For the cops that night, it seemed like a scavenger hunt gone mad, each discovery yielding a new, more stunning, find. In the dining room, police said, a half-dozen children lay asleep on a bed, their tiny bodies intertwined like kittens. On the floor beside them, two toddlers tussled with a mutt over a bone they had grabbed from the dog’s dish. In the living room, four others huddled on a hardwood floor, crowded beneath a single blanket. “We’ve got eight or nine kids here,” Officer John Labiak announced. Officer Patricia Warner corrected him: “I count 12.” The cops found the last of 19 asleep under a mound of dirty clothes; one 4-year-old, gnarled by cerebral palsy, bore welts and bruises.
As the police awaited reinforcements, they could take full measure of the filth that engulfed this brigade of 1-to 14-year-olds. Above, ceiling plaster crumbled. Beneath their feet, roaches scurried around clumps of rat droppings. But nothing was more emblematic than the kitchen. The stove was inoperable, its oven door yawning wide. The sink held fetid dishes that one cop said “were not from that day, not from that week, maybe not from this year.” And though the six mothers living there collected a total of $4,500 a month in welfare and food stamps, there was barely any food in the house. Twice last year, a caseworker from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) had come to the apartment to follow up reports of serious child neglect, but when no one would let her in, the worker left. Now, it took hours to sort through the mess. Finally, the police scooped up the children and set out for a state-run shelter. As they left, one little girl looked up at Warner and pleaded, “Will you be my mommy?”
Don’t bet on it. Next month the children’s mothers-Diane Melton, 31; Maxine Melton, 27; May Fay Melton, 25; Denise Melton, 24; Casandra Melton, 21, and Denise Turner, 20-will appear in Cook County juvenile court for a hearing to determine if temporary custody of the children should remain with the state or be returned to the parents. Yet, for all the public furor, confidential files show that the DCFS is privately viewing the 19 children in the same way it does most others-“Goal: Return Home.”
Why won’t we take kids from bad parents? For more than a decade, the idea that parents should lose neglected or abused kids has been blindsided by a national policy to keep families together at almost any cost. As a result, even in the worst cases, states regularly opt for reunification. Even in last year’s budget-cutting frenzy, Congress earmarked nearly $1 billion for family-preservation programs over the next five years. Yet there is mounting evidence that such efforts make little difference-and may make things worse. “We’ve oversold the fact that all families can be saved,” says Marcia Robinson Lowry, head of the Children’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “All families can’t be saved.”
Last year there were 1 million confirmed cases of abuse and neglect. And, according to the American Public Welfare Association, an estimated 462,000 children were in substitute care, nearly twice as many as a decade ago. The majority of families can be repaired if parents clean UP their acts, but experts are troubled by what happens when they don’t: 42 percent of the 1,300 kids who died as a result of abuse last year had previously been reported to child-protection agencies. “The child-welfare system stands over the bodies, shows you pictures of the caskets and still does things to keep kids at risk,” says Richard Gelles, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Family Violence Research Program.
Nowhere has the debate over when to break up families been more sharply focused than in Illinois, which, in the last two years, has had some of the most horrific cases in the nation. Of course, it’s not alone. But unlike many states, Illinois hasn’t been able to hide its failures behind the cloak of confidentiality laws, largely because of Patrick Murphy, Cook County’s outspoken public guardian, who regularly butts heads with the state over its aggressive reunification plans. The cases have turned Illinois into a sounding board for what to do about troubled families.
The Chicago 19 lived in what most people would consider a troubled home. But to veterans of the city’s juvenile courts, it’s just another “dirty house” case. In fact, Martin Shapiro, the court-appointed attorney for Diane Melton, plans to say that conditions could have been worse. He can argue that Melton’s children weren’t malnourished, weren’t physically or sexually abused and weren’t left without adult supervision. He’s blunt: “Returning children to a parent who used cocaine-as horrific as that might seem-isn’t all that unusual in this building.” If only all the cases were so benign.
