. Ginger said she would keep the girls with her as long as it took; then the social worker announced that the girls would be “removed for evaluation” the next day. Melody knows, as I do, that this is code for placement in foster care.

None of this is unusual. For incarcerated women, the child welfare system most often becomes involved at the point of arrest, justifying their presence as being “in the best interests of the child.” But research has shown how a system that is supposed to be protective is actually punitive, for mothers as well as their children. In reality, across the US, corrections officials and child welfare workers rarely inquire or even think about how incarceration will negatively impact the parent-child relationship during the possible phases of trial, sentencing, and prison intake.¹ And here, as parents facing incarceration, the consequences for women differ radically from those experienced by men. Although all mothers and fathers have to cope with separation from their children, for men, there’s usually a woman on the outside—mothers, wives, girlfriends—to care for their offspring. In fact, when men are incarcerated, whether it’s in a state or federal prison, 90 percent of the time the children they have together are taken care of by their mother. But women don’t have the same backup. Few men—somewhere between 22 and 28 percent—assume responsibility for childrearing if their female spouses or partners are incarcerated.² Instead, when women are locked up, families are splintered, and the upheaval affects communities as well. Children all too often lose any sense of permanence and feel they don’t belong anywhere. They stop attending school, feeling unmoored and uncertain, emotions they share with their mothers. And despite all the upheaval, there is simply no support and no reentry planning for women and their children once mothers are incarcerated. Instead, there is a void that, all too often, children’s protective services rush in to fill.

I reassure Melody that I will call Elie as she’s pleading, “I just want my kids back. I don’t want them to go through what I had to go through.” Her words sting, even though they’re all too familiar to me. I’ve heard those two phrases over and over because Melody’s experience is tragically common among incarcerated women. The reason for this is sadly straightforward; throughout their lives, in different forms and different ways, one force is a constant: the child welfare system. Most of these women have been entangled with DCFS for as long as they can remember—first as children, then as mothers.

So many previously incarcerated women possess painful memories of being separated from their own families as girls, of the miseries and abuses that occurred in foster care. They will do anything to save their children from the same fate but are often powerless to do so. Despite their devotion to their children, they usually experience a series of heartbreaking outcomes that cascade through their lives, once they are locked up, even if it is before a trial.

Overwhelmingly, women struggle to keep their children within their extended family system while they are incarcerated. Most often they reach out to grandparents, usually their own mothers or those of the father. But rarely does this represent the best of solutions, particularly when the parents are elderly or unable to care for their grandchildren. Many women also are reluctant to rely on their families if there’s been a history of abuse or neglect involving them. This represents a “Sophie’s choice” for many incarcerated women: if they can’t rely on their families because that’s where they were abused, their own children—like Melody’s—may be placed in foster care.

This then brings on the threat of adoption. Once children are placed in foster care, the clock begins to tick. Then the parents or—in many cases—single parent will have a specific period of time—in California, it’s eighteen months—to comply with whatever conditions are set up before the family can be reunified. For so many women, either during or after incarceration, such “family reunification” represents an impossibility. If family reunification fails, time’s up and the children are eligible for adoption. Sometimes, extended-family members adopt the children; sometimes complete strangers become the new parents for the sons and daughters whose mothers are locked away in jail or prison. For children who are “too old” to be adopted, usually adolescents, there may be placement in a “group home,” which is just what the name implies: a setting where groups of older foster kids reside together under the care of an adult, with little in common except their lack of a permanent home.

These outcomes are not just a matter of public policy. Over the past ten years, the number of women I’d interviewed who’d been involved in the child welfare system as children was stunning. Among the eighty women who shared their histories with me, sixty-one had been entangled with the child welfare system when they were girls. They’d been in foster care or extended-family or kinship care or in group homes or in some combination of all three. And most of them had vowed their own children would be free of such pain. “I was determined that no child of mine was gonna get mixed up in the system,” one woman told me. “I didn’t want them to suffer what I’d suffered. And I didn’t want them to go into foster care or get adopted. No baby of mine was getting adopted.”

