This first-of-its-kind state report describes the performance of New Jersey’s child protective services system, operated by the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency (DCP&P) within the New Jersey Department of Children and Families (DCF), and to make recommendations to improve it.

The author of the report is the Staffing and Oversight Review Subcommittee (SORS) of the New Jersey Task Force on Child Abuse and Neglect. SORS retained the Camden Coalition as an independent contractor to help carry out its oversight responsibilities, including helping to write this report.

Key report findings

What works well

The New Jersey child welfare system is vastly improved in comparison to 20 years ago. This is a tremendous accomplishment, and the culmination of long-standing efforts to bring about positive change for New Jersey’s children, youth, and families. For example:

• The vast majority of children (91%) remain safely with their families and are not removed to foster care.
• Caseworkers visit with children removed from their families in a timely manner (93%).
• The majority of caseworkers have maintained a manageable caseload of children for the last six years (at least 90%).

Areas needing improvement

As in any substantial system, SORS identified areas in need of improvement and those include:

• Child abuse is conflated with families’ need for concrete supports. The state child abuse hotline received reports of suspected abuse or neglect for nearly 100,000 children, yet 97% of these children were not found to be abused or neglected. In New Jersey and across the country, the vast majority of hotline reports do not result in continued child protective services involvement. Instead, many families have social service needs stemming from low household incomes, including stable housing, food, physical and mental health care, and substance use disorder treatment — but not child protection needs. Children should not be involved in the child protection system solely because their families have low incomes.
• Children who are Black are disproportionately involved in the child protection system. Of all children involved in the system, children who are Black are involved at a rate more than two times their proportion in the general population (32% and 13% respectively). Comparativel, children who are white are involved at approximately half the rate of their proportion in the general population (24% and 43% respectively). Of all children removed from their families and placed in foster care, Black children are removed at a rate nearly five times higher than white children (rates of 2.4 and 0.5 per 1,000 children, respectively).
• DCP&P’s efforts to reunite some children with their families are sub-optimal. The quality of DCP&P’s efforts to help children who have been temporarily removed from their families reunite with their families or find another permanent living situation needs improvement. For example, DCP&P’s internal quality review process resulted in a 58% quality rating for staff consistently conducting family assessments who are tasked with identifying interventions to resolve issues so families could function safely and exit DCP&P services.

The report contains recommendations for DCP&P, the Governor, families, and community-based organizations to sustain the methods that are working well and strengthen the areas that need improvement.