ON THE LAST NIGHT OF Joseph Wallace’s life, no one could calm his mother’s demons. Police say that Amanda Wallace was visiting relatives on April 18,1993, with 3-year-old Joseph and his 1-year-old brother, Joshua, when she began raving that Joseph was nothing but trouble. “I’m gonna kill this bitch with a knife tonight,” Bonnie Wallace later told police her daughter threatened. Bonnie offered to keep the boy overnight, but Amanda refused, so Bonnie drove them to their apartment on Chicago’s impoverished West Side. It’s unclear what forced Amanda’s hand, but authorities tell a harrowing tale: at about 1:30 a.m., she stuffed a sock into Joseph’s mouth and secured it with medical tape. Then she went to the kitchen, retrieved a brown extension cord and wrapped it around Joseph’s neck several times. She carried her son to the living room, stood him on a chair, then looped the cord around the metal crank arm over the door. In the last act of his life, Joseph waved goodbye.
Amanda Wallace, 28, has pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder. No one ever doubted that Amanda was deeply troubled. When Joseph was born, she was a resident at the Elgin Mental Health Center in suburban Chicago, and a psychiatrist there warned that Amanda “should never have custody of this or any other baby.” Three times, the DCFS removed Joseph from his mother. Yet three times, judges returned him to Amanda’s dark world. Six months after the murder-which led to the firing of three DCFS employees-a blue-ribbon report blasted the Illinois child-welfare system, concluding that it had “surely consigned Joseph to his death.”
Even in the most egregious instances of abuse, children go back to their parents time and again. In Cook County, the public guardian now represents 31,000 children. Only 963 kids were freed for adoption last year. But William Maddux, the new supervising judge of the county’s abuse and neglect section, believes the number should have been as high as 6,000. Nationwide, experts say, perhaps a quarter of the children in substitute care should be taken permanently from their parents.
But it’s not simply social custom that keeps families together, it’s the law. The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 is a federal law with a simple goal-to keep families intact. The leverage: parents who don’t make a “reasonable effort” to get their lives on track within 18 months risk losing their kids forever. The law itself was a reaction to the excesses of the ’60s and ’70s, when children were often taken away simply because their parents were poor or black. But the act was also one of those rare measures that conservatives and liberals embraced with equal passion conservatives because it was cheap, liberals because it took blame away from the poor.
By the mid-’80s, though, the system began to collapse. A system built for a simpler time couldn’t handle an exploding under class populated by crack addicts, the home less and the chronically unemployed. At the same time, orphanages began shutting their doors and foster families began quitting in droves. The system begged to know where to put so many kids. It opted for what was then a radical solution: keeping them in their own homes while offering their parents intensive, short-term support-child rearing, housekeeping and budgeting. But as family-preservation programs took Off, the threat of severing the rights of abusive parents all but disappeared. What emerged, Gelles argues, was the naive philosophy that a mother who’d hurt her child is not much different from one who can’t keep house-and that with enough supervision, both can be turned into good parents.
In hindsight, everyone in Chicago agrees that Joseph Wallace’s death was preventable, that he died because the system placed a parent’s rights above a child’s. Amanda could never have been a “normal” parent. She had been a ward of the state since the age of 8, the victim of physical and sexual abuse. Between 1976 and Joseph’s birth in 1989, her psychiatrist told the DCFS, she swallowed broken glass and batteries; she disemboweled herself, and when she was pregnant with Joseph, she repeatedly stuck soda bottles into her vagina, denying the baby was hers. Yet 11 months after Joseph was born, a DCFS caseworker and an assistant public defender persuaded a Cook County juvenile-court judge to give him back to Amanda, returning him from the one of the six foster homes he would live in. The judge dispatched Amanda with a blessing: “Good luck to you, Mother.”