What’s unsettling about all this is that even as they struggled to avoid it, most women acknowledged, and even accepted, the ongoing presence of the child welfare system in their lives. Whether it was a part of their experience as girls or a threat to their own families as women, “the county” or “children’s services” always seemed to be there in the background. And incarceration just made everything worse for each of these women. It meant that they were further behind and more disempowered than the other mothers who were involved with the system. It also meant they had more to fear, more to lose, and no one there to help them. Ivy and Janeth were practically the poster children for the problems that mothers encountered even before they went to trial, let alone after they were convicted.

The problems began once bail was set and grew from there. It’s generally acknowledged that today, in America, money bail represents a major criminal justice issue. In particular, the cash bail system affects Black people, people of color, and the poor disproportionately, even when they are being held after arrest for nonviolent crimes.³ Today, individuals await trial in overcrowded jails for unimaginable periods of time. I had seen this firsthand as an expert witness in a gang case, where the accused had already been in jail for five years and his trial date still had not been set. And this was before the Covid-19 pandemic, which ultimately set things back even further. The title of a recent book examining the inequities of bail tells the whole story in three words: Incarceration Without Conviction.⁴

On top of its disproportionate impacts on Blacks, people of color, and the poor, the effects of bail are gendered, with profound consequences for the children of women who are locked up. The long-term effects of the ill-fated War on Drugs started the incarceration ball rolling. Today, money bail is critical to understanding why the percentage of women America imprisons continues climbing: the number of women now incarcerated in jail is fourteen times as high as it was in the 1970s. Still, what is crucial in all of this is the fact that, as so many sources report, the majority of women are being held in jail on what is termed “pretrial” status, purely because they cannot post bail.⁵ They have not been found guilty of any crime. They have not even gone to court. On top of that, most women are charged with low-level, nonviolent offenses, such as drug possession, shoplifting, and parole violations. The result of women’s inability to make bail is that more than a quarter of a million children in the US have a mother in jail, awaiting trial.⁶

But the problem doesn’t stop with bail. If a woman is ultimately found guilty of the crime she’s been arrested for, she goes to jail or prison. At this point, there is further evaluation by and involvement of the child welfare system, with devastating consequences. The children of incarcerated mothers are five times as likely to wind up in foster care as those with incarcerated fathers. In certain states, such as Oklahoma, once a child is in foster care, the state can completely terminate parental rights in two years. As with bail, Black families and families of color are affected in greater numbers than any other group. The last year that national data was made available through the US Bureau of Justice was 2008. At that time, 62 percent of women in state prisons nationwide reported having a minor child, and 42 percent of these women reported being the single parent in the household. Incarcerated mothers were three times as likely as fathers to report they provided the daily care for their children. As of 2019, the Prison Policy Initiative estimated that nationwide 80 percent of incarcerated women in jails had children. Recent estimates also put the number of children in the US with an incarcerated parent at 2.7 million, or 1 of every 28 children. Broken down by race, the numbers are even more disproportionate and disturbing: 1 in 9 Black children, 1 in 28 Latino children, and 1 in 57 white children in the US have a parent who is incarcerated.⁷ These women and their children don’t have anyone to turn to for help. There are few services available for them, and very little effort is made to strengthen the relationship between mothers and children separated by incarceration. Because of all this, mothers who can’t afford bail and want to get back to their children swiftly are motivated to plead guilty even when they haven’t committed any crime.

What makes things worse for so many of these mothers was just what Melody cried over—their own involvement with the child welfare system as children. Their experiences had scarred them and had led them down the trajectory of bad relationships, trauma, addiction, and crime. They desperately wanted to raise their sons and daughters while avoiding any contact with the child welfare system and often trying to circumvent its authority. And yet they were often powerless to escape this fate. There was no one who embodied this double trauma more than a woman I first met through Denise, who had insisted, “You gotta talk to my friend. You gotta talk to Clara.”

Clara Vasquez was born in Sonora, Mexico, where she lived with her great-grandmother until she was seven years old. Then, she traveled to the United States to reunite with the mother she’d never known. In Los Angeles, her mother’s husband was the man Clara eventually considered her father. “Gilbert is the person who raised me, gave me his last name. He’s not my biological father. But he put shoes on my feet, a roof over my head, so I’m grateful to him, even though he was very, very abusive.” As she recalls her childhood Clara looks tired, yet there are traces of the girl she once was in the warmth of her eyes and her smile. Her round face is surrounded by a penumbra of light brown hair, and she speaks softly, almost liltingly. She looks like what she is today: a sweet, middle-aged mother, smiling as she checks her phone for texts from her daughter. “You have to understand,” she tells me, “it’s just the way life went on in those days. Everyone accepted that my dad would get angry and he’d beat us.”

