CPS: The System that Protects Careers, Not Children

The Pattern is Old.  The Costume is New.

What we call child protection is just an old pattern dressed in a new costume.

The language changes.

The agencies change.

The paperwork gets thicker.

But the pattern.

The targeting, the surveillance, the removal of children from the same neighborhoods over and over has not changed.

For decades, we’ve been told that CPS exists to keep children safe.

But once you’ve seen the machinery up close, a different truth emerges.

This system doesn’t protect children.

It protects careers.

What we call “child welfare” is a massive employment engine. An interconnected network of agencies, contractors, clinicians, nonprofits, evaluators, attorneys, and professionals whose livelihoods depend on families in crisis.

Children are not the priority.

They never have been.

The Red Zones: Where Every System Extracts the Same Families

If you map out where children are taken, the same red zones light up every time: neighborhoods marked by high removals, high incarceration, high juvenile detention, high poverty, and relentless surveillance.

These aren’t hot spots.

They’re extraction zones.

Communities harvested generation after generation by systems that claim to protect, while they quietly separate and destroy.

And the system has crafted a powerful narrative for the public: children are being rescued, saved, and protected.

But that’s not what’s happening.

The system isn’t saving children.

It’s swapping one set of risks for another.

Trading the known for the unknown.

Trading poverty for trauma.

Trading family for instability.

Calling it protection when it’s really displacement.

The system is the priority.

And the more you follow the money, the clearer the picture becomes.

Over time, we’ve grown desensitized to it.

Not because the harm is any less violent, but because we’ve watched it happen to the same communities for so long that it begins to feel normal.

For some, it’s easier, consciously or not, to believe that this suffering is justified, as long as it stays a safe distance from their own home.

But children do not choose the zip code they are born into. And no child deserves to be born into a community treated as commodities.

Where suffering is concentrated, profit is concentrated.

Entire industries survive because of the pain coming out of these zip codes.

As my colleague Corey Best so eloquently stated, “We say poor people don’t pay their bills, but they pay our bills.”

CPS Doesn’t Mean What We Think It Means

The public hears the words “Child Protective Services” and imagines safety, help, and compassion.

But inside the system, you see something else:

CPS doesn’t stand for Child Protective Services. It stands for Career Preservation Services.

This machine is built to sustain itself, not protect families.

It feeds on fear, survives on surveillance, and grows because most people never question the truth beneath the name.

Entire industries make their money off family separation.

Entire careers are secured through the suffering of parents and children.

Family trauma has become someone else’s business model.

This is not what child protection looks like.

This is what system preservation looks like.

The Shadow Economy Built on Family Separation

When CPS removes a child, that single action activates an entire network of professionals and services.

Money moves.

Contracts move.

Referrals move.

Careers move.

The child becomes the entry point to a shadow economy: therapists, evaluators, parenting programs, substance-use providers, group homes and residential facilities, visitation centers, case management agencies, court-appointed supports, and nonprofits built around high-need clients.

These organizations don’t just exist around the system.

They exist because of it.

And like any industry, they need a steady supply of cases to survive.

The referrals don’t stop.

Referrals can’t stop because too many jobs, contracts, and careers depend on the pipeline staying full.

And that pipeline doesn’t end with CPS.

The child welfare system is the front door to the next two systems waiting in line: juvenile justice and adult incarceration.

What starts as “child protection” becomes the first step in a long corridor of surveillance, control, and punishment.

Children were meant to grow in families, not institutions, yet this system feeds the very institutions built to confine them.

When entire industries are fueled by trauma coming out of a handful of ZIP codes, the suffering becomes normalized.

Expected.

It becomes the cost of doing business.

People stop asking why because they’ve accepted that it’s happening.

And when you accept a pattern long enough, you stop seeing it as harm.

You start seeing it as order.

As necessary.

As deserved.

Meanwhile, families are forced to navigate a system that places more oversight on them than on the professionals who hold power over their lives.

Parents endure assessments, screenings, drug tests, home visits, and case plan tasks stretching months or years while the professionals deciding their fate face far less scrutiny.

A parent shows emotion and is labeled unstable.

A professional shows bias and it’s considered judgment.

This imbalance is intentional.

It is baked in.

We treat Black families experiencing poverty as risks. We treat the system as trustworthy by default.

But there is no safety in a system that profits from the instability of the families it monitors and no justice in a pipeline that begins with child removal and ends in incarceration.

The Silent Agreement

There is a silent agreement holding this entire machine together.

Systems send the referrals.

Professionals understand what the system wants to see.

And as long as they deliver the right narratives: compliance over curiosity; reports over relationships; deficits over strengths; and confirmation over truth, then the referrals never stop.

The system feeds the professionals. The professionals feed the system. And families become expendable.

We are not just looking at bad decisions or individual bias.

We are looking at an economy.

The Historical Thread: From Slavery to Today

This machinery did not appear out of nowhere.

For Black families, these practices are not new.

They are modernized echoes of a much older blueprint.

During chattel slavery:

• Black children were sold for profit.

• Black mothers had no legal rights to their children.

• The state enforced family separation with violence.

Today:

• Black children are removed at disproportionate rates.

• Poverty is treated as neglect.

• The state enforces separation through court orders instead of chains.

It’s the same logic:

• Control the family

• Exploit the suffering.

• Profit from the outcome.

  
  

Entire industries grew from the bodies and trauma of Black families then and entire industries grow from them now.

CPS.

Juvenile detention.

Mass incarceration.

Different names, same purpose.

This isn’t coincidence.

It’s continuity.

Black children are not removed because they are in more danger.

They are removed because they are more surveilled. More policed. More doubted. More disposable.

The names have changed. The paperwork has changed. The language has changed.

But the logic, the belief that Black families are less deserving of being together, has remained intact.

This is inherited harm.

And it must be confronted.

What God Says About Systems Like This

Scripture has never blessed the tearing apart of families especially not the poor, the marginalized, or the oppressed.

Isaiah 10:1–2 says: "Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.”

This is not vague spiritual language.

It is a direct indictment of exactly what we are facing: unjust policies, oppressive systems, and leaders who profit from the pain of the vulnerable.

If God’s design is family, then any system built on separation must answer to a higher authority.

The question is simple:

Who gave us permission to break what God put together? What gives our government the right to separate what God has ordained?

This Is Not a Child Welfare System

Let’s stop pretending.

This is not a child-welfare system.

It is an adult-welfare system. An economy designed to protect institutions, contracts, and careers.

The same communities harmed by slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration are the same communities sustaining this machine today.

That is not accidental.

It is structural.

It is historical.

It is profitable.

Once you understand how interconnected these systems are, the truth becomes clear:

We are not fighting one system.

We are fighting an entire economy built on family separation.

A Vision for the System We Deserve

If this system can be built, it can be dismantled.

And if it can be dismantled, it can be replaced.

The system I am fighting for is not a reform of this one.

It is a replacement.

Once you know the truth, silence becomes complicity.

If you work inside the system. Tell the truth.

If you lead in policy. Fund prevention, not punishment.

If you are part of a faith community. Stand with families.

If you are impacted. Know this: you are not the problem; the system is.

If you have influence. Use it.

Refuse to call harm help.

Refuse to treat poverty like neglect.

Refuse to accept separation as safety.

Refuse to look away when the same communities are targeted again and again.

The system only functions when good people cooperate with the lie.

Tell the truth, and the system begins to crack.

Organize, and the system begins to weaken.

Stand with families, and the system begins to fall.

We can build something new

Something children would choose

A system rooted in dignity, justice, truth, and love.

Our children deserve nothing less.

The time to act is now.