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“Hearings” is a series of stories from a corner of the law that is not reported on enough – America’s child welfare courts.

Across the country these tribunals – often called juvenile dependency or family court – are routinely witness to some of the most high stakes legal proceedings in American jurisprudence.

The Family First Prevention Services Act has become law. It includes the biggest change to the structure of federal child welfare finance since the establishment of the Title IV-E entitlement in 1980.

The Family First Act is aimed at amending the IV-E entitlement to provide more federal resources to help families in crisis stay together, and limit federal funds for putting foster youth into congregate care placements, including group homes.

At an August 2016 campaign stop, President Donald Trump made the opioid crisis part of the dismal portrait of America he purported to change.

“We’re going to take all of these kids … that are totally addicted and they can’t break it,” he promised at a Columbus, Ohio, town hall meeting.

One in five California foster youth will find themselves taken away from the county where they lived and placed in another county. This three-part series looks at the experiences of some of those youth.

Underneath the tension-laden surface of national politics, there is growing agreement that the United States needs to rethink criminal justice, that the nation is over-reliant on expensive and ineffectual incarceration and short on other strategies that would lower the likelihood of continued criminal behavior.