Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services

Pryce debuts with a harrowing memoir of her former career as an investigator for Child Protective Services and her eventual reckoning with the system’s structural inequities. As a CPS investigator in Tallahassee, Fla., Pryce responded to anonymous reports of child abuse and neglect. At first trusting in the process, she later came to see the system as geared toward hasty child removal rather than careful consideration of each case. After a close friend was investigated by CPS, Pryce came to believe that families being separated were disproportionately poor and Black, and that it would be better to provide more support to struggling families before resorting to child removal. She eventually left the department and became an advocate for reform. While Pryce’s initial naivety almost beggars belief—she recalls being so unattuned to problems with the system that she reported her own sister to CPS, shocking even her coworkers—the narrative is all the more riveting for her total immersion in the ideology. Readers will be troubled and enthralled by Pryce’s detailed reconstructions of disturbing scenes in which she and other investigators entered messy and dysfunctional homes for confrontations with clearly neglectful but also desperate and ill-equipped parents. Equally noteworthy is Pryce’s careful spelling out of how workplace camaraderie provides cover for the persistence of bad policy. It’s an invaluable insider account of a pressing social issue. (Mar.)