Torn Apart: The Carceral Web

Torn Apart is the inaugural podcast in our Ms. Book Club Series. Hosted and co-produced by Professor Dorothy Roberts, this limited series podcast in four parts is based on her award-winning book, Torn Apart.  In the podcast, she examines the child welfare system and advocates for abolishing family policing and reimagining child welfare.  Tune in to hear the voices of impacted families, family defenders, activists, and scholars.

In this episode, Torn Apart  reveals the child welfare system’s deep entanglements with the criminal legal system.  It exposes how state child protection caseworkers collaborate with police and use a carceral logic to surveil families. It investigates how the system treats Black children like criminals, resulting in Black children being more vulnerable to arrest, incarceration, and early death. Foster care is traumatic for both children and parents, and often leaves lasting damage on children.  In this episode, Torn Apart  turns to examining what it will take to end family policing, 

Meet Dorothy Roberts

Dorothy Roberts is a distinguished professor of Africana Studies, Law, and Sociology at
University of Pennsylvania. An elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences,  American Philosophical Society, and National Academy of Medicine, she is author of the best selling book on reproductive justice, Killing the Black Body. Her latest book, Torn Apart, won the 2023 American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award Honorable Mention, was a finalist for an LA Times Book Prize and C. Wright Mills Award, and was shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice.

With Guests

·         Sixto Cancel is a nationally recognized leader driving systems change in child welfare, working across tech, service delivery, research and data, and state and federal policy to improve outcomes for youth and families. He spent most of his childhood in foster, which informed his activism for child welfare. In 2017 Sixto founded Think Of Us, a nonprofit organization that uses technology and research centering people who have experienced foster care to transform the child welfare system’s fundamental architecture. He currently serves as the CEO, where he advises state and government officials to improve child welfare policies. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he led a campaign that disbursed $400M in Federal pandemic relief funds to former foster youth.

·         Joyce McMillan is the founder and Executive Director of Just Making A Change For Families, an organization in New York City that works to abolish the child welfare system and to strengthen the systems of supports that keep families and communities together. Joyce’s mission is to remove systemic barriers in communities of color by bringing awareness to the racial disparities in systems where people of color are disproportionately affected. Her ultimate goal is to abolish systems of harm–especially the family policing system (or the so-called “child welfare system”)–while creating concrete community resources. Joyce leads a statewide coalition of impacted parents and young people, advocates, attorneys, social workers, and academics collaborating to effect systemic change in the family policing system. Joyce also currently serves on the board of the Women’s Prison Association.

·         Erin Miles Cloud is a cofounder and codirector of Movement for Family Power in New York City. Cloud worked at the Bronx defenders, representing families and working with advocates, for nearly a decade. 

·         Lisa Sangoi is a cofounder and codirector of Movement for Family Power in New York City. Sangoi has previously worked at the NYU Law Family Defense Clinic, National