When started my career as a flight attendant, I never imagined that I wouldn’t be able to continue breastfeeding after I went back to work. I thought that, like most workplaces, my airline would be required by federal law to provide workers a clean, private place and breaks to pump at work. (That’s thanks to a provision known as the Break Time for Nursing Mothers law.)

But it turns out my employer isn’t. That’s because flight attendants are among the approximately 9 million women who are excluded from the law’s protection — along with other transportation workers, teachers, agricultural workers, nurses, and many others. A bill before Congress right now — the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act — would fix that. Congress should act now to pass it.

I first realized the pickle I was in when I became pregnant with my first child and found out that my employer, Frontier Airlines, didn’t provide any accommodations for nursing moms. I’d watched other flight attendant moms trying to make it work pumping on the job — and I saw how stressful it was for them. They were too fearful of losing their paychecks to ask the airline to accommodate them. When some of my coworkers did ask for breaks and a place to pump, Frontier actually prohibited them from pumping at work, and even forced them off the job without a paycheck.

That was when I started to feel like Frontier was making me choose between my career and breastfeeding my baby. I believe breast milk is optimal for babies, and I wanted to give him those health benefits. At the same time, I didn’t feel great about pumping in an unsanitary airplane lavatory, and having to scramble to find time to pump between flights, especially given my unpredictable schedule. I was worried I’d lose my job if I had to pump on duty and got reported. Even though I desperately wanted to keep nursing my baby, I just couldn’t see how I could make it work. It was a wrenching decision, but I decided I had no choice but to give up breastfeeding in order to go back to work and support my family.

No woman should have to make that kind of decision. But because of the gap in coverage under the current law, too many of us still do.

The ACLU is representing me in a lawsuit arguing that Frontier’s treatment of pregnant and breastfeeding pilots and flight attendants is discriminatory. But if the airline had not been exempt from the duty under the existing federal Break Time Law to provide breaks and a clean place to pump, we probably would have never had to take Frontier to court over that in the first place.

The PUMP Act would give workers like me the protection we need: a clear requirement that all employers must provide workers who are nursing with the basic accommodations they need. Solutions exist in all industries — including airlines — that would allow employees to pump safely. And the bill would strengthen the law in other ways, extending protections from one year to two years, clarifying that it covers situations like adoption or stillbirth, and ensuring that when employers are not in compliance, there is a meaningful way to enforce it.

The bill has bipartisan support in Congress. Let’s make sure it becomes law so that all workers — no matter what industry they work in — have the choice to continue breastfeeding and the ability to get back to work.

Research shows that reductions in the United States incarceration rate would have prevented millions of COVID-19 cases and tens of thousands of deaths, both inside jails and prisons and in their surrounding communities. For those of us working with incarcerated people during the pandemic, this confirms what we already know: decarceration will save lives and is a vital part of pandemic response. So why, with the Delta variant tearing through the country and a new, vaccine resistant variant discovered, are we not seeing more releases?

In part, this is due to a failure in leadership. Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Ralph Gants explained the dilemma in his comments on a lawsuit to increase releases from the state’s detention facilities: “We’ve got the governor saying, ‘Not my problem, I shouldn’t be ordered to do something.’ We’ve got the Department of Correction saying, ‘We manage the prisons, the only thing we’re involved with is medical parole,’ and now we’ve got the parole board saying that it’s not their problem. So who’s supposed to do it?” Justice Gants asked.

COVID releases that did occur prove that a range of government actors have the power to release people when they deem it appropriate. This is not a question of authority; it is a question of will.

Governors have the power to commute sentences, as they did everywhere from Washington state to North Carolina. State legislatures can pass bills to release people early, as New Jersey’s did. Corrections departments can expedite releases or release people early, as many states, including Wisconsin and Iowa’s, did. State courts can identify people for early release or appoint special masters to do this as they did in Maryland and Hawaii, or expand those eligible for release hearings as in Massachusetts. Federal courts can act similarly, as when a federal judge ordered federal immigration authorities to immediately release people from Pennsylvania prisons. Criminal judicial systems, superior courts, and district attorneys can adopt policies that fix the presumptive bail amount for certain charged offenses at $0, so that people are not locked in jails due to their poverty and inability to raise enough money to buy their freedom pending trial.

With thousands dead from COVID-19 in U.S. jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers, the failure of officials with the authority to release people to do so is inexcusable. The evidence shows that when jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers reduced the number of people locked up, public safety did not suffer, and that releases save lives.

While ensuring vaccine access is vital, it is not a substitute for decarceration. Breakthrough infections remain a danger even for those who are vaccinated, and vaccinated people are still able to spread the disease to others, including those who are unable to be vaccinated. During a July COVID-19 outbreak in a highly-vaccinated Texas federal prison, for example, 70 percent of vaccinated people were infected, along with 93 percent of unvaccinated people in the prison.

Carceral settings, communal living spaces that often have tight quarters and poor ventilation, are an ideal environment for spreading the highly infectious Delta variant, and the discovery of the vaccine-resistant Mu variant further proves the danger of relying on vaccines alone. The World Health Organization has emphasized the “need to do everything possible to stop the spread of the virus in order to prevent mutations that may reduce the efficacy of existing vaccines.”

As the U.S. battles the latest wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to learn from the mistakes of the first waves, including the failure to release large numbers of people from the prisons, jails, and detention centers that became hotbeds for the virus. Judges, elected officials, and correctional officers have a choice to make as they respond to this wave. They can choose to value public health and the safety of incarcerated people over the will to punish no matter the cost.