But, as things turned out, not everyone accepted the abuse. Clara’s oldest sister, Maria, started getting into fights at school and running away from home—girls’ most common response to trauma, as research has revealed. It was not until her mother lost control and beat Maria that she ran away—straight to the police. Shortly after that, officers arrived at the Vasquez household. In response, the family was fearfully cooperative. Clara’s mother and stepfather were “legal,” but the three girls were undocumented, and their polite responses masked anxiety. They needn’t have worried. Unless the abuse was egregious, most cops weren’t interested in a child welfare case. They wanted to chase bad guys and leave “domestics”—intrafamily issues—to social workers. Their attitude worked to the advantage of Clara’s family and the case was referred to the Department of Children and Family Services. Now Clara’s story took a strange twist: in follow-up visits with a social worker, her mother decided the children would be safer and have more opportunities if they were in foster care. Clara never forgot the day her life changed.

“My mom sat my sisters and me down and told us, ‘You guys are going to go to a foster home; they’re going to help you out.’ So, my mom basically just gave us up to the foster system. She told us this would help us to get ahead in the world and—most important—we would get our papers.” I’d never thought of foster care as a pathway to citizenship and upward mobility. I knew Clara was telling the truth—but the story just didn’t make sense. Worst of all, her mother’s unusual decision kicked off what became Clara’s lifelong struggle with the child welfare system.

Clara is certain her mother is the reason she’s now a citizen. But the price was high; the talk with her mother marked the last time she lived with her family. After that, she became a child of DCFS. Once she and her sisters were “placed,” Clara moved through four different foster homes sprawled throughout Los Angeles County, in the working-class communities of Whittier, South Gate, and East Los Angeles. During this time, there was one social worker she always remembered, Deborah. “She talked to me,” Clara says. “She tried to help me—all the time.” Just as Tommie Baines had connected with Rosa, Deborah built a relationship with Clara, making sure that she went to school and that her foster home offered at least an accepting environment, if not a loving one. Then Deborah moved on from DCFS, worn out by the demands of a huge case load and limited resources. This often happens. Some of the most compassionate social workers leave child-welfare work behind because of the pain, the demands, the secondary trauma. I’d experienced this when I worked briefly as a children’s social worker. It was why, I constantly explained to people, working with gang members was actually less painful than working with DCFS. In their families, gang members had frequently suffered child abuse and acted out their rage, sometimes with horrifying results. Still, they weren’t denying what they’d experienced, and their rage was out in the open. Clara, thirteen, with her beloved social worker gone, encountered what many think of as the second abuse, at the hands of the child welfare system.

The foster homes were always pretty wretched, but one stands out in Clara’s mind. “The foster kids used to stay in a little room, like a shack, in back of the house. It wasn’t even attached to the house; it was next to the doghouse. There was no bathroom and we slept in there. We could go inside the house at certain times. The mother gave us food; there just wasn’t enough. We were starving all the time. I never forgot that little shack.” Eventually, Clara moved to another foster home, and there were more changes in store. She couldn’t adjust, and then the social worker discovered that there were more foster children in the home than the law allowed. After that, when Clara was moved to her fourth foster home, she was done. She ran away when she was fourteen years old, and homelessness became her reality.

“Most nights, I didn’t know where I was going to sleep. But it was still better than foster care. Once in a blue moon, I’d call my mom and be like ‘Hey, Mom, I’m still alive.’” On the streets, the inevitable involvement with gangs, drugs, and violence began as Clara struggled to survive. At first, drugs weren’t part of the picture; she focused on survival, and that meant being part of a gang. She didn’t have time to get high; her fight to belong somewhere, to something, was all-consuming. In Central Los Angeles, Clara latched on to the West Side Rebels, or WSR13, a barrio well known throughout Hollywood.⁸

Unlike most of the women I was interviewing, Clara bypassed men, turning to the gang directly for protection. Her attraction to gangs “wasn’t so much that I was looking for a boyfriend or a family,” she says. “I was just looking for somebody to be there with me.” The gang members squatted together in abandoned apartments. One homie would steal radios from cars and sell them to get money for food.

