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We are sending more foster kids to prison than to college

539 points by amin 6y ago

admiralspoo 6y ago
The title is totally vacuous and makes no logical connection for why college is a standard. Replace "foster kids" and "prison" with whatever you wish, e.g. "chess grandmasters" and "ice cream shop".
wombatmobile 6y ago
Does it surprise anyone that more foster kids go to jail than attend college? What is the inevitable outcome of how our society is structured? Our values come from television, which exists to serve advertising. Advertising works by appealing to selfishness, hedonism, and self-doubt. Who is going provide the time, thought, care, attention and funding to give these unfortunate kids, alone in this world, the confidence, skills, endurance, and self-belief to navigate the education system and a society that’s based on connection for advancement? The government? We’re told that’s a “swamp” that can’t do anything as efficiently as private enterprise. Private enterprise? There’s no profit in running foster homes. The prison system? There’s profit in that!
nixass 6y ago
Need to fill the pockets of private prison owners + local government who allowed them
temporaryacc1 6y ago
Genetics are a stubborn force.
tyingq 6y ago
"The state, however, has since returned to high-level dysfunction, including a recent case in which foster kids were being transported in handcuffs and leg shackles — a practice that has now been prohibited" I wonder what the sequence of events was where nobody said anything about putting shackles on kids that aren't prisoners or being arrested.
- tokai 6y ago
  Guess anyone with a shred of empathy was long gone before shackling kids came up.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    I'm surprised that nobody balked just for self-preservation reasons. I'd certainly be concerned about the legalities of shackling someone. Sounds like kidnapping to me.
- sonotathrowaway 6y ago
  Don’t underestimate how unruly, disobedient, and oftentimes violent these children are. In the best case, these children have been traumatized by their removal from a family, however dysfunctional. In the worst cases, they’ve suffered abuses that make people support the death penalty. While none of those scars is written on a person, they do manifest in sudden outbursts of screaming, hitting, stealing, and scores more destructive behaviors. For a neglected child, negative attention is preferable to not existing, and if acting out is the only way to make your existence register to the outside world, so be it. Many of those people who placed said children in shackles aren’t practiced in methods to manage traumatized children or understanding of their past, and identify them as ‘problematic’, not ‘traumatized’.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Has anyone checked the skin colour of those kids?
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    Let me rephrase that, but without the inflammatory assumptions: Given that social workers are good people who do very hard (thankless and low-paid) work - has anyone checked what the reasons were for instituting this policy. We're all in agreement that the agency needs to explain why this policy was put in place (which has since been prohibited), because it isn't normal to shackle kids and potentially someone needs to be held accountable. But maybe we can do that without impugning social workers as bigots - don't you think?
williesleg 6y ago
Some go to Hillary and Joe to suck their blood so there's that.
heckerhut 6y ago
More generally, prisons all over the world serve much more often as a place to put people that society has failed than vice versa. It’s a sad truth that gets very little recognition since these people have no lobby. The American prison situation is certainly particularly awful due to privatization. But it doesn’t stop there. We’re doing terrible things in Europe as well.
- remh 6y ago
  Not to downplay the issue in Europe but there are 111 inmates per 100,000 people in the EU. In the US it's 698. That shows the amplitude and the spread of the carceral problem in the US.
  - tyingq 6y ago
    The conditions once you're in are also starkly worse in the US. More people, for longer periods, in worse living conditions.
  - slumdev 6y ago
    The "nonviolent drug user" inmate is as much a myth as Reagan's welfare queen. We have a crime problem, not a "carceral problem".
    - watwut 6y ago
      Afaik, Americans do not commit 6 times more crime then Europeans.
      - krspykrm 6y ago
        Did you bother actually looking up the data? Because intentional homicide in the US is indeed more than 6x greater than it is in places like Austria and Switzerland. There is no country in western Europe with anywhere near the violent crime rate as the US.
        6y ago
nelson_muntz69 6y ago
It seems like official US policy to make things “cruel and usual”, effectively skirting the prohibition on punishments that are cruel and unusual.
aminozuur 6y ago
"Of the inmates who took the survey, 1 in 4 said they were the product of foster care." I really wish people understood the long term effects of childhood trauma, and I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- throwawayz8182z 6y ago
  Life isn't really that nice and tidy. It would be nice if it were, but generally people are mostly good and sometimes unplanned things happen. Intact families need to be a societal goal. My parents were definitely not financially stable. I grew up in the equivalent of what the US would call "the projects" but a key difference was that it was a community. There was a rec center, a school, groceries, health care all within a couple of enclosed city blocks. Average income was poverty level. All of the services reduced burdens on the parents who often worked two jobs. My mom had two jobs, my dad had two jobs. If you use an iPhone, you are using my code. If you played a Wii game in the last decade, you're using my code. Many more examples. That's how far I came and most of my friends went as far if not farther. One of us manages a global tech organization now. Most kids I know who didn't do well or treaded water were the product of contentious divorces as this was the time when "rah rah women's liberation" was at its height and many men were kicked out of their family. I still remember my friend lamenting to me that the only time he can see is father is during school lunches. That friend did better than he would have because he basically lived at my house as a result of his family situation. Surprisingly, in this area, there were fewer such divorces than the general population. I have looked up the stats. Raising kids is not hard but somehow we went from village to complete independence. We need to go back to a village mindset. We are all in it together or we will all feel the pain one day.
  - geofft 6y ago
    The historic reason many religions/societies looked down on divorce is that it left the woman worse off - the man would be able to work and fend for himself but the woman would have few options. The fact that in out modern world many women (in heterosexual relationships) are the ones who desire to leave, and can reasonably fend for themselves, is pretty novel, and we haven't figured out how to adjust the rest of our social structures to account for it. It is a good thing that women can leave relationships where they're being mistreated and be better off on their own, but it means we need to rethink designs elsewhere in society that were based on the assumption that they wouldn't. I agree with you about the village mindset, and it's kind of the most robust option. Even ignoring divorce, a parent can be emotionally incompetent at caring for children, and certainly can be called to work (or fight) elsewhere, can get sick and/or die, etc. We should be ensuring children have multiple backup options if their own parents are unavailable for whatever reason.