Over the next two years, caseworkers twice removed Joseph after Amanda attempted suicide. But a DCFS report, dated Oct. 31, 1992, said she had gotten an apartment in Chicago, entered counseling and worked as a volunteer for a community organization. And though the report noted her turbulent history, it recommended she and Joseph be reunited. Joseph Wallace was sent home for the last time 62 days before his death, by a judge who had no measure of Amanda’s past. “Would somebody simply summarize what this case is about for me and give me an idea why you’re all agreeing?” the judge asked. Amanda’s lawyer sidestepped her mental history. Nevertheless, the DCFS and the public guardian’s office signed on. When Amanda thanked the judge, he said, “It sounds like you’re doing OK. Good luck.”
Murphy says that deciding when to sever parents’ rights should be obvious: “You remove kids if they’re in a dangerous situation. No one should be taken from a cold house. But it’s another thing when there are drugs to the ceiling and someone’s screwing the kids.” Ambiguous cases? “There haven’t been gray cases in years.”
No one knows that better than Faye and Michael Callahan, one of the foster families who cared for Joseph. When Joseph first came to them he was a happy, husky baby. When he returned after his first stretch with Amanda, “he had bald spots because he was pulling his hair out,” Faye says. By the third time, she says, Joseph was “a zombie. He rocked for hours, groaning, ‘Uh, uh, uh, uh’.” The fact that he was repeatedly sent home still infuriates them. Says Michael: “I’d scream at those caseworkers, ‘You’re making a martyr of this little boy!”’
EARLY LAST THANKSGIVING, ARETHA McKinney brought her young son to the emergency room. Clifford Triplett was semiconscious, and his body was pocked with burns, bruises and other signs of abuse, police say. The severely malnourished boy weighed 17 pounds-15 percent less than the average 1-year-old. Except Clifford was 5.
This wasn’t a secret. In a confidential DCFS file obtained by NEWSWEEK, a state caseworker who visited the family last June gave a graphic account of Clifford’s life: “Child’s room (porch) clothing piled in corner, slanted floor. Child appears isolated from family-every one else has a well furnished room. Child very small for age appears to be 2 years old. Many old scars on back and buttocks have many recent scratches.” In April, another caseworker had confronted McKinney’s live-in boyfriend, Eddie Robinson Sr., who claimed that Cliff was a “dwarf” and was suicidal-neither of which doctors later found to be true. Robinson added that Cliff got “whipped” because he got into mischief. “I told him that he shouldn’t be beat on his back,” the caseworker wrote. “Robinson promised to go easy on the discipline.”
It’s one thing to blame an anonymous “system” for ignoring abuse and neglect. But the real question is a human one: how can caseworkers walk into homes like Clifford’s, document physical injury or psychological harm and still walk away? A Cook County juvenile-court judge ruled last month that both McKinney and Robinson had tortured Clifford (all but erasing the possibility that he’ll ever be returned to his mother). But caseworkers are rarely so bold. In Clifford’s case, the April worker concluded that abuse apparently had occurred, but nine days later another found the home “satisfactory.” Says Gelles: “Caseworkers are programmed by everything around them to be deaf, dumb and blind because the system tells them, ‘Your job is to work to reunification’.”
Murphy charges that for the past two years, Illinois has made it policy to keep new kids out of an already-clogged system. “The message went out that you don’t aggressively investigate,” he says. “Nobody said, ‘Keep the f—ing cases out of the system’.” But that, he says, is the net effect. “That’s just not true,” says Sterling Mac Ryder, who took over the DCFS late in 1992. But he doesn’t dispute that the state and its caseworkers may have put too much emphasis on reunification-in part because of strong messages from Washington.
The problems may be even more basic. By all accounts, caseworkers and supervisors are less prepared today than they were 20 years ago, and only a fraction are actually social workers. Few on the front lines are willing, or able, to make tough calls or buck the party line. In the end, says Deborah Daro, research director of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse, “the worker may say, ‘Yeah, it’s bad, but what’s the alternative? I’ll let this one go and pray to God they don’t kill him’.”