She ultimately wound up at one of her homeboy’s houses after almost a year on the streets, where, in the barrio version of foster care, “the dad took me in, and I was his daughter.” Just as with the other girls, men, not women, helped her. Women were rivals; ultimately only men could be trusted to take care of you. “He was a good man and that was where I lived for six months until I went to jail.” Like most youth, Clara refused to accept the vocabulary of juvenile justice and its empty euphemisms: “halls and camps,” “detention,” and “placement.” Her description of her crimes was equally straightforward. “I was about sixteen, and I got arrested because we were gangbanging and we were robbing people, and someone got hurt.” She went to Central Juvenile Hall and then to Camp Resnick at Challenger Memorial Youth Center, where she met Denise and “we first ran together. We’ve been friends ever since.” She shows me the photos Denise has been texting her with the caption, “Guess where I’m at?” We’re both laughing at this point—Denise is on a UCLA field trip to Challenger. Holding her smartphone close to her face, Clara scrolls through her memories as well as the photographs.

Just like Denise, Clara was part of a group that researchers and policymakers refer to as “crossover youth.” These are the boys and girls whose lives consist of overlapping risk factors that lead first to involvement with more than one system. Usually, they all begin in child welfare. However, because the risk factors include trauma, family dysfunction, abuse, neglect, substance abuse, and mental health issues, they act out or commit an offense, leading to involvement with a second system, juvenile justice. The term “crossover” tells the story—these youths literally “cross over,” becoming engaged with multiple systems, with little attention paid to the intensity of their needs. Too often, young men and young women exit both systems without resolving past traumas and familial issues, seriously hindering their abilities to succeed in education, employment, or future relationships.⁹ As crossover youths, both Clara and Denise experienced this, moving from supervision by DCFS to detention under the jurisdiction of the LA County Probation Department.

Clara was scared at first, but once she had her own bed, she realized that Camp Resnick actually was a solution to her homelessness. She was even back attending classes there—the camp had a school on site. As she talked about how relieved she felt, I thought of Rosa. And I remembered what Father Greg Boyle had told me: that for many kids—especially girls—camp represents the first time they truly feel taken care of and safe. It’s not a punishment so much as a respite.

No one knew she was locked up. When Clara was arrested, there wasn’t anyone to call; she was just a teenage runaway and she didn’t want to risk a return to foster care. Out on the streets, she’d made up a name that followed her into Camp Resnick. Then, one Sunday, the front desk announced she had a visitor. “I kept saying, ‘Are you sure, cuz it’s my fake name,’ and they’re like ‘Yeah, yeah.’ So, I went over to the visiting area and it was my mom. We both started crying.”

To this day, Clara doesn’t know how her mother found her. Sadly, after their tearful reunion, her mother only visited once more over the year and a half Clara was locked up. “I never really know if she loves me,” Clara said, sighing. “I wonder what it is about me that makes it so she doesn’t care. I knew I couldn’t count on anyone except for the barrio, the gang. They are the only ones who cared about me.” She sounded like Denise talking about her hood. All I could think was that this pathway of trauma is also a pathway of abandonment.

Clara sometimes wondered why a social worker from the child welfare system hadn’t found her. These thoughts invariably ended with a sense of resolution. Even though she’d been abandoned to the streets, she felt relieved that she’d escaped foster care. That relief would soon change. Having fulfilled her detention, Clara was discharged from Challenger Memorial, and just as with women exiting jail or prison, there were no support services for her, no reentry plan. The LA County Probation Department was notorious for banking all the state funds allocated for reentry services but failing to develop any meaningful aftercare programming. Instead, Clara was released to DCFS and sent right back into the foster-care system. Her involvement with this system had caused all the problems that she’d run away from. Now she had to return. And to make things worse, she was placed with the first family she’d lived with—the one that had put her in the room next to the doghouse before being forced to move her into a bedroom. Now she was assigned to the exact same bedroom.