nr2x 6y ago
My basic understanding is the U.S. replaced mental health asylums and orphanages with homelessness and prisons. What do other countries do? Does it work?
- dkdk8283 6y ago
  Private prisons create a perverse incentive to lock people up. Follow the money.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/remember-we-re-not-just-making-money-we-re-building-prisons-new-yorker-cartoon_u-l-pgrpop9p3u2.jpg?p=0&dims=1 https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/remember-we-re-not... new yorker cartoon - remember, we're not just making money, we're building prisons.
  - bcrosby95 6y ago
    Follow the money but it's not just private corporations. In California the prison guard union is one of the stronger lobbies and have pushed to pass some pretty bad bills over the decades.
    - Clubber 6y ago
      High conviction numbers also allows an ambitious prosecutor to look good once they have aspirations for higher political office as well.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >My basic understanding is the U.S. replaced mental health asylums and orphanages with homelessness and prisons. To be clear, that was not the motivation. There were lots of reasons why things changed and institutionalization fell out of favor (and not just in the US, but across the West). For example, right now, in most states, you couldn't forcibly institutionalize, say, a schizophrenic homeless individual legally, even if the request came from the individual's family. And if you try, municipal and state governments, bolstered by activists and rights organizations will fight you.
stevespang 6y ago
Thanks for posting this.
gadders 6y ago
I've been reading the Burke series of novels [1] written by Andrew Vachss [2]. As he says in the novels, we make our own monsters: http://www.vachss.com/av_dispatches/disp_9006_a.html http://www.vachss.com/av_dispatches/disp_9006_a.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_(series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_(series) [2] http://www.vachss.com/vachss/credentials.html http://www.vachss.com/vachss/credentials.html
batch12 6y ago
I was a foster kid for 11 years. My social worker and foster parents were likely the only reason I am still here. My social worker would visit his children weekly-- even on weekends and did whatever it took for us. Still, he was just one man. I still talk to him regularly. During one discussion, I asked him about the other kids that I remembered. There were only two of us left. I think people forget about the trauma foster kids deal with. First, the reason kids went into care. Second, the separation of the kid from their families. My experiences showed me that this trauma, combined with an institutional care system does not equip most kids to function in society.
- aminozuur 6y ago
  Thank you for sharing your experience. May I ask, how are you doing now? Did you find any ways to address or even overcome those past experiences?
  - batch12 6y ago
    I am doing well for myself now. How I got here is pretty complicated. I can only attribute my ability to overcome these experiences to those who genuinely cared. These are the people who cared enough to help me succeed but also let me fail and deal with the consequences. In high school, I was a low C to D student. I slept in class. I refused to do homework. I thought the schools were only temporary, so therefore they did not matter. I only passed classes because I excelled at test taking and understood the material. I felt like it was all a game-- people, school, relationships. None of it mattered and all I had to do was find the right way to play. After foster care, I had a free ride (I was still in care), but failed out of college because I didn't see a point. I joined the military. This forced structure and discipline actually helped me. I understood this game and excelled. I used my experience in the military to get an entry level job in IT and continue to grow. There are residual effects that I will always deal with. I have huge gaps in memory from when I was a kid- I don't remember much before age 11. I compartmentalize things too easily. I can be impatient with people. I dislike and distrust bureaucracies. I don't have enough patience for incompetence. I could go on, but I'm sure that's not why you're here :)
treeman79 6y ago
Adopted a teenager out of foster care. None of the others she knew from foster care did well in life. All on drugs, homeless, many in prison, spent time there. Many are having kids that will soon be take away by the state, for good reasons. Our own has done better, but was years of insane drama. Knowing that bio family was out there hurt her immensely. She finally had to spend time with them. Literally Pulling her drunk biological dad out of a ditch, to realize that they were dragging her down. She does aight these days. Foster kids can be helped, but you really need multiple strong families or support groups dedicated to the task. For a couple of decades, at least.
- Geminidog 6y ago
  >Foster kids can be helped, but you really need multiple strong families or support groups dedicated to the task. For a couple of decades, at least. It's sad but I don't think that this is sustainable.
  - bigfudge 6y ago
    It would be cheaper than prison. We do so little to support foster families that I don't know how we know that it's not sustainable... we just haven't tried. It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer. This is a question of priorities.
    - creato 6y ago
      > It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer. I think people that say things like this overestimate how much we spend on things like this and underestimate social spending. About 50% of US government spending is health and social services. So even cutting everything else to zero is only a doubling of health and social services. A doubling isn't nothing, but a game changer? And not all (or even most) of that other 50% will be spending you feel is frivolous, so it would be much less than doubling.
dfilppi 6y ago
The state doesn't make good parents. Shocking.
BGthaOG 6y ago
I highly recommend watching the video interview (5 min.) embedded in the article, titled "Taken into foster care, through the eyes of a child". It is not far from the beginning of the article. Here is the written caption: "Before she was an inmate, Michelle Voorhees was a kid in foster care. Painting a vivid picture, Voorhees asks you to imagine the harrowing, disconcerting experience of being removed from your own home." Search-in-page any part of the caption and it should be easy to spot.
Turbots 6y ago
US is sending more foster kids to prison than to college*
Sevii 6y ago
My Dad fosters what seems like an unending stream of kids. The parents have a drug problem and end up losing their kids. Once the parents get their shit together again they get the kids back. Form the kids perspective they are either dealing with temporary guardians or with a parent that provides next to no super vision. The state can’t parent children, but foster care is in a real way keeping children off the street.
rtx 6y ago
Child care and elderly care one of the harder problems to solve. I hope some smart people decide to tackle it. Lots of potential for abuse and neglect. At one point I used to plan about combining an old age home and orphanage together. It could help with some emotional needs.
- klyrs 6y ago
  These problems do appear inextricably linked. Individualism in american culture is, IMO, the root. In many other cultures, family is huge -- folks are connected to their parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins... grandparents help out with the kids until they can't, and the skills of parenting are naturally passed from generation to generation. Funny to see a comment on another that "no one" is prepared to raise a kid... that's because individualism is bad at retaining wisdom. The problem with your mixed old folks' home / orphanage is that individualistic old people don't wanna live there until they're too old to help out.
