Politics > Politics-USA > Nearly four years after Janet Napolitano pushed reforms at ChildProtective Services, the ghosts of murdered children haunt the agency.
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Politics > Politics-USA |
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18 Nov 2007 11:13:44 PM |
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Nearly four years after Janet Napolitano pushed reforms at ChildProtective Services, the ghosts of murdered children haunt the agency. |
A stubborn problem
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0808wed1-08.html
Aug. 8, 2007 12:00 AM
Is CPS still broken?
Nearly four years after the governor pushed reforms at Child Protective
Services, the ghosts of murdered children haunt the agency.
Gov. Janet Napolitano says the reforms were good and the agency is
moving in the right direction. She also told The Republic: "Any time you
have a child found dead, there needs to be a lot of introspection."
She's right on both counts.
The tragedies have been well-documented:
Brandon Williams was 5 years old when he died. CPS evaluated his home
and called it "unsafe." He was left there, though, and the family was
assigned counseling. Now his mother, Diane Marsh, and her roommate,
Flower Tompson, are charged with killing him.
Allowing children to remain at home with services to the family is
widely recognized as being in the child's best interest - if it can be
done safely.
The most recent report on child welfare in Arizona from CPS points to a
67 percent increase since July 2003 in the numbers of children being
safely served in their homes.
Child advocates say that's a good thing.
In Brandon's case, it wasn't.
Ariana Payne was 4 and her brother, Tyler, was 5 when they died. The
mother, Jamie Hallam, had custody, but CPS had doubts about her fitness.
When their father, Christopher Payne, refused to return the children
after a visit, Hallam called the Tucson police. CPS told the police the
kids would be better off with dad. There they stayed. There they died.
CPS never checked on them. Ariana's body was found in a trash bin.
Tyler's body was never found. Payne and his girlfriend, Reina Gonzales,
are charged with murdering them both.
Napolitano says she wants to "drill down" and find out how mistakes
happened and how to prevent them from happening again.
But she also says, "CPS is a lot better than it was three years ago."
She points to the decrease in the numbers of very young children who
spend time in shelters, an increase in the number of children who are
safely returned to their homes, increased permanency rates for foster
children, increased adoption rates, increased numbers of foster homes,
and a slight decrease in the numbers of children in out-of-home care.
Statistics suggest Napolitano is right about the improvement of the
agency. But even an improved agency falls short of what many people
would expect.
For example, the number of children in foster care who get
state-mandated visits from their caseworkers is the highest it has been
in four years. But it is still only 78 percent.
Staffing has been increased, but caseloads are well above the state
standard set by the 2003 reforms. Meeting those standards would mean
filling 220 more positions than are currently funded.
"Hiring and staffing are much more difficult than any of us
anticipated," Napolitano says.
Staffing may also be the single most important thing the agency does.
Caseworkers make decisions that can save a child's life or rip a family
apart.
Asked what she knows now that she didn't know when CPS reforms were
being written, Napolitano says, "I wish I'd been given a magic wand -
we'd have all the caseworkers we need and pay them all $75,000 a year."
But it's not just money, and there's no magic wand in sight.
"We can always say we need more funding," she says. "I don't want to
rest on that . . . we need to use the resources we've got to do the best
possible job."
If you doubt the importance of doing that job - if you think this agency
is a hopeless waste of money - consider another child.
This one is a 3-year-old girl whose grandfather had her in a headlock
and was squeezing her body when Phoenix police forced open the door. Her
mother, naked and bloody, was nearby as the "exorcism" of the child was
being performed.
That little girl was taken into protective custody. That means she was
turned over to CPS. The state became her parent. A government agency is
not an ideal parent, but sometimes children have no one else.
"We should be cognizant of the difficulty of the job," Napolitano says.
"There is a collective societal responsibility here, it's not just the
government."
Is CPS still broken?
Yes.
Did the reforms of 2003 help?
Yes, but far more remains to be done.
