A reading list for parents who want to understand — and fight — the machinery behind family court.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Maryann Petri knew something was wrong from the beginning. “Bias, collusion and perjury link themselves like a chain,” she writes in the introduction to Dismantling Family Court Corruption, “that is weighted down by an anchor known as corruption.”
She wrote the book after losing her children. She went in expecting justice. She found an industry.
That experience — bewildering, financially ruinous, and structurally designed to be both — is what this reading list is about. Not every parent who picks up one of these books will find their exact story inside. But they will find the explanation for it. The same patterns keep appearing because they are not accidents. They are incentives.
I picked up these books because I needed to understand what happened to me. These books approach that reality from different angles. None is a prerequisite for another. Start wherever you are.
If you’ve lived it
Maryann Petri, Dismantling Family Court Corruption: Why Taking the Kids Was Not Enough (2020)
Jill Jones-Soderman, Family Court Corruption (2023)
Petri is a registered nurse and former domestic abuse survivor who lost her children to the family court system she entered seeking protection. Her book is the most direct account in this literature of what the system feels like from inside it. “There may come a time,” she writes, “when going Pro Se is your only choice to fight not only for yourself, but for your family. The decision to go this route usually happens when you become financially drained. At the Pro Se level, you are on your own; no one to catch you or comfort you when opposing counsel demeans you in a courtroom in front of everyone. The judge sits back and says nothing.”
That passage will be familiar to anyone who has been there. So will the trajectory: a parent who enters the system with evidence, with faith in the process, and discovers that neither matters as much as who is getting paid.
Jones-Soderman is the founder of the Foundation for Child Victims of the Family Courts and brings four decades of clinical and forensic experience. Her opening chapter documents a case in which she presented testimony under oath that a signed affidavit bearing her name had been submitted to the court — an affidavit she had never written, for a child she had never met. “Despite the clear evidence of fraud and perjury,” she writes, “the judge completely disregarded my testimony and went on to transfer full custody of the child to his father.”
Her earlier case — Shannon, a domestic abuse survivor for whom Jones-Soderman spent a year building an ironclad evidentiary record — ends with a line that captures the entire argument of both books: “But the victory was short-lived. I had no idea how the family court system really worked. Or that a protective parent can never be sure of her children’s safety until they’re not children anymore — or their abuser is dead.”
Winning in court, it turns out, is not the same as being protected by it.
If you want to understand the machinery
Daniel L. Hatcher, The Poverty Industry: The Exploitation of America’s Most Vulnerable Citizens (NYU Press, 2016)
Daniel L. Hatcher, Injustice, Inc.: How America’s Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor (UC Press, 2023)
Hatcher is a professor of law at the University of Baltimore and a former Maryland Legal Aid attorney. These two books — read together — form the most rigorous documented case that what happens in family court is not dysfunction. It is design.
“As policy experts across the political spectrum debate the best structure for government aid programs,” Hatcher writes in The Poverty Industry, “a massive siphoning of the safety net is occurring behind the scenes.” Foster care agencies contract with private companies to capture disabled children’s Social Security benefits. Child support payments from families on public assistance are converted into government revenue. States siphon Medicaid funds earmarked for the poor into general coffers. Hatcher obtained the actual contracts and shows, line by line, how the incentive structures work.
Injustice, Inc. follows families from the welfare system into the courthouse and finds the same logic operating. Courts enter contractual arrangements that generate revenue based on volume: more children removed, more parents paying, more federal matching dollars flowing. Internal documents Hatcher obtained describe foster children as “units” and as a “revenue generating mechanism.” The chapter on what he calls the “Judicial Child Support Factory” is essential reading: Title IV-D of the Social Security Act provides federal matching funds to states based on child support collected, which means courts are financially rewarded for producing high-support-paying noncustodial parents — not arrangements that serve children.
His first day in juvenile court, Hatcher writes, he “abruptly encountered a line of mostly Black children shackled in chains as they were shuffled to delinquency proceedings.” Later, a message arrived from a judicial master demanding the attorneys appear immediately “to quickly dispose of the cases because the Baltimore Orioles game was scheduled to start soon.”
The systemic conclusion he reaches is not subtle: “Harm arises when institutions of justice try to run like a business, swapping the ethical pursuit of justice with the mission to maximize money.”
If you want to see the professional ecosystem
Joseph Sorge, Divorce Corp. (2014) — book and documentary
“People don’t realize a judge can just take the kids away because they don’t like you,” Sorge told Fox News when the film was released. “People think this can’t happen in America, but it does.”
Sorge came to this subject through his own divorce and custody battle. What he found, after interviewing lawyers, judges, mediators, evaluators, and litigants across the country, was a professional ecosystem — lawyers, guardians ad litem, custody evaluators, therapists — financially rewarded for prolonging conflict rather than resolving it. Family law has become, in the book’s framing, “a growth industry, transferring over $50 billion a year from families in transition to a cadre of professionals, judges, and insiders,” despite declines in both the marriage and divorce rate.
