LA County’s DCFS removes between 4,000 and 6,000 kids from their homes every year and places them in foster care.
Of those removed, social workers disproportionately place children of color and those who live in the lowest-income communities in foster care at higher rates than their peers in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods.
When mothers experiencing domestic violence call the police for help, they find that responding law enforcement officers are quick to involve the child welfare system.
Once involved, social workers often remove children from their homes, even if the victim has left the partner who is abusing them.
Knowledge of this possibility often leaves victims of domestic violence afraid to call the police for help when they need it.
The final installment of this five-part series about Los Angeles County’s unique Maternal Health Diversion Program explores the pressing need for LA’s Office of Diversion and Reentry to scale up its diversion capacity. Thus far, the money to do so hasn’t been there.
The Maternal Health Diversion program pulls pregnant people from the county’s women’s jail and places them in interim group housing until they’re ready to move into their own permanent housing with their children. All the while, participants receive a broad array of services.
Long before the point of lock-up, the moms now in a Los Angeles diversion program for pregnant incarcerated people said they experienced problems for which they might have gotten assistance — things like housing insecurity and homelessness, domestic violence, substance use disorder, and involvement with the child welfare system.
With the support of the Maternal Health Diversion Program, many of these women said they are now able to get the help they need.
Diverting pregnant people from LA County’s jails is a complex process involving many moving parts and many players — including the diversion court, probation, child welfare, health care clinicians, case managers, housing providers, and the clients themselves.
In the third part of this multi-part series, our partners at WitnessLA explore some of the ways in which the process of diversion can jump the rails.
The process begins with a list of names.
Every few days, the obstetrics team inside Los Angeles County’s main women’s lockup, the Century Regional Detention Facility, sends the county’s Office of Diversion and Reentry a roster of pregnant people currently held in the facility.
The goal is to decide who qualifies for the Maternal Health Diversion Program, which diverts pregnant women away from jail and into supportive housing.
Women have become the fastest-growing incarcerated population in the U.S., even as overall national incarceration numbers have begun to slowly recede. Approximately 80 percent of the 2.9 million women jailed each year in the U.S. are mothers.
Los Angeles County’s Maternal Health Diversion Program disrupts the incarceration cycle by moving pregnant people out of jail cells and into supportive housing.