An Inconvenient Truth about Child Protective Services, Foster care, and
the Child Protection “INDUSTRY”
CPS Does not protect children…
It is sickening how many children are subject to abuse, neglect and even
killed at the hands of Child Protective Services.
every parent should read this .pdf from
connecticut dcf watch…
http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com/8×11.pdf
http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com
Number of Cases per 100,000 children in the US
These numbers come from The National Center on
Child Abuse and Neglect in Washington. (NCCAN)
Recent numbers have increased significantly for CPS
Perpetrators of Maltreatment
Physical Abuse CPS 160, Parents 59
Sexual Abuse CPS 112, Parents 13
Neglect CPS 410, Parents 241
Medical Neglect CPS 14 Parents 12
Fatalities CPS 6.4, Parents 1.5
Imagine that, 6.4 children die at the hands of the very agencies that
are supposed to protect them and only 1.5 at the hands of parents per
100,000 children. CPS perpetrates more abuse, neglect, and sexual abuse
and kills more children then parents in the United States. If the
citizens of this country hold CPS to the same standards that they hold
parents too. No judge should ever put another child in the hands of ANY
government agency because CPS nationwide is guilty of more harm and
death than any human being combined. CPS nationwide is guilty of more
human rights violations and deaths of children then the homes from which
they were removed. When are the judges going to wake up and see that
they are sending children to their death and a life of abuse when
children are removed from safe homes based on the mere opinion of a
bunch of social workers.
Currently Child Protective Services violates more civil rights on a
daily basis then all other agencies combined, Including the NSA/CIA
wiretaping program…
FOSTER CARE IS A 80 PERCENT FAILURE:. A Brief Analysis of the Casey
Family Programs. Northwest Foster Care Alumni Study. By Richard Wexler
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:E2PcWEpNCD4J:www.nccpr.org/reports/cfpanalysis.doc
or for .doc
http://www.nccpr.org/reports/cfpanalysis.doc
HOW THE WAR AGAINST CHILD ABUSE BECAME A WAR AGAINST CHILDREN
http://www.nccpr.org/issues/1.html
A recent study has found that 12-18 months after leaving foster care:
30% of the nation’s homeless are former foster children.
27% of the males and 10% of the females had been incarcerated
33% were receiving public assistance
37% had not finished high school
2% receive a college degree
50% were unemployed
*Casey Family Programs National Center for Resource Family Support
Children in foster care are three to six times more likely than children
not in care to have emotional, behavioral and developmental problems,
including conduct disorders, depression, difficulties in school and
impaired social relationships. Some experts estimate that about 30% of
the children in care have marked or severe emotional problems. Various
studies have indicated that children and young people in foster care
tend to have limited education and job skills, perform poorly in school
compared to children who are not in foster care, lag behind in their
education by at least one year, and have lower educational attainment
than the general population.
80 percent of prison inmates have been through the foster care system.
The highest ranking federal official in charge of foster care, Wade Horn
of the Department of Health and Human Services, is a former child
psychologist who says the foster care system is a giant mess and should
just be blown up.
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=2017991
This study found thousands of children already in foster care who would
have done better had child protection agencies not taken them away in
the first place.
Front-page story in USA Today.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-07-02-foster-study_N.htm?csp=34#Close
The full study is available here.
http://www.mit.edu/~jjdoyle/doyle_fosterlt_march07_aer.pdf
The bottom line? - the foster care system nationwide for the most part
turns out young adults that are nothing more than Walking Wreckage…
But it is Good for Arizona's economy, first massive amounts of federal
dollars flowing into the state to take care of all the Poor “paper
orphans” And then more federal dollars when eighty percent of the former
foster care children come back into state custody as “PRISONERS OF THE
STATE” after having aged out of the system at 18 and are now in trouble
with the law as young adults because they had no family or relatives for
support, and now everybody is wondering why Arizona can’t build prisons
fast enough?
in its current configuration Child Protective Services is like a “CRACK
ADDICT” addicted to Kids the more money you give CPS the more kids they
will remove from their homes until the CPS & foster care system is
overloaded again….
money and more power for CPS is not the answer to the problem…
we’ve already tried that several times, they already have more than
enough to the job!
The answer? save the family and you save the child, pretty simple?
but how to go about it? also pretty simple, addressed the underlying
cause, usually its poverty…
.
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