mindvirus 6y ago
As a relatively new parent, this is particularly heartbreaking. It just seems so hopeless - why can't we as a society solve this, whether through better resources for kids or for their parents? There was another story following two homeless kids - think of how much worse off they'll be with COVID and remote learning https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/19/nyregion/student-homelessness-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/19/nyregion/stud...
- balls187 6y ago
  I felt the same heartbreak. > why can't we as a society solve this We can. We (collectively as a society) have chosen not to. Foster kids don't vote, don't pay taxes, and their advocates aren't nearly as well funded as those for many other special interest groups.
  - balls187 6y ago
    Also, fwiw--74 million Americans voted to reelect Donald Trump, despite his policy that forcibly separated children from their parents at the US Border...
- bluGill 6y ago
  Easy to say, but when you learn about the problem it is hard to suggest an answer that might help.
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  The sad truth is that some people are so broken by their upbringing that nothing can be done to “fix” them. And you don’t know ahead of time if somebody is an impossible case or not.
LatteLazy 6y ago
I did youth work with a family who fostered then adopted 4 half brothers from the same mother. She was a heroin addict. Every other year she'd have a baby, malnourished, underweight, in withdrawal, neglected taken away. 4 kids: 2 had adhd, 1 was developmentally delayed, 1 autistic, 1 had ADD, plus all were smaller and weaker than their comparative age peers. After taking the forth one, they were too over stretched to take anymore. Lovely kids. It was amazing watching them socialise gradually. So sad what happened to them really.
- eplanit 6y ago
  "I did youth work with a family who fostered then adopted 4 half brothers from the same mother. She was a heroin addict. Every other year she'd have a baby, malnourished, underweight, in withdrawal, neglected taken away." That's truly tragic. You've been a blessing to those children, and that's beautiful. Given the harshness of this reality, I understand why past generations looked to forced sterilization. There's really no winning with that, but after 4 kids (to date) with that fate, it's a legitimate moral debate (not an easy one, nor should it be) as to the relative good. I guess it's a sibling to the abortion debate.
  - LatteLazy 6y ago
    I'm a brit, around the same time a US based charity set up here that paid drug using women to get (temporary but long term) Birth Control. I thought it was a good idea but it was (is) very controversial. They started after a similar experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention The kids I worked with were so lucky to get a nice loving family, a very strong community to support them, lots of opportunities for socialisation and education etc. God knows what happens if you're not that lucky. Edit: I have to be honest, I enjoyed the work. I wouldn't have done it otherwise. :) the kids had their moments but mostly they were really excited to do anything and getting male attention was a big draw for them (one they got over the fear of men they all arrived with).
    - eplanit 6y ago
fuhry 6y ago
Wife and I are hopefully less than 2 months away from being licensed. If we can do it in our tiny 2 bedroom house, you can too!
- bluGill 6y ago
  Good luck. My parents did it when I was little. They remember showing real love to kids and being hated for it.
pinipedman 6y ago
Is this really a surprise to anyone? The US is second only to the USSR in incarceration rate. The disenfranchised, e.g. foster children, will certainly suffer disproportionately under such a system. The lack of social safety nets, mental health services, etc. certainly play a role, but the larger issue is the authoritarian nature of the US regime.
- brink 6y ago
  While we do incarcerate too much, I don't think the solution is necessarily "incarcerate less" as much as it is "Nurture families more and create stable environments for children to grow up in so that they feel wanted."
  - pinipedman 6y ago
    I don't think anyone would disagree that a better home environment is fundamental. But do you think that, in general, the longer sentences and higher rates of incarceration (especially for non-violent crime) in the US compared with other developed nations are beneficial? Publishing names and mugshots of arrestees prior to convictions, the existence of the sex offender registry, rampant human rights abuses in prisons, loss of voting rights for felons, and the explicit allowance of slavery as punishment do not make it seem like the US "justice system" even approximates the humanist notion of justice that other developed nations apparently aim for.
the-dude 6y ago
That is literal survivorship bias there. I know multiple stories of deeply unhappy/unstable foster children, no matter how much stability, love & care they were given ( I knew some of those foster parents ).
- gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  I knew two kids adopted as infants who were born addicted to drugs. The family that adopted them was wealthy. They poured enormous amounts of time and resources into raising those kids. One turned it all around and works for Google, the other ram away and hasn’t been heard from in 20 years. Same birth mother, born two years apart, she was an addict.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    I think it is a fairly safe assumption that raising children has aspects of a chaotic system. Small changes to upbringing can cause large impact on the result. Of course not all "inputs" have this chaotic nature, and there are lots of inputs that aren't under direct control of the parents. There are just so many variables that it is hard to tease out patterns.
    - mikepurvis 6y ago
      Fair, but as far as controlled experiments are possible in this kind of thing, it doesn't get much better than two kids with a shared birth parent and the same adoptive parents/environment. Anyway, you're not wrong about the chaotic environment that is child rearing— the other side of this coin is sets of identical twins with differing sexualities, eg: https://kinseyinstitute.org/news-events/news/2019-07-26-twins-sexual-orientation.php https://kinseyinstitute.org/news-events/news/2019-07-26-twin...
      - kevincox 6y ago
        No, it doesn't get much better than that scenario. But something as simple as which other kids are sat next to them in school can completely change their childhood. Observations like these are the best we have, and should not be ignored, but there are just so many variables that can never bet (ethically) controlled.
jriley 6y ago
I know volunteers for CASA. It is both uplifting and heartbreaking work. https://nationalcasagal.org/ https://nationalcasagal.org/
elmo2you 6y ago
“A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” ~ Mahatma Ghandi I think that says it all. Despite all the propaganda/cultural brainwashing, convincing many Americans that their country/culture is somehow better than others.
seebetter 6y ago