The documentary is widely available and the most accessible entry point in this literature. The book goes deeper into the reciprocal relationships between judges and the professionals they appoint — a backscratching arrangement where favors flow in both directions, before and after robes come off. Gloria Allred, interviewed for the film, put it plainly: one merely needs to “follow the money” to find the reasons why people are being hurt and who benefits from the system.
Divorce Corp. is angrier in tone than Hatcher and lighter on legal architecture. That is a feature, not a bug, for parents who are in the middle of the experience and need to understand it fast.
If you want the constitutional arguments
Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland House, 2007)
A note on framing: Baskerville is a political theorist, and the book carries ideological weight that a gender-neutral publication does not adopt wholesale. The framing is explicitly fathers-focused, and some of the broader cultural arguments go further than the evidence warrants.
Read past the frame and what you find is a serious, documented case that the “deadbeat dad” narrative was constructed to justify a system — not the other way around. “No scientific evidence has ever been adduced,” Baskerville writes, “to show that large numbers of fathers are voluntarily abandoning their children… clear and overwhelming evidence exists that it is not.”
What fills the vacuum left by that narrative is what he calls “the divorce industry”: “a massive and largely hidden governmental and quasi-governmental machine consisting of judges, lawyers, psychologists and psychiatrists, social workers, child protective services, child-support enforcement agents, mediators, counselors… virtually all their power and earnings derive from the harm that divorce inflicts on children.”
The constitutional argument turns on the meaning of the word custody itself. “‘Custody’ is not the right to parent one’s children,” Baskerville writes; “it is the power to prevent someone else from parenting his children and to marshal the penal apparatus — courts, police, and jails — to ensure he stays away from them.” Family courts, he documents, are “the lowest in status in the judicial hierarchy” yet “possess some of the most sweeping powers. Many operate behind closed doors and leave no record of their proceedings, virtually free of oversight or accountability.”
On secrecy specifically — a direct parallel to the court transcript access work Father & Co. has covered — family courts “operate in secret,” with “no case studies or data on outcomes… we do not even know how often courts make decisions in favor of resident parents.”
The systemic arguments hold regardless of which parent the system has targeted. Filter the ideological framing accordingly, and what remains is a constitutional due process sourcebook with receipts.
If you think reform is the answer
Jane Spinak, The End of Family Court: How Abolishing the Court Brings Justice to Children and Families (NYU Press, 2023)
Jane Spinak spent forty years practicing and teaching family court law before concluding it cannot be fixed. “When I began writing this book,” she writes, “I had no intention of calling for the abolition of family court.” The evidence changed her mind.
Her argument is the most radical in this list: the structural features that produce the outcomes documented in every other book here are not bugs. They are the institution. “One hundred and twenty years later,” she writes, “we are still sending children and families into a court that thinks it is doing good and the consequence is that, by trying to do good, it fails to do justice and often does great harm.”
On the question of whether reform can succeed, she is direct: “Do these failures lead inevitably to abolishing the court? My answer is ‘yes.'”
The reason reform keeps failing, she argues, is that the court has spent more than a century mastering the art of institutional survival. Observers at the court’s centennial noted that it possesses “almost complete control over its own survival,” changes “the playing field whenever the footing becomes precarious,” and functions as an “institutional chameleon” able “to intone, without blanching, whatever bromide suits the moment.” Every reform effort becomes fuel for the court’s next reinvention.
Spinak is the most academically credible voice making the case that calls for more oversight, better training, and model courts have failed and will continue to fail. That is a necessary frame for any reporter or advocate who has watched a documented reform produce documented non-results.
On parental alienation specifically
The clinical and legal debate around parental alienation is genuine and unsettled. There is broad professional consensus that children can be manipulated against a parent. There is significant dispute about the diagnostic rigor of “Parental Alienation Syndrome” as a formal construct, how courts apply it, and whether it has been weaponized to protect abusers rather than children.
Jean Mercer’s Someone Said Parental Alienation (Routledge, 2025) is the most current clinical treatment of that debate from a skeptical perspective. For reporting purposes, the most defensible framing focuses on what the structural literature supports: a system financially incentivized to prolong conflict produces prolonged conflict. Children pay the cost. Whatever name the courts put on it.
These books do not describe a broken system. They describe a system working as designed — for everyone except the parents and children inside it.
The difference between those two framings is not semantic. A broken system needs repair. A system working as designed needs to be understood, documented, and dismantled.
Do you have a book you recommend? Leave a comment or drop us a message.
Sources: Maryann Petri, Dismantling Family Court Corruption (2020); Jill Jones-Soderman, Family Court Corruption (2023); Daniel L. Hatcher, The Poverty Industry (NYU Press, 2016); Daniel L. Hatcher, Injustice, Inc. (UC Press, 2023); Joseph Sorge, Divorce Corp. (2014); Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody (Cumberland House, 2007); Jane Spinak, The End of Family Court (NYU Press, 2023); Jean Mercer, Someone Said Parental Alienation (Routledge, 2025).
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