It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Former New York Chief Judge Judith Kaye says that when the family court system was first conceived in the early 1960s, “the idea was that the family courts would provide better, more efficient services to children.”
But as Albany has expanded the role of family court, in ways ranging from the establishment of permanency planning hearings for children in foster care, to the expansion of orders of protection that can be filed for intimate partners in addition to married ones, the infrastructure hasn't always been able to keep up. (An issue of Child Welfare Watch last year explored this in detail.)
And because of the nature of abuse and neglect proceedings, which have to be heard as soon as possible in order to give accused parents the benefit of a prompt trial, the squeeze on judges' current capacity can often hamstring other types of proceedings.
“The longer you delay adding judges, the longer families will have to wait to have their neglect matters adjudicated because removal decisions have to be made on a day-to-day basis,” explains Ronald Richter, a Queens family court judge and former deputy commissioner at the Administration for Children's Services.
“The family court, by virtue of not having enough judges, turns into an emergency kind of court ... because the limited number of judges you have must be used to decide emergencies and the neglect and abuse trials," Richter said.
For the period between January and June of this year, 203 foster care placement and review cases were disposed by the city’s family court, compared with 6,374 abuse and neglect dispositions.
James Purcell, CEO of the statewide Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies, believes there is a double standard at play in the tolerance of a backlog for family court cases, because lower-income families are among those most likely to be brought into court to answer to abuse and neglect indications or make petitions to reunify with their children.
"Imagine a middle-class family where a child was taken, and months and months later the final decision has not been made by the court on whether that event [which led to a child’s removal] is valid in the first place,” Purcell said. “I can’t imagine that that would be acceptable in our society if middle-class and upper-class families were treated that way.”
For former Chief Judge Kaye, who recalls having a conversation with the architect of the newly-built Queens family courthouse on how the building was designed around people having to spend long wait times to see judges, the reality of packed waiting rooms for family courts throughout the city is “heartbreaking.”
“I realize these are terrible times, it’s not something we don’t know, but still there have to be priorities for our limited resources – and this is a priority.”