In most cases, they don’t. Nevertheless, children who grow up in violent homes beyond the age of 8 or 10 risk becoming so emotionally and psychologically damaged that they can never be repaired. “The danger,” says Robert Halpern, a professor of child development at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, “is not just the enormous damage to the kid himself, but producing the next generation of monsters.”
Clifford Triplett is an all-too-pointed reminder of how severe the injuries can be. He has gained eight pounds, and his physical prognosis is good. But there are many other concerns. “When he came, he didn’t know the difference between a car and a truck, the difference between pizza and a hot dog,” says his hospital social worker, Kathleen Egan. “People were not introducing these things to him.” Robinson and McKinney are awaiting trial on charges of aggravated battery and felony cruelty. McKinney’s attorney blames Robinson for the alleged abuse; Robinson’s attorney declined to comment. Clifford is waiting for a foster home. A few weeks ago he had his first conversation with his mother in months. His first words: “Are you sorry for whipping me?”
ACCORDING TO THE CASEWORKER’S report, 2 1/2-year-old Saonnia Bolden’s family was the model of success. Over 100 days, a homemaker from an Illinois family-preservation program called Family First worked with Sadie Williams and her boyfriend Clifford Baker. A second helper-a caseworker-shopped with Sadie for shoes and some furniture for her apartment; she evaluated Sadie’s cooking, housekeeping and budgeting. She even took her to dinner to celebrate her progress. On March 17, 1992, the caseworker wrote a report recommending that Sadie’s case be closed: “Due to the presence of homemaker, the amount of stress and frustration has been reduced. Sadie appears to have a lot more patience with her children and she continues to improve her disciplinary techniques.”
What the Family First caseworker evidently didn’t know was that, just hours before she filed her report, Saonnia had been beaten and scalded to death. Prosecutors claim that Williams, angered because her young daughter had wet herself, laid the child in the bathtub and poured scalding water over her genitals and her buttocks. Williams and Baker were charged with first-degree murder; lawyers for Baker and Williams blame each other’s client. Regardless of who was responsible, this wasn’t the first assault. The autopsy on Saonnia’s visibly malnourished body found 62 cuts, bruises, bums, abrasions and wrist scars, among other injuries. Eleven were still healing-meaning they probably happened during the time the homemaker was working with the family.
Since Illinois’s Family First program began in 1988, at least six children have died violently during or after their families received help. In many other instances, children were injured, or simply kept in questionable conditions. Such numbers may look small compared with the 17,000 children in Illinois who’ve been in the program. But to critics, the deaths and injuries underscore the danger of using reunification efforts for deeply troubled families. Gelles, once an ardent supporter of family preservation, is adamant about its failures. “We’ve learned in health psychology that you don’t waste intervention on those with no intention of changing,” he argues.
A University of Chicago report card issued last year gave the Illinois Family First program barely passing grades. Among the findings: Family First led to a slight increase in the overall number of children later placed outside their homes; it had no effect on subsequent reports of maltreatment; it had only mixed results in such areas as improving housing, economics and parenting, and it had no effect on getting families out of the DCFS system. John R. Schuerman, who helped write the report, says it’s too simplistic to call Family First a failure. Still, he concedes that the assumption that large numbers of households can be saved with intensive services “just may not be the case.”
Nevertheless, in the last decade, family-preservation programs have become so entrenched there’s little chance they’ll be junked. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala carefully sidesteps the question of whether it’s possible to carry the reunification philosophy too far. Asked where she would draw the line in defining families beyond repair, she diplomatically suggests that the answers be left to child-welfare experts. “Nobody wants to leave children in dangerous situations,” says Shalala. “The goal is to shrewdly pick cases in which the right efforts might help keep a family together.” So far, not even the experts have come up with sure way to do that.
POLICYMAKERS BELIEVE THAT IF THE could just remove the stresses from a family, they wouldn’t have to remove the child. But critics argue that the entire child-welfare network must approach the idea of severing parents’ rights as aggressively as it now approaches family reunification. That means moving kids through the system and into permanent homes quickly-before they’re so damage that they won’t fit in anywhere. In theory, the Adoption Assistance Act already requires that, but no state enforces that part of the law. Illinois is typical: even in the most straightforward cases, a petition to terminate parental rights is usually the start of a two-year judicial process-after the 18-month clean-up-your-act phase.