It was full circle with a vengeance, and Clara exploded. Again, it was the rage, the same rage Rosa had experienced when the court returned her to her mother. Within days, Clara beat up her roommate, another foster child. The beating was so severe that the police were called, Clara was arrested, taken into custody and eventually placed at MacLaren Hall Children’s Center, a huge child welfare facility routinely referred to as “the orphanage.” Located in El Monte, east of Los Angeles, MacLaren was little more than a warehouse for children who had nowhere else to go. MacLaren was also the notorious emblem of the failure of both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. It was overcrowded and under-resourced, and the staff violently abused the children in their care. In 2003, after years of horrifying rumors and reports, MacLaren finally closed permanently, but not before the ACLU and other groups had filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles County over the treatment there of children with emotional and behavioral problems. At the same time, a class-action lawsuit was filed that sought unspecified damages for more than a thousand children who’d been physically and/or emotionally abused at MacLaren. To this day, there is a website, Survivors of MacLaren, where survivors’ accounts are collected. ¹⁰

All this was ten years too late for Clara, who sized up the situation and knew there was more trauma in store for her. Within days, she ran away from MacLaren, and her “protection” by the child welfare system came to an unofficial end. It was 1993 and Clara was seventeen years old. She was on the streets at the height of the decade of death in California: the crack epidemic was in full swing and gangs were murdering people at a rapid rate, accounting for most of the 1,200 homicides recorded that year in Los Angeles.

Clara developed the skill set of someone decades older, working her street networks and selling drugs. Within months she’d put enough money together to rent an apartment. She connected with her mother, who wove in and out of her life once Clara reassured her that she wouldn’t ask for any money. It was not lost on Clara that she expressed an odd kind of satisfaction in her daughter’s activities. “My mom lived the life that I lived—she’d been part of the gangs in Mexico. So, she’d say to me, ‘Good, you’re on the street working. Don’t be a bum.’” Much of what Clara said reminded me of my much loved Joanna Carillo, whose parents actually reveled in her achievements as a drug dealer, often expressing their pride in her “success.”

Clara got a job at Little Caesar’s Pizza and sold drugs on the side. She was free and making enough money to enjoy herself. “I felt good,” she said. This way of life lasted almost two years, until Clara met Javier. She sounds a lot like Denise and so many other women when she tells me, “I left behind everything for him. He told me I didn’t need to work, he would take care of me.” She gave up her apartment and they lived together happily until Clara discovered she was pregnant. Two weeks later, Javier left her for someone else. Again, she was homeless with no money, squatting in abandoned apartments. “Sometimes I’d fall asleep on a dirty couch on the street,” Clara says. “I was so ashamed! When I got with Javier, I had my apartment, I had my furniture, I had my job, I had my money. When he left me, I was broke, pregnant, and in the streets. He took everything. I thought, I’ll just sell some drugs and figure it out later.” Temporary relief came when her sister Maria offered Clara room and board in return for watching her children. Between babysitting and drug dealing, Clara saved her money, began learning about benefits she could apply for, and—ready to give birth—moved out again.

“I got an apartment and had my daughter, Theresa, two days later.” Javier came to see her at the hospital and, acknowledging the baby for the first time, promised he’d be a good father. When Clara got home to the apartment, he took both mother and daughter out, buying a car seat and a crib. Their relationship began anew.

At first, Javier visited daily and gave Clara money to buy whatever she needed. But soon his interest and his money began to flag. Then Clara discovered that the girl he’d left her for earlier was pregnant. Three months later, Javier had a second daughter. “After that baby was born, he stopped coming completely. So, there I was, on my own. I wanted someone to help me. Anyone.”

Javier’s abandonment traumatized her; it was her mother all over again. Lonely and frightened, she began depending on Eduardo Lopez, who she knew from the neighborhood. They moved in together, and this marked the time in Clara’s life “when a lot of things went downhill. He was on drugs. I started using drugs with him, and then he started physically abusing me.” Her drug use escalated—whatever was available, she used. It was always a way to run away from her pain, to deny the abuse she was experiencing. Still, she couldn’t leave Eduardo. “What was I supposed to do, go back to the street? I thought he would take care of me.” Those words. Again.

