This is part 3 of the series, Before the Record: The Pipelines, which examines the policies and practices that criminalize girls
When the banging starts, the clock reads 11:34 p.m.
Shauna listened to her mother, who scrambled to the door, with a voice that goes sharp and wary — “Who is it?” — before she unlocked a bolt lock and a bar lock, then cracked open the front door.
Thud. The door hit the wall hard, pushed open with force. Shauna scrambled to her bedroom door to watch through the hole where the doorknob used to be.
The landlord didn’t wait to be invited in. He wants his rent. Her mother tells him Friday. He tells her she’s been saying Friday for months.
What happens next, Shauna will carry for the rest of her life.
The landlord smiled—she will remember it as a devilish smile — and made her mother a proposal. Her mother said no. He pinned her by the neck against the wall with one hand, and with the other undid his pants and lifted her skirt. Her mother said no again, crying. He said: “Either you can do it, or I can take it from your daughter.”
Her mother gave in. Seemed like she placed her mind somewhere else until it was over. As he zipped up his pants, he had a final message. “I still want my money on Friday. Or your daughter is your next payment.” Then he left.
Shauna ran to her mother and held on as hard as she could. That night, they left in their car. They found a parking lot two blocks away and stayed there. From the car, she and her mom focused on each day’s survival: finding something to eat, a restroom to use, a place to change clothes and wash off. School was not a priority. She basically stopped going.
I knew this girl. I taught her.
From the classroom, I knew that she loved poetry and those teenage novels. She was short in stature, outspoken, smart, sassy, and cute. But beneath her smile, there was a hint of sadness that made me worry about her on the days she didn’t show up. I knew not to assume that she was fine.
But those repeated absences triggered a notice from the school office to child welfare. And the state came and took her.
Her life was never the same—not because the state caught her, but because it claimed her. To state caseworkers who claimed her, she was no longer Shauna the girl who had persevered and who planned to graduate and work a steady job, maybe at the front desk of a hotel like her aunt. She was “a youth who needed placement.”
Once Shauna was in foster care, I listened to her weep about not being able to see her mother, about how screwed up the system was, about everything it had taken from her without asking. On the days when she felt like death was the only answer, I talked her off that proverbial ledge.
She had a lot of spirit, and I believe those qualities helped her get through tough circumstances. And believe me, she had tough circumstances. I watched her survive things that would have broken adults twice her age—and I watched a system that was supposed to protect her treat her survival instincts – which prompted her to skip school and run away from foster homes as needed – as a behavioral problem.
Shauna is from the South Ward of Newark, New Jersey. I am writing this from New Orleans, where the accents, heat, and food are different. The system is the same.
The System That Was Built Before She Arrived
The word welfare does the heavy lifting of a lie.
What happened to Shauna’s mother was a crime. What the system did next was policy — and that distinction is the entire argument.
A landlord’s sexual violence produced the homelessness. The homelessness produced the school absences. The school absences produced the state’s arrival. The state’s arrival produced the removal. Not once in that entire chain of institutional response did anyone address the original crime. They just took the girl.
This is “family policing,” a term coined by civil rights scholar Dorothy Roberts of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School to describe the institutional practice of surveilling and punishing poor Black families rather than supporting them.
In 2019, federal spending on maintaining children in foster care outstripped spending on services to keep families together, reflecting a long-standing preference for removal over support.
This logic predates Louisiana’s DCFS, the Department of Children & Family Service. Black mothers have been observed, evaluated, and found deficient by the state for 150 years.
After emancipation, Freedmen’s Bureau agents would sometimes manage the forced separation of formerly enslaved Black mothers, deeming them unfit so that their children would be placed into indentured servitude with farmers, forcing mothers to have to petition local officials for the return of their children. In the 20th century, welfare caseworkers would arrive unannounced to check for male clothing or any evidence of a “man in the house” forcing women to sever their households so that they could get the help they needed to survive.
Shauna, who lived in a female-headed Black household living in poverty, should have been supported by advocates of feminism or racial justice or income equity. That she wasn’t can be explained by the “intersectionality” framework developed by civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw.
As Crenshaw explains it, social movements usually focus on one issue. The racial justice movement did not center gender violence. The feminist movement did not center poverty. The child welfare system centered neither. Shauna lived at the intersection of all three identities but instead receiving the support of its movements, she was discriminated against for all three identities, in a way that compounded and flowed right into the pipeline to systems like foster care and juvenile detention.
