The Department of Inhuman Services
Improving management at the Maine Department of Health and Human Services should be easy. Unfortunately, the simplest method requires violations of the Geneva Convention banning torture.
Which is ironic, because top DHHS officials have displayed little concern about the torture they’ve inflicted (albeit indirectly) on the abused, neglected and (occasionally) dead kids unfortunate enough to have been called to their indifferent attention. Not saving children at risk has been a hallmark of the department’s mission through at least four gubernatorial administrations.
At least now we know it’s not just the bureaucrats who are making all those bad decisions about how best to deal with their little charges with bruises, broken bones and internal organs that no longer function properly. There’s an inhuman entity that’s been fouling up the works. That’s right, the fault lies with a computer.
Sometime around 2017, DHHS instituted something called a “Structured Decision-Making tool” designed to digitally decide the outcomes of cases of possible child abuse. How did that work? According to the 2020 annual report from the department’s ombudsman, Christine Alberi, not so well.
“[T]he same basic investigation issues that have been repeated for many years are still occurring,” Alberi wrote, “not recognizing risk when the evidence is clear.”
Nearly four years have passed. Surely, DHHS brass has figured out why this tool and a complementary program called Katahdin (presumably because, like its namesake mountain, it’s inaccessible and full of bugs) are still horribly incapable of determining whether children are in danger.
Nope.
In spite of a spike in child deaths from abuse, in spite of a report from the state Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability that found “errors on top of errors” in the handling of one recent fatal case, in spite of the abrupt departure of the director of the department’s Office of Child and Family Services, Todd Landry (last seen flashing his sharp teeth and wiggling his dorsal fin as he swam away), nothing fundamental has changed.
In December, the nonprofit Walk a Mile in Their Shoes, headed by former state senator and ex-secretary of state Bill Diamond (full disclosure: my wife is a member of this group’s board of advisors), issued a report that found all the same old bungling was still standard procedure at DHHS. It’s just that now it’s computer-assisted bungling.
In addition to caseworkers being overworked and poorly trained (according to the report, “training focuses on DHHS policy and procedure rather than helping caseworkers understand children or assess when children are in dangerous situations”), staffers are required to rely on the computer called HAL — oops, sorry, I mean Katahdin — to decide what, if any, services to provide to potentially abused kids.
The report says, “Caseworkers shared that overriding the recommendations made by the computer program is discouraged by DHHS management.” They also complained that Katahdin is “not user friendly, making it difficult for caseworkers to pull reports and get a complete view of a child’s case.”
The report concludes, “Decisions about whether or not a child is safe in their home, or whether or not it’s safe for that child to return to their home are predominately made by computers rather than humans.”
There’s overwhelming evidence that computers, no matter how sophisticated, are lousy at sorting out all the complex elements involved in child abuse. Dr. Amanda Brownell, medical director of the Spurwink Center for Safe and Healthy Families, in South Portland, told the Maine Monitor that such assessments are complicated and require detailed examinations of injuries as well as in-depth interviews with the children, parents or other caregivers. Nothing else gets close to the truth.
Can a computer do that? Not Katahdin.
Even the incompetent commissioner of DHHS, Jeanne Lambrew, admitted as much during a December legislative hearing. “Performance on some key child welfare metrics has worsened,” she conceded.
That seems obvious, but it’s difficult to quantify. During a 2022 legislative hearing, department staffers admitted they hadn’t really worked out how to analyze data from the Structured Decision-Making tool to see how effective it was. When asked if humans could override the computer’s decisions, the answer meandered from the vague to the absurd. According to the minutes of the meeting, a staffer told the committee, “[A] discretionary override addresses the fact that in some circumstance there are times where they want to change the decision and it is not listed or captured under the reasons for changing the decision.”
What the fuck?
If DHHS is doing anything about this glaring shortfall in its program, the bureaucrats in charge are keeping it a secret. The department’s communications director, Jackie Farwell, didn’t respond to most of the questions I e-mailed her asking about Katahdin’s role in cases involving serious child abuse. Instead, she sent me the incomprehensible minutes of that committee meeting.
About the only thing I could conclude from that gobbledegook is that artificial intelligence may not be an improvement over no intelligence at all.
All e-mails sent to aldiamon@herniahill.net will be analyzed for common sense by my proprietary digital program.
