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Up to Half of Foster Children Needlessly Placed in
System
LOS ANGELES (CNS) — Up to half of Los Angeles County's
foster children were needlessly placed in a system that is more dangerous
than their own homes because of incentives in state and federal laws, a
two-year probe has found. A Daily News investigation
discovered that the county receives nearly $30,000 a year from federal and
state governments for each child placed in the system - money that goes to
pay the stipends of foster parents, but also wages, benefits and overhead
costs for child-welfare workers and executives. For some special-needs
children, the county receives up to $150,000 annually. "Called the 'perverse
incentive factor,' states and counties earn more revenues by having more
children in the system - whether it is opening a case to investigate a report
of child abuse and neglect or placing a child in foster care," wrote the
authors of a recent report by the state Department of Social Services Child
Welfare Stakeholders Group. Since the early 1980s, the
number of foster children in California has gone up fivefold, and doubled in
the county and nation. About one in four children will come into contact with
the child welfare system before turning 18, officials say. This has overwhelmed social
workers, who often don't have time to help troubled families or monitor the
care children receive in foster homes. The hundreds of thousands
of children who have cycled through the county's system over the years are
six to seven times more likely to be mistreated and three times more likely
to be killed than children in the general population, government statistics
reveal. Officials acknowledge that
more than 660 children embroiled in the county's foster care system have died
since 1991, including more than 160 who were homicide victims. "The county's foster
care system makes Charles Dickens' descriptions look flattering," said
Mark Rosenbaum, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of
Southern California. David Sanders, who took
over as director of the Department of Children and Family Services in March,
said experts estimate up to 50 percent of the 75,000 children in the system
and adoptive homes could have been left in their parents' care if appropriate
services had been provided. He said DCFS comes into contact with nearly
180,000 children each year. The Daily News'
investigation of the child-welfare system, which is shrouded in secrecy by
confidentiality laws, involved the review of tens of thousands of pages of
government and confidential juvenile court documents, studies, computer
databases and several hundred interviews. As the investigation
progressed, state and county officials acknowledged that the financial
incentives built into the laws encourage the needless placements of children
in foster care, and officials have started taking steps to reform the system.
Copyright
© 2003 KABC-TV and the Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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