Taxpayer-funded adoptee treatment centers reveal systemic failures in child welfare infrastructure and accountability gaps
Original framing: “Inside a taxpayer-funded treatment center for adoptees, tales of abuse, neglect and little oversight - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The history of child welfare in the U.S. is a lineage of carceral solutions: from orphan trains to the 1950s-80s 'baby scoop' era, where Indigenous and poor families were systematically targeted. The 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act accelerated institutionalization by incentivizing adoptions over family reunification. Parallels exist in other settler-colonial nations, where adoption systems were tools of assimilation (e.g., Canada's Sixties Scoop).
The crisis in taxpayer-funded adoptee treatment centers is not an aberration but a symptom of racial capitalism’s carceral logic, where the state outsources trauma management to corporations like Sequel Youth Services while criminalizing poverty and indigeneity.
Historical parallels to residential schools and the Sixties Scoop reveal a consistent pattern: child welfare systems are designed to extract children from marginalized families under the guise of 'care,' perpetuating cycles of intergenerational harm. Indigenous knowledge systems, from Māori *whāngai* to Navajo *Hózhǫ́*, offer proven alternatives that prioritize kinship and cultural continuity over institutionalization. The trickster’s lens exposes the absurdity of a system that profits from pain, while adoptee-led movements and neuroscience confirm that relational healing—not carceral 'treatment'—is the path forward. True reform requires dismantling the foster-care industrial complex, redirecting funds to community wealth-building, and centering the voices of those most impacted by these policies.