When Yusef Presley was 5, he was removed from his family home and separated from his mom and 8-year-old sister due to allegations of maternal abuse. “I still think about that day, still dream about it,” he told me. “My mom had our best interests” at heart, Presley said, “but she did not know how to parent. She needed help. She had a lot on her plate and was being abused by a boyfriend. Money was tight. If the local community had invested in my family, we would have been OK. We needed assistance, but my sister and I did not need to be removed and separated from our mom and our community.”

During the next eight years, Presley was sent to a multitude of foster homes. Although he was eventually adopted by an aunt, by that point, he had spent time in two facilities: First, a Kansas program that was closed by the state in 2014 and demolished in 2017 because it was too decrepit to repair; and then the Kansas Juvenile Correctional Complex (KJCC), a “reform school” that opened in 1879. “I felt like I was being starved at KJCC,” Presley said. “I felt trapped. There were fights all the time and one of the guards kept telling me that he’d see me back at KJCC once I was released. It was a demoralizing, terrible place with unlivable conditions.”

Thankfully, Presley defied the odds and never returned to KJCC. Now 27, he is a junior at Wichita State College and is majoring in organizational leadership and learning. He’s also a youth advocate at Destination Innovation, where his work includes organizing alternatives to youth and adult incarceration and providing support for families caught in the child welfare system.

In addition, Presley is now part of a national movement to abolish prisons, end family policing and stop the war on drugs that feeds both systems.

Furthermore, he credits a serendipitous meeting with an abolitionist from Progeny KS with introducing him to the campaign to end what has become known as the foster-care-to-prison pipeline, the connective tissue between foster care, juvenile detention and adult confinement.

Alan J. Dettlaff, professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work and author of Confronting the Racist Legacy of the American Child Welfare System: The Case for Abolition, is also part of this multi-issue movement. He likens today’s abolition organizing to 19th-century anti-slavery efforts that sought more than an end to chattel slavery and sought to eradicate white supremacy itself.

Like 19th-century abolition, today’s abolitionist movement has both short-term and long-term goals. Changing attitudes, Dettlaff said, is key for success at both time scales. “Family policing and the violence inflicted on Black Americans, Brown Americans, Native Americans, disabled Americans and the poor run up against the myth of benevolence,” he explained. “The general public believes that the child welfare system helps vulnerable children in need of protection and support. What they don’t know is that 70 percent of kids are removed because of neglect, not sexual or physical abuse, and neglect conflates directly with poverty.”

Other facts also rankle Dettlaff. Many people, he says, were justifiably horrified by the 30,000 family separations that occurred at the U.S.–Mexico border in 2020 and 2021. “Many psychologists likened it to torture,” he said. “At the same time, 3,000 American kids are separated from their families every week and, for the most part, people turn away and say nothing about it. Aren’t these separations also tantamount to torture?” he asked.

That torture is elevated when ableism enters the mix. This is because parents with disabilities are more likely than nondisabled parents to be referred to child welfare, said Robyn M. Powell, professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. “Disabled people tend to have more involvement with government programs so there are more people keeping watch,” she said.

The child........

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