That compound discrimination is made worse in Black communities, which are themselves orphaned and exploited by state officials, who put neighborhoods into constant flux through mass incarceration and deliberately withdraw state investment from the households that remain, like Shauna’s. The result is what prison abolitionist and carceral geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.”
Only surveillance and removal remain. The clinic closes. The landlord stays. The caseworker arrives.
What the Numbers Name
This is not abstract theory. Louisiana’s own numbers tell the story.
Looking at the children taken from Louisiana families in 2024, 93% included no allegation of sexual abuse or physical abuse by parents. Instead, poverty is seen as neglect and the child is taken away, instead of offering a parent a route to Medicaid, food stamps, stable housing or babysitting – four of the most common needs for parents who were cited for common DCFS complaints – like letting an illness go untreated or not providing adequate food, living space, or supervision.
Louisiana’s DCFS is responsible for thousands of children in foster care; a 2024 federal class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of more than 4,000 of them.
As the legal complaint outlines, the system earned the state the second-worst ranking in the nation, 49th out of 50. Because of a lack of foster homes, many Louisiana children were unnecessarily placed in group homes, hospitals or hotels. And nearly 1 in 5 kids in Louisiana foster care endured three or more placements during their first year in care.
I watched as Shauna was moved constantly, which placed greater strain on her relationship with her mother and made it nearly impossible for Shauna to keep up with her schooling. As a teacher, I saw that students who had stayed in the same school and developed reliable ties with teachers could make it through challenging situations. That’s attachment theory, developed by British psychiatrist John Bowlby, who found that stable bonds with caring adults are the number-one buffer against delinquency.
Shauna didn’t need more placements. She needed her mother, her block, and a landlord in handcuffs.
And, as it turned out, this story doesn’t have a tragic ending. That’s because Shauna made it back to her mother. Not with the help of the foster-care system, but despite it. With the help of the school and community support, she and her mother were reunited and able to find stability together.
Without stability, girls like Shauna are more likely to enter the pipeline. Research has long shown that involvement with a foster-care system is one of the number-one factors that leads to homelessness. And multiple foster-care placements and institutionalization are clearly linked to sharply higher rates of arrest and incarceration later in life. Every severed placement is criminogenic, more likely to lead to arrest or incarceration – because these are kids who often lack family support, who are often forced to find ways to survive on their own even at a young age.
For my thesis, I analyzed interview data from Loyola University’s Modern Slavery Research Project — 53 Black cisgender and transgender girls across six U.S. cities. Of participants who had been in foster care, 9 out of 10 experienced multiple, overlapping victimizations inside the very system meant to protect them. And nearly half turned to criminalized survival strategies — not because the state stopped watching, but because it never actually started holding. Of participants who engaged in survival behaviors, 100% had prior victimization histories. Every single one.
But the pipeline does not begin in the courtroom. It begins the night a landlord makes a threat and the state’s only response is to take the girl.
Name What We Are Actually Building
Faced with this, Louisiana has a choice: patch the existing system or admit that it is doing exactly what it was built to do.
Last month, Sen. Regina Barrow of Baton Rouge introduced Senate Bill 265, which would abolish the Department of Children and Family Services and redistribute its functions across other state agencies. After all, this is a system that has watched children die across administrations, across reform cycles, and across the same promises repeated at the same oversight hearings
Senator Barrow agreed last month to put aside her bill to work on improvements to DCFS. But her proposal acknowledges, implicitly if not explicitly, that this is not a system that failed. It is a system that succeeded at something other than what it claimed.
Girls like Shauna who age out of Louisiana’s foster care system at 21 exit with no bridge to adult services, no gender-responsive programming, no structured support — parishes away from the communities that raised them, with no plan and no door.
Shauna is from New Jersey. But in every parish in this state, there are girls who look like her — who have stood in parking lots two blocks from home and held their mothers until they were ripped away from them, crying. Organizations like the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights and Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children have been naming them for years.
These girls did not fall through the cracks. They were processed through a system that has always known exactly what it was doing.
If this were about child welfare, Louisiana would not remove those children. If this were about child welfare, Louisiana would instead address the landlord — the sexual violence, the housing instability, the poverty that gets coded as Black maternal failure.
If not, we are not talking about child welfare. We are talking about a pipeline of poor outcomes waiting outside, while a caseworker knocks at the door.
If this were about child welfare, Shauna would stay with her mother instead of being led into that pipeline by a caseworker who has been taught to prioritize removal instead of support.
Andrea Hagan is a criminology instructor at Loyola University New Orleans and the founder of Pattern Hunters, LLC, a public scholarship platform that focuses on criminology, community engagement, and accountability. Further information is available at patternhunters.com.