I worked on this issue in 2008. My best friend had directed a film called Where the Day Takes You about homeless kids in Hollywood. A Harvard lawyer I knew added me to her non profit and asked me to produce a documentary about homeless teenagers in Colorado. I wanted to call it STATE OF NEGLECT and push for an efficient form of social programs ran by the state. My infinitely educated friend, she was a project attorney, had no concept of filmmaking or project management. She tried to put a bad director with no technical production in charge with me. Harvard lawyer was scared Comcast wouldn’t give us $25 million so she asked me to sanitize the criticism towards state foster programs. Months later, her foundation closed. In Where the Day Takes You, it was Will Smith’s movie. Tom Cruise’s partner Paula was my best friend’s agent at the time. This and the CIA is how I know about the UFO scientology religion by Kit and Hal. Of course, Hacker News shadowbanned me for this comment on my other account. Even though I work with the Office of Director of National Intelligence and JASON Group. My friend is currently the Chair of the Defense Policy Group. Today President Trump is going to free Ross and Drew. Hackers aren’t marketers who made SaSS and rattle on about series A. There are no hackers here. There are no painters here. Come to EFNet where real hackers are, not corporate grifters like Y Combinator. I know everyone important in Atherton and SV and the IC. We don’t need your corporations startup bros and CIA In-Q-Tel fronts. Overthrow everything government, religion and corporations. Just like the Bavarian Illuminati planned for their sinister conspiracy to enact the Futuristic Past.
paulmendoza 6y ago
My wife and I adopted two older boys (10 and 12). Most of the families trying to adopt are looking for babies but we were looking for older kids. It still took almost 2 years to get our first kid placed with us because I think the social workers weren’t sure if my wife and I really knew what we were getting into. But once we got the first kid I think they realized we were good. Then a year later they called us out of the blue about a second kid.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  I always find this a bit ridiculous - do folks that want babies really know what they are getting into? Heck, do folks that have babies? Probably not. The difference is that we can do things to prepare foster parents or adoptive parents for it - more so than natural birth.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Babies are easier because they don't start off bad. Teens have had years of abuse behind them. Read the reports of others here and you will see it is rare and hard to fix the kids after that trauma.
    - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
      Sure, babies don't start out with years of trauma. So what? People are willing to take classes and things and learn, are they not? It just isn't the same as babies. And to be fair, you aren't "fixing" a baby: You are doing the same thing - providing a loving home, trying to give another person the things they need. You just have a head start on some of the problems you'll be facing with a teenager - the sort of thing that blindsides parents of babies if it happens. I'm not sure why it is an issue that "things are hard".
      - watwut 6y ago
        > Sure, babies don't start out with years of trauma. So what? I think that you should look up what trauma and dysfunctional early setup does with kids. Because it can be very hard on caregiver and test all their abilities including self control. The adoption agencies themselves are quite open about these issues - they do not want people to adopt and then be unable to handle things. Which are all euphemisms mind you. Basically, there are issues with violence, inability to create relationship or even inability that relationship can be "true". Which causes whole other bunch of behavioral problems. Like, the eagerness to "test" caregiver by really going out of way to create trouble. And if caregiver fails, result is basically abuse. And the kid can't help itself, but adults should. And adults when they see they don't have time and resources and patience to deal with above, do better to adopt baby. > People are willing to take classes and things and learn, are they not? It just isn't the same as babies. What did that even means?
throwawaypali 6y ago
Can we just go ahead and admit that the foster program is not superior to the orphanages that it replaced?
- yarcob 6y ago
  I think that in general foster families are better than group homes. The problem is that most children shouldn't be taken away in the first place.
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    >The problem is that most children shouldn't be taken away in the first place. Sure. To be clear though, the state doesn't really take children away for no reason. I'm sure there are isolated incidences, but in general, the kids who end up in the foster care, did not land there because they came from loving stable environments.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Most kids are not taken away from their homes. The exceptions horrible cases.
  - chopin24 6y ago
    How do you run A/B to prove this hypothesis?
  - frankydp 6y ago
    Spoken by someone that is hopefully truly ignorant of child welfare.
    - yarcob 6y ago
      Everything that I've learned about foster care tells me that removing children from their surroundings is a traumatic event, and should be only a last resort. In many cases, there are a lot of things that can be done instead of just taking kids away. If there's any research that shows I'm wrong, and that taking troubled kids away from their families is actually the best thing for their development, I'm eager to hear about it.
dcolkitt 6y ago
This is a good time to remind people that there's a huge backlog of stable, middle-class Americans desperate to adopt. This persists primarily because of huge regulatory and legal burdens placed on the adoption process. The most despicable of which is a constellation of bigoted state-by-state policies on "racial matching". The end result is that black foster kids on average spend twice as long in the system as their white counterparts.[1] [1] https://ij.org/press-release/institute-for-justice-challenges-barriers-to-interracial-adoption/ https://ij.org/press-release/institute-for-justice-challenge...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rstupek 6y ago
  Isn't having white couples adopt black foster kids something the black community has pushed back on?
  - haram_masala 6y ago
    It's something that Ibram Kendi has pushed back on: https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/26/anticapitalist-sponsored-by-twitter-ceo-accuses-amy-coney-barrett-of-colonialism-for-adopting-from-haiti/ https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/26/anticapitalist-sponsore.... But he does not represent the Black community, despite the amount of media he gets.
- frankydp 6y ago
  Georgia was sued a decade ago and lost for letting children languish in care, because of racial matching "rules" in certain counties. This resulted in a hugely disproportionate number of specifically african american children never finding adoptive homes due to a lack of racial matched adoptive resources. There are now reporting requirements for this specific issue in the egregious counties Fulton and Dekalb.
  - soccerz 6y ago
    We had a sibling pair for a year and were on the verge of adopting them. DFCS was more than a year late than was legally required to file TPR and at the last minute moved them to yet another home, this time based on skin color. These kids are pawns of a harmful ideology.
DanielBMarkham 6y ago
My SO works with foster kids. Her job is to find foster families, work with the kids, and try (if possible) to heal the family and put them back together. She loves and is good at her job. Most folks have no concept of the types of trauma many of these children go through. Sadly, by the time the state has to step in, it's no easy journey forward. People watch movies and TV dramas about these kinds of things. It does not prepare anybody involved for the reality of the problems. I've heard second-hand stories I wish I could forget.
