NEITHER COPS NOR CASEWORKERS: TRANSFORMING FAMILY POLICING THROUGH PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING

A caseworker makes a home visit to a poor Black family under the guise of protecting the children in the household from suspected neglect. The caseworker investigates. They search the premises without a warrant, as the Fourth Amendment's restraints do not apply to them, eventhough they are state actors who replicate police power. The family's four children share a bedroom while the parents sleep in the living room. The caseworker interrogates the parents. Their obvious lack of resources is automatically assumed to endanger the children and place them at risk of future maltreatment. It is not alleged that the parents have otherwise neglected (or abused) their children. Despite holding itself out as a "caring institution,"the state does not respond compassionately or even reasonably to the family's deprivation. Instead, the state wields the threat of removing the children from their home. Like in many cases, the threat is carried out, and the children are placed in unfamiliar environments with strangers. The removal directly links the parent's precarious financial situation to their fitness to parent, thereby targeting marginalized families who experience poverty. Money that could (and should) have gone to the needy family to care for their children is instead given to the strangers for taking in the children. The avoidable separation traumatizes the children, perpetuating the injustices they already experience as race-class subjugated people. This process, which plays out routinely in poor Black and brown communities, has been described as the "death penalty"of the child welfare system, otherwise known as the family police. Drawing from the abolitionist praxis of powershifting, this Article argues for the implementation and expansion of participatory budgeting ("PB") to unravel the connection between economic deprivation and family policing. PB is a governance arrangement that provides an entry point for directly impacted groups to "change the way-and for whom-policy and budgeting operates."1Throughoutthe country, much of the federal dollars budgeted for the poor never reach their pockets because of the discretionary structure of federal block grants. This means that state and local administrators have a lot of control over how welfare funds are spent, and they have come up with creative ways to sit on the money instead of using it to expand the social safety net. Moreover, many families struggling tomake ends meet avoid drawingwelfare because the programs are stigmatized. PBshifts power from the state to directly impacted communities and allows these communitiesto organize so thatmoney earmarked for their use will be spent to support them materially, addressing their specific needs as they define them. By bringing the dominated class into the democratic fora, PB also creates spaces where new social connections can form in the local economy. This helps to mitigate the social taxon welfare recipients and spurs welfare participation. Since the family police misguidedly uses poverty as a proxy for neglect, improving the material condition of the needy helps to shrink the reach of the child welfare system as it is constituted without legitimating its carceral logics.1Jocelyn Simonson, Police Reform Through a Power Lens, 130 YALE L.J.778, 825 (2021) (internal quotations omitted).