The upEND team recaps season one and shares their visions for a future without family policing.

We break down recurring myths about “child welfare,” discuss the abolitionist communities growing from spaces such as book clubs, and reflect on topics like the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA).

About Our Guests: 

Maya Pendleton has been a part of the upEND movement since its inception. She currently works as a researcher and writer for the upEND movement, focusing on how we abolish the family policing system, the harms of the current system to children, families and communities, and the world we will build post family policing. 

Alan Dettlaff is a professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work, where he also served as Dean from 2015 to 2022. Alan began his career as a social worker in the family policing system, where he worked as an investigative caseworker and administrator. Today his work focuses on ending the harm that results from this system. In 2020, he helped to create and launch the upEND Movement, a collaborative effort dedicated to abolishing the family policing system and building alternatives that focus on healing and liberation.

Episode Notes:

• Support the work of upEND: upendmovement.org/donate
• Read the episode transcript.
• Continue learning with additional resources in our syllabus: upendmovement.org/syllabus
• Alan Dettlaff and Dorothy Roberts were featured on CBS Sunday Morning in a national story on family policing abolition.
• Maya and Alan reference an article by Anna Arons called “An Unintended Abolition: Family Regulation During the COVID-19 Crisis.”
• Alan mentions the paper “Toward Thick Solidarity: Theorizing Empathy in Social Justice Movements” by Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange.
• The upEND team read “The School for Good Mothers” in a staff book club organized by Maya.
• Join Alan and connease’s book club, Toward Liberation.

After looking closely at how the family policing system operates, we zoom out to discuss how family policing is an extension of other carceral systems and how abolition is the solution. We just need to stretch our imagination. 

About Our Guest: 

Maya Schenwar is the director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism, and the board president of Truthout. She is the co-author (with Victoria Law) of "Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms," and the author of "Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better." Her next book, a co-edited anthology entitled "Parenting Toward Abolition" (a collaboration with Kim Wilson), will be released in 2024.

Episode Notes: 

• Episode Transcript: upendmovement.org/episode1-7
• Support the work of upEND: upendmovement.org/donate 
• Continue learning with additional resources in our syllabus: upendmovement.org/syllabus
• Critical Resistance is building an international movement to abolish the prison-industrial complex and creates robust organizing resources. 
• Just Practice builds communities’ capacity to effectively and empathically respond to intimate partner violence and sexual assault without relying primarily on police or other state-based systems.
• Interrupting Criminalization offers political education materials, organizing tools, support skill-building and practice spaces for organizers and movements challenging criminalization and the violence of policing and punishment to build safer communities. 
• Ujimaa Medics is a Black health collective. We spread emergency first response, community care, and survival skills to access health justice and long term wellness for all Black lives.
• Fumbling Toward Repair is a workbook by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan intended to support people who have taken on the coordination and facilitation of formal community accountability processes to address interpersonal harm & violence. 
• Connect with Maya’s work at mayaschenwar.com, Truthout.org, and loveprotect.org.
  

Why keep advocating for solutions that don’t work? 

In this episode, we'll discuss reforms in the family policing system and how these reforms don't actually help to end the harms perpetuated against Black children, families, and communities. We'll also be discussing the differences between reformist reforms and abolitionist steps.

About Our Guests: 

Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, organizer and collaborator who has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California-Riverside since 2001. Since the late-1990s, Dylan has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance and Abolition Collective. He is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide. 

Maya Pendleton has been a part of the upEND movement since its inception. She currently works as a researcher and writer for the upEND movement, focusing on how we abolish the family policing system, the harms of the current system to children, families and communities, and the world we will build post family policing. 

Episode Notes:

• Episode Transcript: upendmovement.org/episode1-6
• Episode Transcript: upendmovement.org/episode1-6
• Support the work of upEND: upendmovement.org/donate 
• Continue learning with additional resources in our syllabus: upendmovement.org/syllabus
• Explore the resource “Evaluating Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps to End the Family Policing System” which was created and co-written by Maya. 
• Dylan cites Michael Oher’s conservatorship and exploitation by the Tuohy family. 
• Dylan mentions that the U.S. Military’s “Tactics in Counterinsurgency” publication. 
• Follow Dylan on Twitter and Instagram. 
• Follow Maya on Twitter and Instagram.

