It is disgusting, though not shocking - at least to me.
State monopoly of legitimized violence has happened for centuries. It happened here when the UK was a world power too, to an equally horrific extent, and still does today that the UK has been knocked down a few pegs. There is issues of rapes in UK immigration detention centres and deaths in state facilities including those involving kids swept under the carpet. Many of the recommendations in recent reports have gone ignored and even the ones they agreed on, they've generally done fuckall about.
And for those blaming the mother, I don't think we can know exactly her relation with the prison system that helped her be coerced into that position. In some areas, it's more common that if a mother goes to prison and the child ends up in care because of that, it's really difficult to get her kids back even if it was something simple like this. Georgia is an at-will employment state so anything involving the police might cost her her job. I had a relative in the US who was used as 'an example' in what today doesn't even get most people a slap on the wrist. There could be a lot of factors we don't know about.
Living in New York City is like another world compared to living in rural Georgia or Mississippi.
New York City is another world to most of the rest of the US. It's easy to tell when something about the South or Midwest is written by an NYC or West Coast writers because they make the same ridiculous stereotypes about being backwards.
New York is an at-will state too, just like Georgia, even though most other states have brought in exceptions. In many ways, it's backwards too.