Chapter Summaries
Chapter One: Wrongful Taking
his is the book’s scene-setter. It gives 3 snapshots at the top and then describes two cases in detail that show how DCS wrongfully takes children from their families.
One of the book’s main arguments is that DCS takes way too many children into custody and can’t properly take care of the ones it takes. I can’t imagine a more stinging indictment of the ironically-named Department of Children’s Services than the death it served up to little DaCayla Green.
Chapter Two: DCS on the Inside
This chapter begins with 3 snapshots of DCS employees. One of DCS’s major problems is underpaid and overworked caseworkers. Since DCS officials wouldn’t talk to me, I talked to DCS caseworkers and investigators. Throughout the process of reporting about DCS I requested interviews with DCS leadership and second level officials. Never got any. My reporting played a part in ending the tenure of the previous DCS Commissioner, Jennifer Nichols. Her replacement, Margie Quin, hasn’t granted me an interview either.
Chapter Three: How Children Welfare Agencies Operate
This chapter describes DCS operations. It begins with a common universal practice in child welfare cases—unwarranted home searches. Then, it tells about how DCS took Wendy Hancock’s children in Tennessee, how it usually takes children—some people say “kidnaps” them, then how DCS can get you fired from your job, and how Youth & Families Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) rates DCS performance. (poorly) Then I tell the story of a Mom who gave up custody of three kids to get her baby back from DCS custody.
This is one of the book’s longest chapters and has subheads: How Parenting Plans Break the Parent-Child Bond, then a story about a Black Father who fights for custody of his daughter, then Secrets and Lies, then an investigative story called DCS Needs a Major Overhaul.
The Black Dad story has a national context. It describes how much money goes to contractors who provide the bulk of foster homes, academic studies that debunk the myth of drug dependency as a disqualification for parenthood, and the sad outcomes for foster children who age-out of the system.
And it ends with the story of a family who loses a Black child to a white couple who are given custody by a white judge.
Chapter Four: Where Do All Those Kids Go?
They go with relatives or strangers—and are eventually reunited with their birth families about half the time. Some are locked up. This chapter tells the history of the Department of Children’s Services, the Brian A class-action lawsuit in 2001, and several audits by the state comptroller which repeatedly found that DCS failed in its mission to take care of the state’s neediest residents.
The scene is set for the next few chapters with the story of families who came to testify at a legislative hearing but were not allowed to speak. Then the context is widened with two stories from Alabama and Florida that have similar issues.
Chapter Five: Judging the Judges
Chapters 5-8 deal with players who have key roles in Tennessee child welfare. Like anywhere else, they are lawyers, judges, politicians, non-profits, social workers, and family advocates.
Chapter Five features four judges—two good, two bad. This chapter is the heart of the book. It runs 21 pages. It describes how a case moves from when children are first taken into custody through the juvenile court system, and sometimes into higher courts. Like the rest of the book, people are named, what they did is reported, sometimes what they tried to get away with but didn’t, is reported, too.
This chapter tells the story of Family Law Attorney Connie Reguli. Reguli is a foil to both DCS and the judges because she is a family defense attorney. Her role is defending parents and getting their kids back from DCS. In her mind, all the other players are corrupted by a dysfunctional system that unfairly punishes her clients. Reguli’s commentary runs throughout the book but her story comes at the end of Chapter Five because three judges were involved in having her law licens
Chapter Five: Judging the Judges
Chapters 5-8 deal with players who have key roles in Tennessee child welfare. Like anywhere else, they are lawyers, judges, politicians, non-profits, social workers, and family advocates.
Chapter Five features four judges—two good, two bad. This chapter is the heart of the book. It runs 21 pages. It describes how a case moves from when children are first taken into custody through the juvenile court system, and sometimes into higher courts. Like the rest of the book, people are named, what they did is reported, sometimes what they tried to get away with but didn’t, is reported, too.
This chapter tells the story of Family Law Attorney Connie Reguli. Reguli is a foil to both DCS and the judges because she is a family defense attorney. Her role is defending parents and getting their kids back from DCS. In her mind, all the other players are corrupted by a dysfunctional system that unfairly punishes her clients. Reguli’s commentary runs throughout the book but her story comes at the end of Chapter Five because three judges were involved in having her law license revoked.
Chapter Six: Lawmakers and Officials
This chapter is about lawmakers, politics, and welfare officials. It starts with a description of two kinds of Christians and a typical meeting of the House Children and Family Affairs Subcommittee. Then there is a story about the failure to reform the troubled agency.
Then we hear about Gov. Bill Lee, DCS Commissioner Margie Quin, Tennessee Safe Baby Courts and the Strongwell Contract. We hear from Representative Justin Lafferty, a Republican conservative, who says even if DCS had an unlimited amount of cash to spend, it could never substitute for a “loving mother and father in a home to take care of a child”.
Chapter Six ends with a picture of state politics as the 113th General Assembly session concludes in May 2023. Three Democrats took over the microphone, leading to the expulsion of two of them by the Republican supermajority. The incident made national headlines and President Biden met with the “Tennessee Three” at the White House.