Last month, police took American Idol finalist Syesha Mercado’s days-old newborn Ast away because she had not reported her daughter’s birth to authorities, while she was still fighting to regain custody of her son from the state. In February 2021, Syesha had taken her 13-month-old son Amen’Ra to a hospital because he had difficulty transitioning from breast milk to formula and was refusing to eat. What should have been an ordinary medical visit for a new mom prompted a state-contracted child abuse pediatrician with a known history of wrongfully reporting medical conditions as child abuse to call child welfare. Authorities took custody of Amen’Ra on the grounds that Syesha had neglected him. Syesha has been reunited with Ast after substantial media attention and public outrage, but continues to fight for the return of Amen’Ra.

Meanwhile, it took over a year and a half for Erin Yellow Robe, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, to be reunited with her children. Based on an unsubstantiated rumor that Erin was misusing prescription pills, authorities took custody of her children and placed them with white foster parents — despite the federal Indian Child Welfare Act’s requirements and the willingness of relatives and tribal members to care for the children.

For white families, these scenarios typically do not lead to child welfare involvement. For Black and Indigenous families, they often lead to years — potentially a lifetime — of ensnarement in the child welfare system or, as some are now more appropriately calling it, the family regulation system.

Our country’s latest reckoning with structural racism has involved critical reflection on the role of the criminal justice system, education policy, and housing practices in perpetuating racial inequity. The family regulation system needs to be added to this list, along with the algorithms working behind the scenes. That’s why the ACLU has conducted a nationwide survey to learn more about these tools.

Women and children who are Indigenous, Black, or experiencing poverty are disproportionately placed under child welfare’s scrutiny. Once there, Indigenous and Black families fare worse than their white counterparts at nearly every critical step. These disparities are partly the legacy of past social practices and government policies that sought to tear apart Indigenous and Black families. But the disparities are also the result of the continued policing of women in recent years through child welfare practices, public benefits laws, the failed war on drugs, and other criminal justice policies that punish women who fail to conform to particular conceptions of “fit mothers.”

Many child welfare agencies have begun turning to risk assessment tools for reasons ranging from wanting the ability to predict which children are at higher risk for maltreatment to improving agency operations. Allegheny County, Pennsylvania has been using the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) since 2016. The AFST generates a risk score for complaints received through the county’s child maltreatment hotline by looking at whether certain characteristics of the agency’s past cases are also present in the complaint allegations. Key among these characteristics are family member demographics and prior involvement with the county’s child welfare, jail, juvenile probation, and behavioral health systems. Intake staff then use this risk score as an aide in deciding whether or not to follow up on a complaint with a home study or a formal investigation, or to dismiss it outright.

Like their criminal justice analogues, however, child welfare risk assessment tools do not predict the future. For instance, a recidivism risk assessment tool measures the odds that a person will be arrested in the future, not the odds that they will actually commit a crime. Just as being under arrest doesn’t necessarily mean you did something illegal, a child’s removal from the home, often the target of a prediction model, doesn’t necessarily mean a child was in fact maltreated.

We examined how many jurisdictions across the 50 states, D.C., and U.S. territories are using one category of predictive analytics tools: models that systematically use data collected by jurisdictions’ public agencies to attempt to predict the likelihood that a child in a given situation or location will be maltreated. Here’s what we found:

• Local or state child welfare agencies in at least 26 states plus D.C. have considered using such predictive tools. Of these, jurisdictions in at least 11 states are currently using them.
• Large jurisdictions like New York City, Oregon, and Allegheny County have been using predictive analytics for several years now.
• Some tools currently in use, such as the AFST, are used when deciding whether to refer a complaint for further agency action, while others are used to flag open cases for closer review because the tool deems them to be higher-risk scenarios.

Despite the growing popularity of these tools, few families or advocates have heard about them, much less provided meaningful input into their development and use. Yet countless policy choices and value judgments are made in the course of creating and using the tool, any or all of which can impact whether the tool promotes “fairness” or reduces racial disproportionality in agency action.

Moreover, like the tools we have seen in the criminal legal system, any tool built from a jurisdiction’s historical data runs the risk of continuing and increasing existing bias. Historically over-regulated and over-separated communities may get caught in a feedback loop that quickly magnifies the biases in these systems. Who decides what “high risk” means? When a caseworker sees a “high” risk score for a Black person, do they respond in the same way as they would for a white person?

Ultimately, we must ask whether these tools are the best way to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, when such funds are urgently needed to help families avoid the crises that lead to abuse and neglect allegations.

It’s critical that we interrogate these tools before they become entrenched, as they have in the criminal justice system. Information about the data used to create a predictive algorithm, the policy choices embedded in the tool, and the tool’s impact both system-wide and in individual cases are some of the things that should be disclosed to the public before a tool is adopted and throughout its use. In addition to such transparency, jurisdictions need to make available opportunities to question and contest a tool’s implementation or application in a specific instance if our policymakers and elected officials are to be held accountable for the rules and penalties enforced through such tools.

In this vein, the ACLU has requested data from Allegheny County and other jurisdictions to independently evaluate the design and impact of their predictive analytics tools and any measures they may be taking to address fairness, due process, and civil liberty concerns.

It’s time that all of us ask our local policymakers to end the unnecessary and harmful policing of families through the family regulation system.

Read the full white paper:

American Civil Liberties Union

Family Surveillance by Algorithm | American Civil Liberties Union

By Anjana Samant, Aaron Horowitz, Kath Xu, and Sophie BeiersOur country’s latest reckoning with structural racism has involved critical reflection on the role of the criminal justice system, education policy, and housing practices in perpetuating racial inequity. But another area long overdue for collective reexamination is the child welfare system and the algorithms working