The trauma of family separations and foster care are well documented, so why is this harm ignored? 

In episode 5, we discuss the harms of family separation and the outcomes of family policing involvement for children and parents. 

Joyce also shares more about her advocacy for Family Miranda Rights and her personal experiences as a mother impacted by the system. 

About Our Guests: 

Joyce McMillan is a thought leader, advocate, activist, community organizer, educator, and the Founder and Executive Director of JMACforFamilies (Just Making a Change). Joyce’s ultimate goal is to abolish systems of harm – especially the family policing/regulation/destruction system while creating concrete community resources. 

Shanta Trivedi is an assistant professor of law and faculty director of the Sayra and Neil Meyerhoff Center for families, Children and the Courts at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Prior to joining academia, Trivedi was a staff attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services’ Family Defense Practice, representing parents embroiled in the family policing system. Trivedi is a widely published legal scholar and policy advocate in popular media, with a focus on promoting approaches to reduce family separation by the family policing and other legal systems.

Episode Notes:

• Episode Transcript: upendmovement.org/episode1-5
• Support the work of upEND: upendmovement.org/donate 
• Continue learning with additional resources in our syllabus: upendmovement.org/syllabus
• Read “The Harm of Removal” by Shanta Trivedi.
• Connect with Joyce McMillan and support JMAC for Families. 
• Follow Shanta Trivedi’s work at the University of Baltimore.

“Families I work with tell me it’s like being on pins and needles every day of their life. It really impacts their mental health, their physical well-being, as well as their housing and job prospects. These families can’t mess up at all. It’s not a way to live.”

In previous episodes of the podcast, we've covered the history of family separation and family policing from the era of chattel slavery through the late 1900s. Now we're going to get into the current iteration of this system and how it functions to surveil, regulate and punish families, specifically Black and Indigenous families.

In this episode, Victoria’s written responses are voiced by our mutual friend Maya Pendleton.  

About Our Guests: 

Brianna Harvey is a scholar, practitioner, and researcher that engages in community-rooted inquiry. Through her work, she utilizes liberatory praxis that strives to combat the carceral conditions inflicted upon oppressed communities. Brianna received her PhD in Education from UCLA, and her MSW from USC. 

Victoria Copeland is a Black and Filipinx researcher, organizer, and spoonie, with training in social welfare and social policy. They are currently a Senior Policy Analyst at Upturn where their work focuses on the use of data and technology in the criminal legal and family policing systems. Their research is centralized around black study and surveillance studies, and is primarily done in collaboration with local abolitionist organizers. Victoria is dedicated to learning more about how we can sustain community power and care from the intersections between racial, economic, & disability justice movements.

Episode Notes: 

• Episode Transcript: upendmovement.org/episode1-4
• Support the work of upEND: upendmovement.org/donate 
• Continue learning with additional resources in our syllabus: upendmovement.org/syllabus
• Victoria Copeland and Brianna Harvey are authors in the essay collection Help is NOT on the Way. 
• Jaison mentions Katy ISD’s new policy to surveil transgender students in Houston. 
• Victoria mentions “A Complete Guide to The Family First Act” from The Imprint in addition to “Calculating the Souls of Black Folk” by J. Khadijah Abdurahman.
• Brianna cites what scholar Dr. Subini Annamma calls the “rhetoric of responsibility”. 
• Victoria is a co-author of chapters 1 and 4 in “Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System” by Alan Dettlaff.
• Read Victoria’s recent report “DCFS stands for Dividing and Conquering Families.”
  Brianna Harvey has an upcoming article with disability scholars, Subini Annamma, Brian Cabral, and Jamelia Morgan.

How did the family policing system become what it is today? 

We’ll take a look at some of the key policies and ideas from the early 1900s through 1970s that are still in place today including the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) and other white supremacist ideas that emerged at the time.