There were days Clara wanted to give up and end her life. But if she committed suicide, Theresa would go into the child welfare system—she couldn’t let that happen. She was looking for a purpose, any purpose, and in the midst of her pain and confusion, she made her first attempt to go to school, enrolling in Los Angeles Community College. “I wanted an education. I didn’t want to live in that abusive relationship. That’s one thing I’ve always thought. I didn’t want to be one of these statistics of a useless gangbanger. I didn’t want to end up in the streets.” This sounds unimaginable and meaningful all at once. Somehow, some way, Clara had both resilience and the seeds of self-esteem. And she had direction. A neighbor in her building knew both English and Spanish versions of American Sign Language and started to teach her interpretation. “I remember when I was in the foster system, my mom would go to the courts, and she always had to get an interpreter because she didn’t speak English. That’s when I knew, I want to help people like my mom, who can’t speak for themselves.”

At first, she was excited to be in school. She’d stopped using drugs and Eduardo was supportive. He told her they’d work it out. “School was like being a kid in Disneyland. You know you want to be there, but you don’t know what to do; you don’t know even where to start. I made so many mistakes.” Clara hadn’t been in any kind of school since Camp Resnick. Without knowing how to navigate the system, she floundered. “I was failing in my classes, so I dropped out.” What she’d begun with so much hope quickly fell apart.

Clara descended into drug use, self-medicating her depression and her trauma. Her emotions mirrored what many young women caught up in the spiral of trauma, pain, and system involvement lived through each day. When Eduardo’s abuse grew more violent, Clara knew that he wasn’t protecting her, he was trying to destroy her. She kicked him out, and then discovered she was pregnant again. Overwhelmed with the thought of bringing a second child into all this chaos, she broke down. She’d stay in bed all day, dozing off from the drugs, then awakening in a panic that her daughter would make noise and “somebody would knock on the door, and we’d have to answer. They’d see me high and take my daughter to foster care. I didn’t want that to happen to her.”

Her emotional distress and her addiction crushed her spirit. Eduardo moved back in, promising to support her. Instead, they wound up spending their money on drugs and inching closer to homelessness. Disturbed at what they saw, Clara’s mother and sister called the Department of Children and Family Services. The subsequent investigation led DCFS to recommend that custody of Theresa be awarded to Javier. Clara was frantic. “My daughter had no idea who Javier was, and now she was going to live with him!”

In a cascade of crises, she learned there was a warrant out for her arrest for witness intimidation in connection with a gang case, and a few days later, she was picked up by the police. Eight months pregnant, Clara was sentenced to jail; she gave birth to her second daughter while she was incarcerated. Clara only saw her for a few moments—long enough to hold her and name her Aracely—then the DCFS took charge. There was one piece of good news: Clara’s sister was awarded temporary custody of both girls. But after a few days, her sister complained that it was too much work and called DCFS to come get both children. Theresa was given to Javier, and Eduardo’s family were granted custody of Aracely. Locked up, Clara became even more upset when she learned that the Lopezes wanted to adopt Aracely. No matter who the girls were living with, she was still involved with the child welfare system.

This outcome, all too frequent in the lives of incarcerated women, can be traced to a piece of federal legislation signed into law by President Bill Clinton. At the time, the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) was heralded as a breakthrough that would ensure children’s health and safety. Today, it’s largely viewed as causing the shift toward a more punitive child welfare system. ASFA was supposed to be a fix for the problems and abuses that had riddled foster care, many of which resulted from earlier legislation, the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980. In the end, ASFA turned out to be an overcorrection: by focusing more on what were thought to be children’s best interests, there was less emphasis on families being kept together. Among its provisions, ASFA established set deadlines for terminating parental rights for children in foster care: if a child spends fifteen out of twenty-two months in foster care, time’s up and they’re ready to be adopted. Talking to any woman who’s faced poverty, trauma, and incarceration, this rapid timeline feels impossible to beat. For so many mothers who are unable to pay cash bail and secure freedom with the clock ticking, the child welfare and criminal justice systems almost seem to conspire to sever a mother’s ties to her children rapidly and permanently.

