Ordinarily, legal issues are wrapped up with some socioeconomic problem: evictions concern housing insecurity, criminal justice involvement occurs with mental health issues, debt collection indicates lack of financial wellbeing, or SNAP benefits implicate food insecurity. The A2J Lab investigates whether resolution of legal issues improves indicators of socioeconomic wellbeing, and vice versa.
Current Projects
Embedded Legal Services as a Child Welfare and Justice System Primary Prevention Strategy
The Setting: This project will field a randomized controlled trial (“RCT”) of a program that integrates poverty-focused holistic legal and social work services into medical and educational settings that include mandated reporters.
The Problem: The law requires certain professionals (“mandated reporters”) to report to local child protective services (“CPS”) agencies what those professionals perceive as potential child abuse or neglect. Because these mandated reporters—for example, physicians or teachers–lack alternatives, they sometimes also refer to CPS cases that they do not have to report and might prefer not to report if there were an option other than CPS to attempt to address the situation. To reiterate, these optional reports are for cases near the margin – cases for which, if there were another alternative, reporters would not refer to CPS. Mandated reporters inform the A2J Lab that many of these “marginal cases” exist. These marginal cases often share some characteristics of instances of actionable neglect but might more accurately be characterized as resulting from poverty and its associated legal consequences. If so, then the problems could be susceptible to poverty-focused social and legal assistance (such as help with benefits applications, bankruptcy, or domestic violence protection orders) instead of CPS’ more punitive approach.
The Questions: The hypothesis is that such poverty-focused services will reduce the frequency with which these marginal cases are reported to CPS. In particular, the hope is that there will be fewer reports to CPS that result in “no-action” determinations, i.e., cases in which CPS investigates (thus imposing harm on the family) but takes no action (thus providing no benefit to the family).
The Study: This project will evaluate the impact of embedded holistic legal and social work services in a medical care facility serving eight counties in and around Columbia, South Carolina and an early childhood educational facility in Douglas County, Kansas. The study is a randomized control trial (RCT), in which patients presenting at the sites are randomly assigned to receive either full scope help from the multidisciplinary legal and social work team at the Carolina Health Advocacy Medicolegal Partnership (CHAMPS), housed in the University of South Carolina School of Law, in South Carolina, or the Kansas Holistic Defenders (KHD) in Kansas, or comprehensive self-help materials to attempt resolve the issues on their own without help from the legal and social work teams.
CHAMPS and KHD’s current client-bases most often present with issues of accessing Supplemental Security Income (SSI), accessing housing and homelessness resources as well as avoiding evictions, and managing individual education plans or enrolling in school. CHAMPS and KHD also serve clients needing to access food insecurity services; family planning including custody arrangements as well as domestic violence and intimate partner violence assistance; health benefits such as Medicaid; financial stability benefits such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits; end of life planning for parents and children; and criminal justice record-clearing remedies. By reducing burdens such as food insecurity, financial insecurity, education challenges, and lack of access to health insurance, CHAMPS and KHD attempt to stabilize families such that medical and educational professionals will no longer feel compelled to report to CPS.
What We’ll Learn: These poverty-focused holistic legal and social programs target marginal cases, again, cases approaching but not on or over the line of a mandated CPS report. Given the national reach of the CPS system, evidence that poverty-focused legal and social services reduce the rate of investigations, especially no-action investigations, would improve the wellbeing of children and families and could revolutionize national CPS reporting policy.
Research Team: We partner with the Carolina Health Advocacy Medicolegal Partnership (“CHAMPS”), housed in the University of South Carolina (“USC”) School of Law, and the Kansas Holistic Defenders, serving Douglas County, Kansas, to field the evaluation. We partner with Dr. Shaniece Criss, Associate Professor of Health Sciences and Director of the Master of Arts in Advocacy and Social Policy at Furman University to conduct the evaluation.
Resources:
Projects In Development
Community College Expunction Services
The Setting:
What We Hope to Learn:
Research Team:
Access to Justice Lab
Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Innovation Lab