About Our Guests: 

Angela Olivia Burton was recently Special Counsel for Interdisciplinary Matters in the New York State Office of Court Administration’s Office for Justice Initiatives. Prior to this position, she served for 10 years as New York’s first Director for Quality Enhancement, Parent Representation, at the NYS Office of Indigent Legal Services. Angela has taught courses in lawyering practice, constitutional family law, and children’s rights with a focus on the family policing system. 

Richard Wexler is Executive Director of NCCPR. His interest in child welfare grew out of 19 years of work as a reporter for newspapers, public radio and public television. During that time, he won more than two dozen awards, many of them for stories about child abuse and foster care. He is the author of Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse. 

Mical Raz MD PhD is the Charles E. and Dale L. Phelps Professor in Public Policy and Health at the University of Rochester and a practicing adult hospitalist at Strong Memorial Hospital. A scholar of the history of child welfare policy, she is the author of three books, most recently Abusive Policies: How the American Child Welfare System Lost its Way. 

Episode Notes: 

• Richard Wexler references an article in Boston Magazine called “The Really High Housewives of MetroWest Boston.”
• Richard Wexler mentions Kelly Fong’s book, “Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services” which is releasing in October 2023. 
• Richard Wexler cites a paper by Anna Arons called “An Unintended Abolition: Family Regulation During the COVID-19 Crisis.”
• Episode Transcript: upendmovement.org/episode1-3
• Continue learning by taking our self-guided couse, “Introduction to Family Policing Abolition” which is a companion to The upEND Podcast: upendmovment.org/syllabus 
  Support the work of upEND: upendmovement.org/donate

It is commonly believed that the first child welfare system was created in 1874 in response to the abuse of a girl named Mary Ellen Wilson, but there’s actually more to that story. 

In the second episode of Season 1, we investigate the early history of the child welfare system from the time of emancipation during the mid-19th century through the early 20th century. 

About our Guests: 

Dorothy Roberts is a distinguished professor of Africana Studies, Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of the award-winning books Killing the Black Body, Shattered Bonds, and most recently, Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World.

Geoff Ward is a Professor of African and African-American Studies and the director of the WashU & Slavery Project at Washington University in St. Louis. His scholarship examines the haunting legacies of historical racial violence and implications for redress. His award-winning book, The Black Child Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice, examines the rise, fall and lasting remnants of Jim Crow Juvenile Justice. 

Episode Notes:

• Geoff Ward mentions the history of Mary Ann Crouse:  http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Co-Fa/Ex-Parte-Crouse.html  
• Connect with Dorothy Roberts at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and follow her on Twitter @DorothyERoberts
• Connect with Geoff Ward at Washington University in St. Louis and through the Memory for the Future lab at the Lewis Collaborative. 
• Episode Transcript: upendmovement.org/episode1-2 
• Support the work of upEND: upendmovement.org/donate 

Family separation was a key issue used to advance the movement to end slavery in the United States, and the family policing system builds upon slavery’s foundation, attacking the humanity of families seen as undesirable. In the first episode of Season 1, we explore the notion of abolition then and now, and the idea of abolition as a project of not just removal, but also creation of the society we all deserve. 

About Our Guests: 

Professor Ndjuoh MehChu teaches torts, civil rights law, critical race theory, and remedies at Seton Hall Law School. His scholarship explores ways to shore up protections for marginalized groups in the carceral state. Ndjuoh was formerly a legal fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center where he helped incarcerated people press their claims to improve their conditions of confinement and worked on issues involving educational equity in K-12 schools. 

Dr. Vanessa M. Holden is an Associate Professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky where she is the Director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative. Dr. Holden is the author of “Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community. 

Episode Notes: 

• This episode mentions articles by Ndjuoh MehChu including “Policing as Assault” and “Help Me to Find My Children: A Thirteenth Amendment Challenge to Family Separation.”
• Episode Transcript: upendmovement.org/episode1-1
• Continue learning: upendmovement.org/syllabus
• Support the work of upEND: upendmovement.org/donate 

Credits: 

Hosts: Josie Pickens & Jaison Oliver

Producer: Sydnie Mares

Editor: Imani Crosby