In 2001, University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy Roberts released a groundbreaking book, "Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare," laying out the case that most children in the U.S. foster care system are there not because of abuse, but for reasons that boil down to poverty. At the time Roberts was writing, one in 10 children in central Harlem was placed in foster care. Today, Roberts writes in her new book, "Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families — And How Abolition Can Build a Safer World," more than one in 10 Black children across the nation can expect to land in the system by age 18.
Just as the U.S. is a global outlier when it comes to mass incarceration, Roberts writes, "The United States extinguishes the legal rights of more parents than any other nation on Earth." And as with so many other state systems, the brunt falls disproportionately on nonwhite communities.
