Article Published: Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - 4:24:58 PM PST 
Long Beach Press Telegram Opinion
The foster care mess
Some children are put in harm's way for a buck. 

Wednesday, December 10, 2003 - A wronged father called L.A. County's foster care system "legalized kidnapping" for profit, and a pattern of disturbing evidence shows that he isn't far from the truth. 

A two-year investigation by the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (an organization that includes the Press-Telegram) found that the system has taken thousands of children away from their parents in cases where it may not have been necessary or advisable, sending them to homes that are sometimes more dangerous than the ones they left. 

The reason? It appears to be a twisted system of financial incentives that rewards states and counties for placing additional children in foster care from $30,000 to $150,000 for each child. 

The reward system, which one expert called the "perverse incentive factor," has led L.A. County and others to whisk children away from their parents when alternatives might have worked as well or better, such as parenting classes and family counseling. It is also thought that the financial incentives are making workers less likely to pursue claims of neglect and abuse. 

In some extreme cases, children have been taken from their parents for little or no reason. The father who accused the county of kidnapping spent $150,000 in legal fees before the county admitted its mistake and returned the daughter it had wrongfully taken from him. In that context, his comments actually sound restrained. 

In the LANG investigation, experts inside and outside the foster care system said that as many as half of the county's 75,000 children in foster care and adoptive homes may not really need to be there, and the money motive is probably to blame. With the right kinds of services, many of those children could have stayed with their parents or relatives. 

The number of children in L.A. County foster care has more than doubled since the 1980s, and as a result the system is now overburdened, strained and dangerous. Previous studies have shown that children in L.A. County's foster care system are three times more likely to be killed than children in the general population. Since 1991, 660 children in foster care have died; 160 of those deaths were homicides. 

In many cases the system is still working as intended, when it moves abused and neglected children, born to parents who never should have had them, into better homes. But it is also much too quick to remove children in less harmful situations where other solutions could be used. 

There is hope. Child advocates are optimistic that L.A. County's new foster care director, David Sanders, will undertake the reforms and changes necessary to fix this badly broken system. This week the presiding juvenile court judge, Michael Nash, called on county attorneys, judges and social workers to determine which children in foster care could be safely returned to their parents or relatives. And the U.S. Congress next summer is scheduled to hear legislation that would change the way funding is allocated, and give states and counties more flexibility to utilize services that could help keep more families together. 

Among other changes, these reforms must take the price tags off children's heads and force the system to treat them as human beings, not dollars in a budget.