FOSTER CARE NATIONWIDE:
 selected Reports from major national media, and investigative reporters:

from TIME Magazine


November 13, 2000
cover story:

 "The Shame
  of Foster Care"

A TIME Investigation

from the table of contents blurb:
    "A TIME investigation enters into the quagmire that is spawning a generation of forsaken and forgotten children.  Thousands are being neglected, abused, even murdered under what is ostensibly government protection."

    Part I.: "The Crisis of Foster Care":

    The foster care system is not working in Atlanta... Chicago... Bibb Co., Georgia... Dallas... Gillette, Wyoming...

    Untimely death is often the only occasion for the public to catch a glimpse of the foster-care system. But there are living hells, and at times you can smell the brimstone a long way off. At others the evils come in disguise.

     

    Five years ago, there were about a quarter of a million children in the country's foster-care systems. Today that number has doubled, to between 550,000 and 560,000 children.

    Often these are held hostage to abuse and neglect, to bureaucratic foul-ups and carelessness, condemned to futures in which dreams cannot come true.

    President Clinton and Congress boast of new legislation and funding to move children more quickly from foster care to adoption. Indeed, there has been an increase in those numbers. Many foster parents too continue to act selflessly as important way stations for at-risk kids while their biological parents get their lives together.

    However, neglect and a quagmire of child-swallowing bureaucracies plague the system. And the incidence of neglect, physical and sexual abuse of children in the various foster-care systems is feared to be significantly higher than the incidence in the general population.

    Nobody bothers to keep an accurate count, but in round numbers, more than 7,500 children are tortured under what is technically government protection. Together with the many more who linger as long as 10 years in protective-custody systems, they are America's generation of lost children, forsaken and forgotten.

    The [U.S.] Department of Health and Human Services deemed its own auditing process so flawed that Secretary Donna Shalala did not protest when Congress suspended its ability to collect funds from states that did not meet federal eligibility requirements. State foster-care systems are in such poor shape that case files are still hard copy-bound. Without modern databases, tracking the fate of children remains a maddening paper chase.

* * *

"In virtually every state, there is no accountability," says Don Keenan, an Atlanta attorney who has sued Georgia posthumously on behalf of children who have died in foster care. "This is a meltdown.  This is critical."

from the Chicago Tribune:

"States put kids' lives on the block"
  Part 1 of a 3-part series
    Sept. 26, 1999
    by David Jackson & Cornelia Grumman

In what amounts to a vast social experiment, government is retreating from its historic role of caring for orphaned and delinquent children, and is parceling them out to an expanding private industry of  youth jails and foster programs. ...

But the lucrative private programs, which were touted as an antidote to the wretched conditions found in state institutions, are rife with corruption and abuse, and are scantily monitored, a Tribune investigation has found.

* * *

"The more kids they can get, and the longer they can keep them, the more money they can make, and that's a dangerous thing," said former Massachusetts child welfare administrator Jerome G. Miller.

Once the exclusive province of local charities, small churches and child advocates, the youth services industry of the 1990's ranges from a handful of multi-state corporations that dominate the market to a smaller start-ups that win million-dollar contracts with little more than a shabby bungalow and a few empty cots....

* * *

Some non-profits were every bit as avaricious as their profit-making counterparts...

* * *
Children's case files examined by the Tribune point to a fundamental collision between the traditional mission of child work -- to normalize youth and move them out of the system -- and the profit motive, which seeks to keep them in.  Even in the non-profit sector, many fee-per-child contracts give private companies no incentive to discharge children or reduce their level of care or confinement as functioning improves, because doing so would cut revenues, government studies found.

