Broken
Transforming Child Protective Services—Notes of a Former Caseworker
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- $169.00
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- $169.00
Descripción editorial
"It’s an invaluable insider account of a pressing social issue." - Publishers Weekly
Joining the ranks of Evicted and The New Jim Crow, a former caseworker’s searing, clear-eyed investigation of the child welfare system—from foster care to incarceration—that exposes the deep-rooted biases shaping the system, witnessed through the lives of several Black families.
Dr. Jessica Pryce knows the child welfare system firsthand and, in this long overdue book, breaks it down from the inside out, sharing her professional journey and offering the crucial perspectives of caseworkers and Black women impacted by the system. It is a groundbreaking and eye-opening confrontation of the inherent and systemic racism deeply entrenched within the child welfare system.
Pryce started her social work career with an internship where she was committed to helping keep children safe. In the book, she walks alongside her close friends and even her family as they navigate the system, while sharing her own reckoning with the requirements of her job and her role in the systemic harm. Through poignant narratives and introspection, readers witness the harrowing effects of a well-intentioned workforce that has lost its way, demonstrating how separations are often not in a child’s best interests.
With a renewed commitment to strengthening families in her role as activist, Pryce invites the child welfare workforce to embark on a journey of self-reflection and radical growth. At once a framework for transforming child protective services and an intimate, stunning first-hand account of the system as it currently operates, Broken takes everyday scenarios as its focus rather than extreme child welfare cases, challenging readers to critically examine their own mindsets and biases in order to reimagine how we help families in need.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pryce debuts with a harrowing memoir of her former career as an investigator for Child Protective Services and her eventual reckoning with the system's structural inequities. As a CPS investigator in Tallahassee, Fla., Pryce responded to anonymous reports of child abuse and neglect. At first trusting in the process, she later came to see the system as geared toward hasty child removal rather than careful consideration of each case. After a close friend was investigated by CPS, Pryce came to believe that families being separated were disproportionately poor and Black, and that it would be better to provide more support to struggling families before resorting to child removal. She eventually left the department and became an advocate for reform. While Pryce's initial naivety almost beggars belief—she recalls being so unattuned to problems with the system that she reported her own sister to CPS, shocking even her coworkers—the narrative is all the more riveting for her total immersion in the ideology. Readers will be troubled and enthralled by Pryce's detailed reconstructions of disturbing scenes in which she and other investigators entered messy and dysfunctional homes for confrontations with clearly neglectful but also desperate and ill-equipped parents. Equally noteworthy is Pryce's careful spelling out of how workplace camaraderie provides cover for the persistence of bad policy. It's an invaluable insider account of a pressing social issue.