There are exceptions that can be granted: if the state determines that terminating parental rights isn’t in the child’s best interest, if the state hasn’t provided services to ensure the safe return of the child home, or if the child is being cared for by a relative. But in many cases, even if relatives are involved or the mother is receiving services to facilitate reunification, there is still risk of her parental rights being terminated. The impact of ASFA has turned out to be both tragic and lethal for families. According to the Marshall Project, a criminal justice journalism organization, because of ASFA’s strict provisions, “at least 32,000 parents since 2006 have had their children permanently taken from them without being accused of physical or sexual abuse, though other factors, often related to their poverty, may have been involved. Of those, nearly 5,000 appear to have lost their parental rights because of their imprisonment alone.”¹¹

After serving her sentence, Clara wasn’t sure what would happen with her girls. It felt like public policy was literally structured to deny her custody of her daughters. She had no idea how she was going to fight the loss of her children, but she was determined to do it. In the meantime, as part of her probation, she was attending anger management and domestic violence classes, which were literally her only form of reentry support. Ignoring Eduardo’s pleas to give him another chance, she focused on her two-hour supervised visits with Theresa. She’d arrive early to meet Javier at the LAPD Hollywood Station, though he was always late; her complaints to the social worker were ignored. “I felt like the social worker and the whole child welfare system were all just lined up against me.”

In reality, Clara was living out what the research over the past decade has shown: the child welfare system routinely creates a series of obstacles that further separate formerly incarcerated women and their children. Despite the pretense of supervised visits and the empty words about progress, formerly incarcerated women believe they’re outmatched in trying to maintain connections with their children. Clara and so many others saw the child welfare system as just another institution working against them, like juvenile probation and adult criminal justice. For women lacking a stable income and secure housing, it’s extremely difficult if not impossible for a woman to meet the state’s requirements that will allow her children to return to her.¹² Women are also haunted by the very real anxiety that they may lose custody of their children forever. The fear Clara experienced was compounded by her knowledge that “my sister and my mom were actually helping Javier get permanent custody of Theresa.” Clara was reliving the nightmare of her childhood through the experiences of her daughters. She started crying as she remembered the trifecta of trauma she experienced: domestic violence, incarceration, and the loss of her children, all at the hands of her family. “I can’t believe they helped Javier get custody, even though some of it was my fault as well because I wouldn’t leave that abusive relationship, that’s all I knew. I thought he would take care of me.”

Overwhelmed by what she was facing, Clara returned to Eduardo. The physical abuse had finally stopped, but in its place his verbal and emotional abuse now escalated. They were also beginning to “chip,” using drugs on occasion. Clara kept all of this hidden—she had to complete probation and she wanted her daughters back. It was frightening: all this time it felt like DCFS was speeding things up and she was falling farther behind. As the Lopezes’ adoption of Aracely moved forward, Clara tried to make her peace with the situation. “At least I knew where she was living—and she was with blood, not strangers. It was a stable home; Eduardo’s parents had been married for over fifty years.” She saw Aracely whenever she could.

Her supervised visits with Theresa at the LAPD Hollywood station continued to be humiliating. Then one day, even though she arrived early, the social worker was already waiting for her. She couldn’t make eye contact with Clara as she told her that Javier and Theresa had disappeared; he’d severed all contact and had “failed to inform” DCFS where the family had moved. The system that was punishing her because it was supposedly “protecting” her children had now failed her daughter completely. It reminded Clara of her life after probation camp: how DCFS had sent her back to foster care at the same neglectful household she’d run away from before. It reminded her of all the times she’d tried to do her best as systems and forces bigger and stronger than she’d ever be just ran her over. Her drug use continued; it was the only way Clara could deal with the pain she was experiencing. She felt powerless and alone.

It’s no wonder that women who struggled with trauma and incarceration felt like they couldn’t stand up against the institutional strength of criminal justice and child welfare. It’s no wonder they turned to self-medication. It wasn’t substance abuse; it was a matter of survival. How else could they face the loss and the stress of their lives? I was tired of so many people—well intentioned and yet poorly informed—asking me why women would drink or use drugs when they were mothers. Didn’t they care about their children? Didn’t they care about themselves? The simple answer to both questions was “Yes, and . . .” Yes, and they were dealing with several pressures at the same time without any supports, without anyone to stand with them and help them through the pain of their lives. Clara and so many others self-medicated while they dealt with all these pressures, and they kept going.

For two years, Clara had no idea where Theresa was living or if she was even alive. She asked everyone who might know Javier or might have heard something about where he’d gone. She called the 800 number that helped parents search for missing children. Every time she got close to finding Theresa, all signs of Javier would vanish, again and again—he moved repeatedly. And then she found out she was pregnant.