NCCPR at the Kempe Center conference: The case against CASA
This is the text of the first of two NCCPR presentations at the 2021 Kempe Center International Virtual Conference: A Call to Action to Change Child Welfare
And see also this update on the research from The Imprint.
Most Court-Appointed Special Advocates programs call themselves CASA programs – as you’d expect. Two programs cited in this presentation either in the past or now use a different term: Volunteer Guardian-at-Litem or VGAL. They mean the same thing, and to avoid confusion I will refer to these programs as CASA programs throughout. Where a quote uses the term VGAL I will substitute the term CASA.
Whatever you call it, the program I am going to discuss today is probably the most sacred cow in American child welfare; the subject of thousands of local news stories across America, gushing over how wonderful this program is. I’m going to talk about why those stories are wrong, and how this most sacred cow in child welfare, Court-Appointed Special Advocates or CASA – harms to children.
That’s not because they want to hurt children, of course. It was all created with the best of intentions. CASAs still, overwhelmingly, are, to use Malcolm X’s famous phrase “kindly intentioned.”
But it has failed.
To understand what CASA is and how it really works, I’d like you to imagine the following scene.
A juvenile court judge thinks he needs more information to make decisions about families that are, literally, life-changing – up to and including whether the family will be allowed to exist. He can’t get anyone to pay for hiring enough professionals to tell him what he thinks he needs to know at court hearings.
So he thinks: I’ve got a great idea! I’ll just send someone out to pick a bunch of well-intentioned amateurs to do it for free! We’ll give ‘em 30 hours of training – ok, maybe 40. Then we’ll let them into the homes of families let them, interview everyone, assess those families, spend an average of 12 minutes every working day investigating the case – and then they can effectively decide if the child will go into foster care. They can effectively decide if the child stays in foster care. They can effectively decide if the child will ever see his or her parents ever again.
What could possibly go wrong?
Stripped of the glossy p.r. and the gooey feature stories and the misleading claims about its effectiveness, what I have described is CASA.
- The program relies on volunteers. Who has time to volunteer? Not an impoverished mother already holding down two jobs to make ends meet. It has to be someone with time on their hands. That means they have money on their hands. No wonder some CASA chapters are started by Junior Leagues.
- The National CASA Association requires 30 hours of training before sending this overwhelmingly white middle-class army of amateurs into homes that are overwhelmingly neither. Some local chapters may make it 40. But even before COVID, much of it could be taken online. If that’s all you need, we’re wasting an awful lot of money on law schools and social work schools.
- Although CASA sells itself as being better than everyone else because CASAs supposedly spend vast amounts of time with the children and families poring over information and investigating, a study commissioned by the National CASA Association itself found that the amateurs actually spend an average of only 4.3 hours per month – 12 minutes per working day — on cases. Oh wait, that’s the figure if the child is white. If the child is Black it drops to 2.67 hours per month.
- I also used the word “decide” earlier. Technically, of course, the CASA only makes recommendations. But the National CASA Association brags that 80 percent of the time, judges accept most CASA recommendations, and 61 percent of the time they accept all of them.
So in fact:
- The CASA is the judge.
- The CASA is the jury.
And often:
- The CASA is the family executioner.
And often, their only real qualification is their white, middle-class status. As Amy Mulzer and Tara Urs put it in their superb law review article analyzing the program, CASA’s very existence is “an act of white supremacy.”
And as one of my board members, Prof. Dorothy Roberts noted in her keynote presentation at this conference, CASA is one of the programs that “expands the state’s monitoring and separation of families.”
How white is CASA?
White volunteers are overrepresented in CASA much the way Black children are overrepresented in foster care. Studies find that 80 to 90 percent of the volunteers are white.