Alan Dettlaff
speaker
269 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Alan Dettlaff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's not usually how things play out, or that's not how I've seen things usually play out.
What I've seen happen, and it's usually related to ASFA because of this 15-month period,
period, states have what they call concurrent planning.
So because you have to begin a termination proceeding once you get to these 15 months and you don't know from the very early stages if you're going to be able to reunify, you start planning for termination from the very first day.
So one, you always have in the back of your mind that as the caseworker, the supervisor, that termination is a potential possibility because you're working towards that concurrently to working towards reunification.
What I've seen often happen, good examples of how ASPA really harms parents and disproportionately harms Black parents, are think of parents who are in prison for, say, a two-year sentence.
I've seen cases where a parent is in prison, and as soon as that child removes, the supervisor has said, oh, well, this is a termination case.
because they know that the person is in prison and not going to be able to do the mandated services that they're required to do.
Or think of a parent who is struggling with substances, substance use, and how often people relapse and how difficult it is for someone who has a substance addiction
to recover from that addiction.
Sometimes that can't happen in 12 to 15 months.
But if it doesn't happen in 12 to 15 months, their rights will be terminated.
And when we have systems that over-criminalize, over-incarcerate Black people, they're more subject to these termination laws.
The other thing that I've seen, where I've seen over and over, which makes me think that reunification is not prioritized,
I've seen many cases where very young children are placed in a foster home and because most states have what's called foster to adopt laws, meaning that foster parents are licensed to foster but also licensed to adopt, many foster parents get into fostering because they're adoption motivated.
So then you have a young child go into a foster care placement who bonds with the foster parents because that child only has a once a week, one hour visit with their parents.
Months go by.
The parent may be working their plan to work towards reunification.
Maybe they've had some slip ups.
But what happens is the state, the caseworkers, the supervisor, start to see how well this child is doing with this nice relationship.
Showing 161–180 of 269 · page 9 of 14
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