You can read about family court. You can study statutes and hear language about protection, best interests, and child safety. But until you stand there, until you feel it settle in your chest, you do not understand what this system does to families.
This is an experience you have to feel to understand.
In Houston County, family court proceedings take place on the third floor of the courthouse. When the elevator doors open, you do not step into justice in motion. You step into waiting. Families line the walls. Mothers clutch folders filled with paperwork they do not fully understand but know they must carry. Fathers stand quietly, eyes forward. Children sit beside them, unaware that the next few minutes may determine where they sleep, who they live with, and whether their family remains intact.
Many parents refer to this space as the “poor people’s court,” a term used nationally to describe family court systems. Not because poverty is the charge, but because of how these courts function across the country. Cases move quickly, representation is often limited, and families cycle through with little pause. Judgment hangs in the air long before a judge takes the bench.
Houston County DHR workers move through this space constantly. They walk back and forth outside the courtroom doors, clipboards in hand, files tucked under their arms, speaking in low voices while parents wait. The movement is steady, repetitive, almost mechanical. To families sitting along the walls, it feels less like a court proceeding and more like an assembly line. Families are moved through in sequence. Outcomes are discussed in fragments. Lives are reduced to paperwork passed from hand to hand.
Parents describe watching decisions about their children discussed steps away from them, often without their presence, input, or understanding. DHR workers function as intermediaries, carrying narratives between rooms, translating families into reports, presenting lives in pieces. What feels like bargaining over human lives to parents is treated as routine workflow by the system.
Consider an angry neighbor who repeatedly contacts DHR. Consider an ex partner using the system as leverage in a personal dispute. Consider a victim of domestic violence who seeks safety and instead finds their parenting placed under scrutiny. Parents describe a system that responds quickly to allegations, regardless of motive, and then coaches families into compliance while the burden quietly shifts onto them to prove they are not a risk.
Consider one mother who once struggled with addiction and did exactly what the system claims to demand. She got sober. She stayed sober. She rebuilt her life. She works. She shows up. She raises her children with stability and care. She believes recovery counts for something. She believes effort matters. She enters court believing her progress will be weighed fairly. Instead, she learns quickly that in this courtroom, the past speaks louder than the present, and redemption carries less weight than a file stamped years ago.
Now consider another mother, one who disciplines her children out of love and concern for their safety. She sets boundaries. She corrects behavior. She guides her children with the intention of preparing them for a world that is not forgiving. In family court, that discipline is reframed. Culture is misunderstood. Intent is erased. What she did to protect her child is recast as something that places them at risk.
Families describe dependency hearings reduced to a single determination. Whether a parent retains custody or the system assumes control. Parents report limited scrutiny of evidence, restricted opportunities to respond, and courtroom environments where voices are discouraged or cut short. Some hearings are conducted remotely, with life altering decisions made through brief virtual appearances rather than in person proceedings. Fathers, in particular, report being sidelined, reduced to names on paperwork in cases that permanently altered their children’s futures.
These reported experiences unfolded under the authority of Judge Lori Collier Ingram, who presides over dependency and family court matters in Houston County. Judges are entrusted as guardians of justice, sworn to protect the most vulnerable and to ensure that the power of the state is exercised carefully, lawfully, and humanely. When parents consistently describe being unheard, when evidence goes unexamined, and when children remain displaced for months or years, the issue extends beyond individual grievance. It becomes a question of institutional accountability.
Confidentiality is invoked at every turn because minors are involved. Families report that it has become weaponized as a shield, concealing procedural failures, blocking scrutiny, and preventing public accountability within a taxpayer-funded system that operates largely out of view.
At the same time, parents report that agencies such as Houston County DHR have been permitted to advance cases using documentation they describe as flawed, expired, or obtained under pressure. The burden quietly shifts onto families to disprove narratives already accepted as fact. Due process becomes theoretical. Family integrity becomes conditional.
When the judge adjourns, the assembly does not stop. Families leave carrying uncertainty, loss, and fear. DHR workers move on to the next file, the next hallway conversation, the next family waiting outside the doors. Names blur. Faces fade. The system does not remember them once court is adjourned. Parents do.
What families encounter is a system driven by cold procedures and colder indifference, where control is exercised and families are left fractured in its wake.
Yet amid the volume of courtroom activity, parents describe a striking absence of meaningful protection once children leave those proceedings. The same system parents allege is upheld inside the courtroom is the system that allowed three-year-old Xylah to have the same arm broken twice in a single day at Dothan Christian Development without accountability.
It is the same system that failed to intervene as teenagers were groomed and exploited online by adults.
It is the same system that has, according to families, repeatedly silenced parents attempting to impose boundaries, discipline, and structure, while young men move through the community carrying weapons and absorbing the consequences of unchecked instability.
Parents point to cases in which children were removed from their homes only to become pregnant while in state care, to drift between couches and placements, and to emerge with lives permanently altered. Children in need of intervention were overlooked, while families described as stable and intact were subjected to scrutiny and separation.
What emerges from these accounts is not a series of isolated failures but an ecosystem of family disruption, where accountability fractures at every level. Media releases often follow, framed as though children appeared without parents, while entire communities are left grappling with grief, violence, and loss.
Parents say they see the patterns clearly. They know the offices involved. They know the officials who signed the paperwork. And they insist that the harm does not end when a hearing concludes. This platform exists to document those patterns, to preserve the public record, and to pursue transparency until the full scope of that harm is acknowledged, examined, and confronted.
As Judge Ingram prepares to retire, families report that the consequences of these decisions do not retire with her. Children remain displaced. Parents remain fighting. The system moves forward unchanged, as new families step off the elevator and into the same hallway.
This article documents reported experiences and systemic concerns raised by parents navigating family court proceedings in Houston County, experiences that warrant public scrutiny. family courts have become ground zero for a national crisis, where children are removed based on allegations rather than proof, where hearings are rushed, and where poverty, past addiction, cultural misunderstanding, and discipline are treated as risk factors while true harm goes unaddressed.
The community depends on judges who swore oath to protect the most vulnerable and to prevent cycles of family trauma from being perpetuated through the courts.