Tennessee Bill Would Lock Up Foster Kids in Juvenile Jail Even Without a Criminal Charge

A deeply troubling bill backed by the Tennessee Department of Children's Services (DCS) would allow foster children, children who have never been charged with a crime, to be imprisoned in juvenile detention facilities. For communities of color, who are disproportionately represented in the foster care system, this legislation represents yet another mechanism of state-sanctioned punishment targeting the most vulnerable.

The bill would create a new classification called "Children in Need of Heightened Supervision," effectively building what Vanderbilt Law Professor Cara Suvall calls "a shadow juvenile justice system without the clarity, without the specificity and without the protections for young people." Suvall, who has not seen this approach anywhere else in the country, called it "a pretty shocking proposal."

Black and Indigenous children are already overrepresented at every stage of the child welfare system. Now Tennessee wants to funnel them into detention cells for the crime of being traumatized. Critics see through the framing clearly,  this is about DCS avoiding accountability for the crisis of foster children sleeping in state offices, by criminalizing the children themselves. Foster care advocate and former foster youth Ella Bat-Ami put it plainly: "The current DCS administration is questioned about their practices of keeping children in unsafe DCS offices and they dodge accountability by blaming the child."

Children of color who have survived abuse, neglect, and family separation are being pathologized for reacting to trauma. As Bat-Ami noted, "Yeah, they are going to act out. Does that make them dangerous children? No, because pretty much any adult would do the same thing." The bill, she warns, "functionally criminalizes being a child, just because these kids are in foster care."

Link: News Channel 5