Why does it take so long? Once a child is in foster care, the system breathes a sigh of relief and effectively forgets about him. If the child is removed from an abusive home, the assumption is that he’s safe. “There’s always another reason to give the parent the benefit of the doubt,” says Daro. “They lose their job, the house burns down, the aunt is murdered. Then they get another six-month extension, and it happens all over again. Meanwhile, you can’t put a child in a Deepfreeze and suspend his life until the parent gets her life together.”
In the most blatant abuse and neglect cases, parents’ rights should be terminated immediately, reformers say. In less-severe cases, parents should be given no more than six to 12 months to shape up. “You have social workers saying, ‘She doesn’t visit her child because she has no money for carfare’,” says Murphy. “But what parent wouldn’t walk over mountains of glass to see their kids? You know it’s a crock. You have to tell people we demand responsibility.”
And if parents can’t take care of them, where are all these children supposed to go? With just 100,000 foster parents in the system, finding even temporary homes is difficult. For starters, reformers suggest professionalizing foster care, paying parents decent salaries to stay home and care for several children at a time. Long range, many believe that society will have to confront its ambivalence toward interracial adoptions. Perhaps the most controversial alternative is the move to revive orphanages, at least for teenagers, who are the least likely to be adopted. One of the fiercest supporters is Maddux, the new supervising judge of Cook County’s abuse section. Maddux, 59, says that his own family was so desperately poor they once lived in a shanty with two rooms-one of which was an old car. When the family broke up, he and his younger brother went to live at Boys Town, Neb. He believes that many foster children today could benefit from the nurturing-yet-demanding atmosphere of group living. “I wasn’t raised in a family after the age of 12,” Maddux says. “I didn’t miss it. Thousands of kids at Boys Town knew that being in a destitute, nonfunctioning family was a lot worse than not being in a family.” In Illinois, some are taking the idea seriously-among the proposals is turning closed military bases into campuses for kids.
Ironically, Illinois could wind up with one of the best child-welfare systems in the nation. Pressed by public outrage over Joseph Wallace’s death, state legislators last year passed a law that puts the best interest of children ahead of their parents’. Foster parents will be given a voice in abuse and neglect cases. And the DCFS is beefing up caseworker training, so that those in the field will learn how to spot dangerous situations more quickly.
Some of the toughest changes are already under-way in Cook County. The much-criticized Family First program has been replaced with a smaller, more intensely scrutinized family-preservation project known as Homebuilders. And the county’s juvenile-court system has been expanded so that there are now 14 judges, not eight, hearing abuse and neglect cases; that cuts each judge’s caseload from about 3,500 to about 2,000 children per year. But reform doesn’t come cheap. The DCFS budget has tripled since 1988, to $900 million, and it could top $1 billion in the next fiscal year.
Whether any of this can save lives, it’s too soon to tell. In its report on Joseph Wallace’s death, the blue-ribbon committee was pessimistic. “It would be comforting to believe that the facts of this case are so exceptional that such cases are not likely to happen again,” the panel wrote with a dose of bitterness. “That hope is unfounded.” The temptation, of course, is to blame some faceless system. But the fate of children really lies with everyone-caseworkers, supervisors, prosecutors, judges-doing their jobs.
Contrary to public opinion, foster care is not dominated by minorities. Nearly half the kids there are white.
white 47.2% hispanic 13.7% black 30.8% others 4.6% unknown 3.7% SOURCE: AMERICAN PUBLIC WELFARE ASSOCIATION
Two thirds of children who leave foster care are reunited with their parents; only a fraction are adopted.
reunited 66.6% adopted 7.7% adulthood 6.5% other 15.7% unknown 3.5% SOURCE: AMERICAN PUBLIC WELFARE ASSOCIATION