hvasilev 6y ago
What does this have to do with technology?
- sound1 6y ago
  Kids who can potentially become Steve Jobs are unfairly ending up in jail?
  - spazx 6y ago
    A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
macspoofing 6y ago
>Texas lawmakers recognized the existence of a possible foster-care-to-prison pipeline several years ago. The 'foster-care-to-prison pipeline' metaphor is such a misnomer and completely unfair. Nobody is moving these kids into the prison system. Traditional parenting can provide personalized rearing and still have that child end-up in prison. We also know that a single-parent household, even with a dedicated loving parent, will have challenges rearing children. How is the state supposed to do it? Worse, the kids who end up in foster-care, more often than not, will already have significant trauma and behaviour or mental issues. So to summarize, you have the State dealing with two major issues that individually create an immense challenge, but together make it even harder: 1) The state can never scale resources to match typical parental rearing. 2) The state has to deal with a population of kids who are already suffering from behavioral or mental issues, drugs, or trauma. An affluent two-parent household with dedicated support workers would have trouble raising kids like that. How is the State supposed to do this? I'm not sure what the right approach is here but it's clear as day that there is no easy answer here.
- Helloworldboy 6y ago
  No idea why you’re being downvoted.
- frankydp 6y ago
  Intervene early and permanently. Trading second and third chances for bio parents at the cost of children's futures is too high a cost in my opinion.
  - ativzzz 6y ago
    The early and permanent intervention would be to somehow convince (or forbid?) parents who are likely to raise such a child from having a child, but this opens up a giant can of ethical worms e.g. eugenics. Better education around sex and children, as well as easy access to birth control would go a long way.
    - frankydp 6y ago
LockAndLol 6y ago
Instead we see how people go onto Facebook to get inseminated by strangers. People would literally rather be injected with somebody else's semen, go through 9 months of crazy hormones and multiple hours of the worst pain in their lives, than take care of an existing child. If people did something to actually help children instead of voting for pro-surveillance laws or "against those people I don't like", maybe kids would get some help. I think that says a lot about our society.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >I think that says a lot about our society. No it doesn't. People have children because having a genetic connection is important to them. That's not a 'society-thing'. That's just humanity. There are exception to this, and that's why foster parents should be applauded because fostering and adopting is great moral act. But I wouldn't impugn the rest of society because most people don't adopt, but instead choose to have biological children.
everdrive 6y ago
Do we know if these kids would have been better off in their own homes? I don't have any statistics here, but one wonders if we can measure the outcomes here. ie, is abusive stability better than what the foster system produces?
- jfrankamp 6y ago
  Recent research has swung the state child welfare policy pendulum back toward this thesis in my state (Oregon) and a few others I'm aware of., e.g. if the situation isn't totally irredeemable, bio fam is the best in terms of average outcome.
selimthegrim 6y ago
I have a friend who has tried to foster parent during COVID but the shifting goalposts, school openings and closings demanding childcare availability instantly (both parents work) and lack of timely reimbursements from the state combine to make it a nearly impossible endeavor. Last I heard the child had made some unfortunate choices after going back to the birth family and might be headed to institutionalization
hamolton 6y ago
It's obscene how we have this foster system that pays these parents for kid's hit-or-miss experiences rotating between families, when adoption, a generally better solution, costs over $10k in fees after proving via background checks that you're an angel. The system is so broken.
- ketzo 6y ago
  Not to be obtuse, but some would say you're reversing cause and effect -- that the $10k and exhaustive background checks are the reasons that adoption has better success rates. I couldn't be less of an expert, but it's hard for me to imagine that the solution is as simple as "adoption is always better." It does absolutely seem like there are many wonderful homes out there who aren't able to adopt because they aren't quite well-off enough, or the couple is gay, or some other factor that a reasonable person could look at and say "this shouldn't disqualify you from adopting."
  - hamolton 6y ago
    Agreed that success rates are irrelevant to this conversation and it's certainly not true that adoption is always better. I think that most people would agree that the relative stability of having permanent parents would be, on average, better than being in the awkward foster system for ages. The foster system is meant to be temporary until a child can be placed in a permanent home [1] but 29% of children placed in the foster care system are stuck for at least 3 years [2]. [1] https://pathwayfs.org/foster-care-vs-adoption-differences-and-similarities https://pathwayfs.org/foster-care-vs-adoption-differences-an... [2] https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a35860/adoption-statistics/#:~:text=There%20are%20107%2C918%20foster%20children,three%20years%20in%20foster%20care https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a35860/adopt....
    - frankydp 6y ago
      Keep in mind that adopting directly from your state DFCS is generally free or reimbursed.
throwaway9870 6y ago
I had an employee adopt a foster child around 10-11yrs old. Quite an eye opener for me. Employee missed a huge amount of time (which I allowed with no questions) because the child just could not function. When they put the child in school, the police were called a couple times a week (I am not exaggerating). Finally, the child accused one of new parents of child abuse because they were not allowed to do something. Child services took the child back in custody but no charges were pressed because everyone involved knew what was going on and what happened. My employee that adopted this child was heart broken and talked to them everyday even a year later. Truly a terrible situation. Bottom line: young children can be broken severely at a very young age and it is extremely hard to fix then going forward.
frankydp 6y ago