This melodrama was about the Lege’s failure to enact gun safety laws and overshadowed the failure of a bill to put a 20-case limit on DCS caseworkers—something that was first proposed in 2017. As one of the renegade representatives noted, their protest was really about how hyper partisanship has prevented their participation in making laws because Republicans simply won’t work with the other side.
I asked the Senate Pro Tempore, Republican Ferrell Haile, if it would be better to even out the number of members from both parties on legislative committees. He shook his head “No” and remarked that there was a long period when Southern Democrats controlled Tennessee and now “they have it coming”.
Chapter Seven: CASA and the Role of NGOs
Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) is a well-known national non-profit that represents children in custody cases. Judges rely on CASA attorneys/advocates to bird dog cases and advise them because they couldn’t possibly do the research for all the families that come into their court.
CASA, like DCS, is seriously conflicted about its mission. Does it represent the child or serve the judge? This chapter has a story that illustrates a common problem when a GAL becomes a tool of the department: neither the child’s best interest nor the court’s impartiality is well-served.
Chapter Eight: Lawyers, Litigators, and How Money Flows through the System
We hear from Jessica Ramsey, a Guardian ad Litem, and Connie Reguli, who we have already met. Reguli is an attorney and family defense activist. Ramsey has her complaints about DCS. In general, she thinks DCS doesn’t act quickly enough to protect children who are at risk. She explains how parents, DCS, the judge, and attorneys each play their parts in a custody case. And she explains about kids who are kept in higher confinement than necessary in order to make more money off of their care.
Reguli tells about her courtroom experiences which led her into advocating for parents and families at a national level. She’s been to Washington at least a dozen times lobbying for changes in federal laws. She talks about her political work, about court-appointed lawyers who push for plea deals instead of fighting for family reunification.
This chapter also includes a critique of for-profit service providers based on a report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project called The Kids Are Not Alright.
Chapter Nine: Family Defense and Parental Advocates
I decided to add this chapter even though we don’t have these things in Tennessee. In child welfare cases here, parents are guilty until proven innocent. That’s just the way it is. New York, Washington, Colorado, and a few other states get better outcomes because they support parents, families, and children in a less adversarial way. Poor outcomes in Tennessee are due to a number of things. Some of it is politics, some of it is law, some of it is prejudice, some of it is organizational dysfunction, and some of it is rank corruption—but all of it together makes for a dysfunctional child welfare system. Taking a different approach that has proven to work well, suggests that states like Tennessee should adopt it. Child welfare in Tennessee could have a more hopeful future than the dreadful picture I have painted in this book. A brighter future for child welfare in Tennessee is possible but a lot of things would have to change before that happens.
Chapter Ten: Activists and Abolitionists
Community organizers, some academics, and people working inside child welfare agencies are pushing back against the system. They employ different strategies and have begun to move the needle but not very far. The good news is that they know about each other and are calling for fundamental change. It’s too early to say if they will succeed but there has been a call to start organizing a radically different approach to child welfare.
Chapter Eleven: Treating People Like Criminals by Keeping Them in the Dark
This chapter is about the lack of transparency in DCS operations, a very expensive computer system that can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, the unwillingness of successive DCS commissioners to engage reporters, and a comparison between Tennessee and Alabama regarding poverty stats, foster care numbers, removal and placement rates, spending, and where both states fit in the national rankings. This is my most wonky chapter but comes to a simple conclusion: namely, Alabama beats Tennessee at more than just football.
Chapter Twelve: War on Drugs and DCS’s Dirty Little Drug War
Drug use and dependency are much exaggerated by DCS investigators and DCS attorneys. They consider exposure to drugs—even prescribed ones– extreme abuse and most Tennessee judges are convinced that it is. Four stories in Children in Custody are about DCS falsely accusing parents of drug abuse in order to take their kids. A story in Obion County tells about a family whose kids were wrongfully taken, ostensibly for drugs, but the role of a landlord who called DCS on them while they were being evicted, was not disclosed in court.
This chapter has stories about the fentanyl crisis, racial disparity in marijuana arrests, fighting discrimination and drug hysteria, and civil forfeiture. These stories are in stark contrast to how DCS whips up anti-drug hysteria and they support a major premise of this book: child removals are really about punishing parents because they are poor.
Chapter Thirteen: Solutions
This final chapter talks about what Tennessee is doing wrong and what some other states are doing right regarding Child Welfare. And it talks about how too much federal money goes towards foster care and not enough into family support and prevention to keep kids from getting taken. We hear from Richard Wexler, an expert on Child Welfare, who is Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. Wexler has been the nation’s leading watchdog on child welfare for more than two decades. Connie Reguli describes what she would do if she were in charge of child welfare in Tennessee.
Chapter Fourteen: Addendum: Child Policy Review
This chapter draws on Wexler’s writings on the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act. Everything else in Harvesting Children is my work product. I have included Wexler’s work because my stories mostly come from Tennessee, Alabama, and Florida and he has a broader scope than my own. I think parents, activists, and academics will find them useful to understand the big picture. My stories detail how these policies fail to protect families and children and what actually happens in child custody cases but I do not have Wexler’s experienced eye about child welfare policy on a national scale. Other articles, resources, and materials about child welfare are included from other writers and experts.