* * *

And the government-managed child welfare systems of Illinois and 11 other states [(Kansas was the second such state)] are operating under court-ordered consent decrees because of class-action lawsuits alleging system-wide abuse of wards.  "It's not as if the public sector has lived up to its mission," said Ira M. Schwartz, dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work.


from "Lifting the Veil"
a report on child-protection in the U.S.
by analyst Emerich ("Rick") Thoma:
(online at http://www.liftingtheveil.org/)

The consequences of vague statutes, increased reporting, and poor decision making among child protective services caseworkers are everywhere to be found. ... 

In Illinois, researchers for the Child Welfare Institute in Atlanta examined cases in three Illinois cities in 1994, conducting interviews with parents, foster parents, and caseworkers.  Again, the researchers reached exactly the same conclusion.  Reports the Chicago Tribune:
"The Child Welfare Institute determined that in one-third of the cases, there was absolutely no reason for the children not to be home with their parents. The children were in foster care for the protection of their caseworker, not for their own safety."
(source: R. Bruce Dold, "Kids Suffer Under DCFS Reform Efforts," Chicago Tribune, (September 22, 1995) )
Defensive social work of the variety identified by the Child Welfare Institute would appear to permeate the field. In 1997, for example, removals of children from their homes in the Tampa Bay area of Florida reportedly doubled after a child known to the CPS system died.
(source: Sally Kestin, "Sibling Separation Traumatic for Kids," Tampa Tribune, (November 23, 1997).)
* * *
Children entering the shadowy world of foster care are often assigned labels arbitrarily and on a bed-available basis. They may end up spending some time in conventional foster homes, only to find themselves shuffled through group homes, residential treatment facilities, mental hospitals and prisons.

Scant attention is given to the needs of these children, and the conditions they are forced to endure are often far worse than those endured by prisoners in some third world nations.

* * *

THE WILDERNESS CAMPS

California probation officer Dennis Lepak found himself introduced to abuses in the system when he visited the Rite of Passage Wilderness Camp, a group home for California boys located on an Indian reservation in the high desert of central Nevada.

"Boys were intentionally denied clothing adequate for the harsh conditions, routinely assaulted by staff, and deprived of meals," he explained.

* * *

HOW SAFE THE SERVICE?

* * *

Child welfare departments are rarely forthcoming with information about the actual extent of harm that comes to children in their care. It is largely through audits and case-readings, associated with legal actions, that the actual extent of the abuses in the foster care system come to light.

The reasons for this may not be as complex as they are made to appear. Child welfare officials who have managed to entrench themselves in lifetime civil service positions in the more desirable nooks and crannies of the child welfare system have a vested interest to protect, and those who run public bureaucracies have devised their own "rationalized myths" to protect their interests, argues John Hagedorn (1995)

The myths of "doing good" benefit those who are advantaged by existing institutional arrangements. Even as politicians are constantly criticizing "bureaucracy" and "bureaucrats," they approve millions of dollars worth of public funds to keep the bureaucracies running. As Hagedorn explains: "It's simply too risky for bureaucrats to admit that their agency may not be 'doing good.' The erosion of that myth may lead someone to investigate them or even propose cutting their budgets" (p. 99)

In Florida, caseworkers in the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services reportedly ran files relating to a botched investigation through a paper shredder. "Documents were being altered, shredded," testified a former HRS employee who watched the destruction of the documents. "It went on and on and on . . . It was nothing but a cover-up"

(source: Mathers, S., "Horror stories about HRS fill workshop." Orlando Sentinel, January 24, 1996)

    [NOTE:  State and federal audits continually cite Kansas's child-protection agency, the "SRS ,"as failing, utterly, to keep honest and accurate records of its actions, and of the status and handling of children under its control.
      State auditors have repeatedly warned that their audits are largely hampered by the SRS's denial of essential information -- even reliable aggregate summary data.
      Stonewalling by SRS officials finally so infuriated legislators and press that it became one of the key factors in the overwhelming passage of the Kansas Open Records Act (KORA) a few years ago, which threatens consequences for officials withholding public information    . ~RH]


For more information, ask a current or former foster child -- in confidence -- to tell you about life in state custody.