50ish percent of all reunified children in the state of Georgia are back in care in less than a year. There is no data available for total recidivism, but I would more than guess that the vast majority of the negative outcome foster stats come primarily from multi-cycle children. Meaning they go in to care, get reunified, then go back in care, and wash and repeat. Tada we are at 16 years and the trauma fruit of "family preservation" policy is ripe for the picking. "Family preservation" is the pervert uncle of a mantra that is the anchor that has dragged foster care outcomes down for decades. Supported by the "evidence based policy" con that has been propagated by services companies. I have not had a child in my home that was not the victim of the family preservation cult. In case you don't know, let me explain the toxic buck passing shit storm of terrible that family preservation programs are. This practice is the plan of taking child neglect cases and not removing children, but assigning a social worker to write a safe plan, such as parent can have no contact and child must live with grand parent that lives in the same house as the parent. Then when that fails 90 day later(80%), we do it again and wait 90 days, and then we wait 90 days, and then maybe we remove the children from the then child cruelty or child endangerment case. Then the charges, which have no impact on the permanency case for the child are usually dropped. We then reunify the children after 12-18 months, and then start the 270 day safe plan again after 6 months or so, and then place the children in care, and then reunify after 12-18 months and then start all over. So all of the people that are telling the kids that they are there to help just keep placing children back with the parent that has demonstrated over 2.5 years at first reunification, their in ability to provide for the child. This legal/policy structure allows for children to exist in a grossly traumatic cycle of permeant psychological and physical damage. This is a legal problem and not a foster care problem. So much of the entire legal system is structured around 'reunify at all cost' that children simply pay all the risk cost of the second chances that bio parents are given. For this type of "justice" that is propagated by people that have no experience or non-"academic" knowledge of long term trauma in children. Children should at least have the right to speedy permanency, and should not be forced to dole out second chances to bio parents that they can never get back. You only get one chance to by 5 or 4 or 3 or 2. There is also a lot to be said for separating child welfare laws from family laws. I mention that because in many states we end up with divorce law that bleeds into welfare cases, specifically regarding visitation of children with parents, even physically or sexually abusive ones out of fear that a TPR may be overturned.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 6y ago
So the big reality disconnect is that the courts are totally in love with the child "protection" agencies and hang on every word they say in the delusion that they are saving the child by putting them them into foster care, when in fact they are just putting fodder into the prison system.
throwaway-23050 6y ago
I've done ok as a foster child, so I thought I would share why. This is a throw-away account because I'd rather not be identified. First, my foster home cared for me. Somehow there is this idea out there that you shouldn't form an attachment to your foster kids, but I think that advice is plain wrong. I know because years later I attended foster-parenting orientation out of personal curiosity, and this is more or less what they told prospective foster parents. For me, that change made a massive difference. My foster home parent made sure my teacher, my school principals, my coaches...etc knew of my situation. They even went as far as letting me stay in my school district despite living outside of it. Second, because of this community-awareness, I had allies at every turn. Teachers spent extra time getting me caught up during tutoring hours. My school counselor sent me email reminders about college application due dates. My AP & SAT tests were paid for. My school lunch were covered...etc. Third, and perhaps most importantly, I wasn't a pay-check to my foster parent. I think that somewhat ties back to my first point, but you'd be surprised at how many folks do this for the money (at least in the state were I was based). How to fix the foster system: This is a really tough one, but I think more emphasis should be placed on putting foster kids inside existing families, if possible. Maybe more outreach is needed to find such folks, and maybe the economic incentive of it should be held back until a kid has been successfully placed for more than a. year inside a family. Furthermore, the whole notion that no attachment should exist is flawed. Lastly, getting the community involved. It really does takes a village to raise a foster kid.
- frankydp 6y ago
  The do not get attached climate is really a recent manifestation of welfare policy coming out of California and Oregon in the last 20 years or so. It is rooted in the family preservation and reunification first policies, vice the children permanency first policies. These policies are sold as evidence based and are generally just what was measured based, and the research is usually conducted by the largest social services companies in the given states.
  - heimatau 6y ago
    I'm not a historian but you're clearly turning this into a political issue (by talking about CA/OR as the origin). Instead, let's focus on the policies. I was in Florida (mostly GOP ran) and they had similar training. These policies (to not be attached) sounds very wrong, especially when numerous studies support attachment parenting as the best way to nurture child development. Let's focus on the a mutually agreed problem (shit training) and work towards a better solution through better policies that either experiment with attachment or outright support it.
rossmohax 6y ago
There is a lot of injustice in social care. Forced adoption is a thing some countries like UK, where children taken from families even if parents committed no crime or no actual harm done to child. Ruling is often based on a social carer opinion and prediction of a possible harm.
arminiusreturns 6y ago
I just want to point out that much of the things that supposedly justify sending kids to foster care, actually happen just as much (if not more) in said care of the state. There are major issues with lack of oversight of foster parents. I just didn't see this mentioned thus far and thought it relevant.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
Most states spend a fraction of their budget dollars on family preservation efforts, even though more kids are removed for neglect than abuse. The best solution to this kind of problem is making a more family-friendly society so we end up with fewer kids in foster care. I don't know how we get there from here. The past decade has really taken its toll on my faith in humanity and the past year has put the world at large through the wringer and trying to focus on doing something positive seems overwhelmingly hard and entirely pointless. America doesn't actually value having a functional society. It values "heroics" and that fact means we don't want to actually take care of our citizens simply for existing. We only want to do something after it's so bad, they need a hero to fix something and then good luck with that. It's too far gone to ever really be functional again. We need housing solutions. We need healthcare. We need to stop enriching the billionaires and giving money to charity while not taking care of ordinary citizens and no one wants to do that. Some people want to provide UBI -- which I think will not take care of people -- or they want to claim that people who aren't making it are just lazy or something. Bezos gave about a billion dollars to his workers in 2020 as either Covid relief in, I think, June or as Christmas bonuses. It amounted to as little as $150 twice for part-time workers. Then he was lauded for giving $10 billion to charity. He could have given $10 billion to the people who helped make him obscenely wealthy, thereby providing a total of $3000 to his least paid workers and more for others and still given a billion dollars to charity. Why do we need so much charity? In part because we don't bother to take care of our people unless they are "charity cases" and then we still don't really take care of them. (Yes, I know, he gave money to climate change. Irrelevant to my point.) We actively turn our people into charity cases and then blame them when their lives don't work and punish them and no amount of virtue is enough to make your life work for far too many Americans.
musicale 6y ago
And prison costs more than college...
hi41 6y ago
The lyrics of the poignant song Runaway Train by Soul Asylum come to my mind.

