Misconceptions about mental health are common within New York City's child welfare system, says Lauren Shapiro, the executive director of Brooklyn Family Defense Project.
As many as one in five child welfare cases involves a parent with a mental health diagnosis, creating challenges for parents, children and caseworkers. Advocates say efforts to address those challenges haven’t gone far enough.
There are reports that some parents are having trouble getting child welfare services because a botched contract award and budget threats last year led providers to scale back.
Hoping to reduce fights, prevent suicide and help inmates avoid returning to jail, New York is changing the way it evaluates new prisoners—and building a new jail. Advocates are split on whether that will solve the problem.
You can now listen to a discussion of our May investigation into the sexual abuse of female prisoners by New York State prison employees, thanks to local radio stations who have interviewed us about it.
In the debate over budget cuts, teacher layoffs and improving schools, much has been said about teachers who get “unsatisfactory” ratings. But little has been heard from those instructors.
New York State prison guards who break the law by having sex with an inmate often receive favorable treatment by juries and light sentences from judges.
DOCS says that misunderstandings about pat-frisks might explain some of the sexual misconduct allegations its inmates have made against guards. Some evidence suggests, however, that the problems in New York’s female prisons are deeper than that.
For at least 35 years, New York State legal advocates, prison officials and unions have wrestled over how to protect female inmates from sexual abuse when male officers guard them.
In 1999, an officer and an inmate at Manhattan’s Bayview Correctional Facility fell in love and started having sex, with consequences that reverberate today.
Several New York State prisons ranked high in a recent federal survey of inmates reporting staff sexual abuse. A City Limits investigation finds that sexual misconduct in New York’s prisons eludes stereotypes—and, sometimes, detection.
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