When Louisiana writes off its children
Sen. Regina Barrow has sponsored legislation to close the Louisiana Department of Children and Families Services, though she has agreed to work with DCFS Secretary Rebecca Harris on measures to improve how the state agency responds to child abuse. (Photo by Greg LaRose/Louisiana Illuminator)
Marley Perrilloux was 5 years old and weighed 19 pounds when he was found unresponsive in Gonzales in January. He was starving. His parents face murder charges.
Before Marley died, the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services received three separate reports about the living conditions in that home. Three times, the agency declined to open an investigation. Three times, a child edging toward death was treated as a paperwork decision.
Sen. Regina Barrow has seen enough. She filed Senate Bill 265 — legislation that would abolish DCFS entirely by Oct. 1, moving child welfare to the Department of Health and child support enforcement to Louisiana Works.
The bill is unlikely to pass, but it identifies something data alone cannot: this system is not fixable at the margins.
Barrow agreed this week to sideline her bill to work on options that involve substantial change at DCFS. She has been at this for years, attending what she calls “countless oversight hearings” and listening to promises of reform
She’s also watched as children keep dying.
In 2022, 2-year-old Mitchell Robinson III died of a fentanyl overdose after DCFS had been alerted at least three times, including two emergency room visits where he was revived with Narcan and sent home.
Communities that have watched this cycle for decades know what reform looks like from the inside: a child dies, legislators convene, the hotline keeps ringing and the staffing shortage never makes the headlines.
University of Pennsylvania law scholar Dorothy Roberts calls this family policing, the institutional practice of surveilling and punishing poor families, particularly Black families, rather than supporting them. She argues that what we call the child welfare system is not primarily a welfare apparatus. It is a carceral one — investigating instead of intervening, removing instead of resourcing, consistently misreading the material conditions of poverty as the moral failure of mothers.
In fiscal year 2019, the federal government spent about $8.6 billion on foster care and adoption assistance — more than 10 times what it devoted to family preservation and support services designed to keep families together.
Three ignored reports in Gonzales. The question Roberts forces is not whether DCFS failed. It is what the agency was built to do in the first place.
City University of New York political scientist Frances Fox Piven argues welfare programs are not designed to solve poverty; they are designed to manage its political consequences. Programs expand under public pressure, absorb the outrage, then contract when the cameras leave.
Louisiana has run this cycle before. A child dies. Legislators convene. Reforms are announced. The staffing shortage remains. The hotline keeps ringing into the void.
DCFS Secretary Rebecca Harris has responded with genuine structural adjustments — a 3-by-3-by-3 rule triggering automatic investigation after three reports in three months, 100 supervisors reassigned to direct fieldwork, a centralized abuse hotline. These are not nothing.
They are also not sufficient for an agency already ranked near the bottom nationally in child support collection and hemorrhaging experienced caseworkers faster than it can train replacements.
The evidence is plain: money prevents child abuse. Not more caseworkers photographing emaciated children and closing cases. Housing. Food. Health care. The boring infrastructure of keeping families stable is what actually keeps children alive.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a prison scholar and professor at the City University of New York, calls this organized abandonment. It’s a deliberate withdrawal of state investment from Black and poor communities, leaving behind only the institutions of surveillance and punishment. Schools close. Clinics shutter. Community anchors disappear.
In this instance, DCFS becomes the last institution standing in neighborhoods the state has already evacuated. Then, when children die, we restructure the last institution standing and call it accountability.
Barrow’s bill is a vote of no confidence. That vote is earned. But moving child welfare to the Department of Health without building housing stability, income floors and mental health infrastructure is bureaucratic musical chairs. The child falling through the gap does not care which agency’s letterhead is on the file that missed him.
Louisiana has to decide whether it will keep responding to dead children with reorganization charts or finally invest in the living ones.