539 points by amin 6y ago

The title is totally vacuous and makes no logical connection for why college is a standard. Replace "foster kids" and "prison" with whatever you wish, e.g. "chess grandmasters" and "ice cream shop".

wombatmobile 6y ago

Does it surprise anyone that more foster kids go to jail than attend college? What is the inevitable outcome of how our society is structured? Our values come from television, which exists to serve advertising. Advertising works by appealing to selfishness, hedonism, and self-doubt. Who is going provide the time, thought, care, attention and funding to give these unfortunate kids, alone in this world, the confidence, skills, endurance, and self-belief to navigate the education system and a society that’s based on connection for advancement? The government? We’re told that’s a “swamp” that can’t do anything as efficiently as private enterprise. Private enterprise? There’s no profit in running foster homes. The prison system? There’s profit in that!

nixass 6y ago

Need to fill the pockets of private prison owners + local government who allowed them

temporaryacc1 6y ago

Genetics are a stubborn force.

tyingq 6y ago

"The state, however, has since returned to high-level dysfunction, including a recent case in which foster kids were being transported in handcuffs and leg shackles — a practice that has now been prohibited" I wonder what the sequence of events was where nobody said anything about putting shackles on kids that aren't prisoners or being arrested.

tokai 6y ago
Guess anyone with a shred of empathy was long gone before shackling kids came up.
- tyingq 6y ago
  I'm surprised that nobody balked just for self-preservation reasons. I'd certainly be concerned about the legalities of shackling someone. Sounds like kidnapping to me.
sonotathrowaway 6y ago
Don’t underestimate how unruly, disobedient, and oftentimes violent these children are. In the best case, these children have been traumatized by their removal from a family, however dysfunctional. In the worst cases, they’ve suffered abuses that make people support the death penalty. While none of those scars is written on a person, they do manifest in sudden outbursts of screaming, hitting, stealing, and scores more destructive behaviors. For a neglected child, negative attention is preferable to not existing, and if acting out is the only way to make your existence register to the outside world, so be it. Many of those people who placed said children in shackles aren’t practiced in methods to manage traumatized children or understanding of their past, and identify them as ‘problematic’, not ‘traumatized’.
pjc50 6y ago
Has anyone checked the skin colour of those kids?
- macspoofing 6y ago
  Let me rephrase that, but without the inflammatory assumptions: Given that social workers are good people who do very hard (thankless and low-paid) work - has anyone checked what the reasons were for instituting this policy. We're all in agreement that the agency needs to explain why this policy was put in place (which has since been prohibited), because it isn't normal to shackle kids and potentially someone needs to be held accountable. But maybe we can do that without impugning social workers as bigots - don't you think?

williesleg 6y ago

Some go to Hillary and Joe to suck their blood so there's that.

heckerhut 6y ago

More generally, prisons all over the world serve much more often as a place to put people that society has failed than vice versa. It’s a sad truth that gets very little recognition since these people have no lobby. The American prison situation is certainly particularly awful due to privatization. But it doesn’t stop there. We’re doing terrible things in Europe as well.

remh 6y ago
Not to downplay the issue in Europe but there are 111 inmates per 100,000 people in the EU. In the US it's 698. That shows the amplitude and the spread of the carceral problem in the US.
- tyingq 6y ago
  The conditions once you're in are also starkly worse in the US. More people, for longer periods, in worse living conditions.
- slumdev 6y ago
  The "nonviolent drug user" inmate is as much a myth as Reagan's welfare queen. We have a crime problem, not a "carceral problem".
  - watwut 6y ago
    Afaik, Americans do not commit 6 times more crime then Europeans.
    - krspykrm 6y ago
      Did you bother actually looking up the data? Because intentional homicide in the US is indeed more than 6x greater than it is in places like Austria and Switzerland. There is no country in western Europe with anywhere near the violent crime rate as the US.
      - 6y ago

nelson_muntz69 6y ago

It seems like official US policy to make things “cruel and usual”, effectively skirting the prohibition on punishments that are cruel and unusual.

aminozuur 6y ago

"Of the inmates who took the survey, 1 in 4 said they were the product of foster care." I really wish people understood the long term effects of childhood trauma, and I hope parents can be considarate, prepared, loving and financially stable before having children.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwawayz8182z 6y ago
Life isn't really that nice and tidy. It would be nice if it were, but generally people are mostly good and sometimes unplanned things happen. Intact families need to be a societal goal. My parents were definitely not financially stable. I grew up in the equivalent of what the US would call "the projects" but a key difference was that it was a community. There was a rec center, a school, groceries, health care all within a couple of enclosed city blocks. Average income was poverty level. All of the services reduced burdens on the parents who often worked two jobs. My mom had two jobs, my dad had two jobs. If you use an iPhone, you are using my code. If you played a Wii game in the last decade, you're using my code. Many more examples. That's how far I came and most of my friends went as far if not farther. One of us manages a global tech organization now. Most kids I know who didn't do well or treaded water were the product of contentious divorces as this was the time when "rah rah women's liberation" was at its height and many men were kicked out of their family. I still remember my friend lamenting to me that the only time he can see is father is during school lunches. That friend did better than he would have because he basically lived at my house as a result of his family situation. Surprisingly, in this area, there were fewer such divorces than the general population. I have looked up the stats. Raising kids is not hard but somehow we went from village to complete independence. We need to go back to a village mindset. We are all in it together or we will all feel the pain one day.
- geofft 6y ago
  The historic reason many religions/societies looked down on divorce is that it left the woman worse off - the man would be able to work and fend for himself but the woman would have few options. The fact that in out modern world many women (in heterosexual relationships) are the ones who desire to leave, and can reasonably fend for themselves, is pretty novel, and we haven't figured out how to adjust the rest of our social structures to account for it. It is a good thing that women can leave relationships where they're being mistreated and be better off on their own, but it means we need to rethink designs elsewhere in society that were based on the assumption that they wouldn't. I agree with you about the village mindset, and it's kind of the most robust option. Even ignoring divorce, a parent can be emotionally incompetent at caring for children, and certainly can be called to work (or fight) elsewhere, can get sick and/or die, etc. We should be ensuring children have multiple backup options if their own parents are unavailable for whatever reason.

nr2x 6y ago

My basic understanding is the U.S. replaced mental health asylums and orphanages with homelessness and prisons. What do other countries do? Does it work?

dkdk8283 6y ago
Private prisons create a perverse incentive to lock people up. Follow the money.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/remember-we-re-not-just-making-money-we-re-building-prisons-new-yorker-cartoon_u-l-pgrpop9p3u2.jpg?p=0&dims=1 https://imgc.artprintimages.com/img/print/remember-we-re-not... new yorker cartoon - remember, we're not just making money, we're building prisons.
- bcrosby95 6y ago
  Follow the money but it's not just private corporations. In California the prison guard union is one of the stronger lobbies and have pushed to pass some pretty bad bills over the decades.
  - Clubber 6y ago
    High conviction numbers also allows an ambitious prosecutor to look good once they have aspirations for higher political office as well.
macspoofing 6y ago
>My basic understanding is the U.S. replaced mental health asylums and orphanages with homelessness and prisons. To be clear, that was not the motivation. There were lots of reasons why things changed and institutionalization fell out of favor (and not just in the US, but across the West). For example, right now, in most states, you couldn't forcibly institutionalize, say, a schizophrenic homeless individual legally, even if the request came from the individual's family. And if you try, municipal and state governments, bolstered by activists and rights organizations will fight you.

stevespang 6y ago

Thanks for posting this.

gadders 6y ago

I've been reading the Burke series of novels [1] written by Andrew Vachss [2]. As he says in the novels, we make our own monsters: http://www.vachss.com/av_dispatches/disp_9006_a.html http://www.vachss.com/av_dispatches/disp_9006_a.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_(series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burke_(series) [2] http://www.vachss.com/vachss/credentials.html http://www.vachss.com/vachss/credentials.html

batch12 6y ago

I was a foster kid for 11 years. My social worker and foster parents were likely the only reason I am still here. My social worker would visit his children weekly-- even on weekends and did whatever it took for us. Still, he was just one man. I still talk to him regularly. During one discussion, I asked him about the other kids that I remembered. There were only two of us left. I think people forget about the trauma foster kids deal with. First, the reason kids went into care. Second, the separation of the kid from their families. My experiences showed me that this trauma, combined with an institutional care system does not equip most kids to function in society.

aminozuur 6y ago
Thank you for sharing your experience. May I ask, how are you doing now? Did you find any ways to address or even overcome those past experiences?
- batch12 6y ago
  I am doing well for myself now. How I got here is pretty complicated. I can only attribute my ability to overcome these experiences to those who genuinely cared. These are the people who cared enough to help me succeed but also let me fail and deal with the consequences. In high school, I was a low C to D student. I slept in class. I refused to do homework. I thought the schools were only temporary, so therefore they did not matter. I only passed classes because I excelled at test taking and understood the material. I felt like it was all a game-- people, school, relationships. None of it mattered and all I had to do was find the right way to play. After foster care, I had a free ride (I was still in care), but failed out of college because I didn't see a point. I joined the military. This forced structure and discipline actually helped me. I understood this game and excelled. I used my experience in the military to get an entry level job in IT and continue to grow. There are residual effects that I will always deal with. I have huge gaps in memory from when I was a kid- I don't remember much before age 11. I compartmentalize things too easily. I can be impatient with people. I dislike and distrust bureaucracies. I don't have enough patience for incompetence. I could go on, but I'm sure that's not why you're here :)

treeman79 6y ago

Adopted a teenager out of foster care. None of the others she knew from foster care did well in life. All on drugs, homeless, many in prison, spent time there. Many are having kids that will soon be take away by the state, for good reasons. Our own has done better, but was years of insane drama. Knowing that bio family was out there hurt her immensely. She finally had to spend time with them. Literally Pulling her drunk biological dad out of a ditch, to realize that they were dragging her down. She does aight these days. Foster kids can be helped, but you really need multiple strong families or support groups dedicated to the task. For a couple of decades, at least.

Geminidog 6y ago
>Foster kids can be helped, but you really need multiple strong families or support groups dedicated to the task. For a couple of decades, at least. It's sad but I don't think that this is sustainable.
- bigfudge 6y ago
  It would be cheaper than prison. We do so little to support foster families that I don't know how we know that it's not sustainable... we just haven't tried. It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer. This is a question of priorities.
  - creato 6y ago
    > It's a cliche but if we spent 10% of of what we spend on Nukes or drug enforcement on this it would be a game changer. I think people that say things like this overestimate how much we spend on things like this and underestimate social spending. About 50% of US government spending is health and social services. So even cutting everything else to zero is only a doubling of health and social services. A doubling isn't nothing, but a game changer? And not all (or even most) of that other 50% will be spending you feel is frivolous, so it would be much less than doubling.

dfilppi 6y ago

The state doesn't make good parents. Shocking.

BGthaOG 6y ago

I highly recommend watching the video interview (5 min.) embedded in the article, titled "Taken into foster care, through the eyes of a child". It is not far from the beginning of the article. Here is the written caption: "Before she was an inmate, Michelle Voorhees was a kid in foster care. Painting a vivid picture, Voorhees asks you to imagine the harrowing, disconcerting experience of being removed from your own home." Search-in-page any part of the caption and it should be easy to spot.

Turbots 6y ago

US is sending more foster kids to prison than to college*

Sevii 6y ago

My Dad fosters what seems like an unending stream of kids. The parents have a drug problem and end up losing their kids. Once the parents get their shit together again they get the kids back. Form the kids perspective they are either dealing with temporary guardians or with a parent that provides next to no super vision. The state can’t parent children, but foster care is in a real way keeping children off the street.

rtx 6y ago

Child care and elderly care one of the harder problems to solve. I hope some smart people decide to tackle it. Lots of potential for abuse and neglect. At one point I used to plan about combining an old age home and orphanage together. It could help with some emotional needs.

klyrs 6y ago
These problems do appear inextricably linked. Individualism in american culture is, IMO, the root. In many other cultures, family is huge -- folks are connected to their parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins... grandparents help out with the kids until they can't, and the skills of parenting are naturally passed from generation to generation. Funny to see a comment on another that "no one" is prepared to raise a kid... that's because individualism is bad at retaining wisdom. The problem with your mixed old folks' home / orphanage is that individualistic old people don't wanna live there until they're too old to help out.

mindvirus 6y ago

As a relatively new parent, this is particularly heartbreaking. It just seems so hopeless - why can't we as a society solve this, whether through better resources for kids or for their parents? There was another story following two homeless kids - think of how much worse off they'll be with COVID and remote learning https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/19/nyregion/student-homelessness-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/19/nyregion/stud...

balls187 6y ago
I felt the same heartbreak. > why can't we as a society solve this We can. We (collectively as a society) have chosen not to. Foster kids don't vote, don't pay taxes, and their advocates aren't nearly as well funded as those for many other special interest groups.
- balls187 6y ago
  Also, fwiw--74 million Americans voted to reelect Donald Trump, despite his policy that forcibly separated children from their parents at the US Border...
bluGill 6y ago
Easy to say, but when you learn about the problem it is hard to suggest an answer that might help.
mbrodersen 6y ago
The sad truth is that some people are so broken by their upbringing that nothing can be done to “fix” them. And you don’t know ahead of time if somebody is an impossible case or not.

LatteLazy 6y ago

I did youth work with a family who fostered then adopted 4 half brothers from the same mother. She was a heroin addict. Every other year she'd have a baby, malnourished, underweight, in withdrawal, neglected taken away. 4 kids: 2 had adhd, 1 was developmentally delayed, 1 autistic, 1 had ADD, plus all were smaller and weaker than their comparative age peers. After taking the forth one, they were too over stretched to take anymore. Lovely kids. It was amazing watching them socialise gradually. So sad what happened to them really.

eplanit 6y ago
"I did youth work with a family who fostered then adopted 4 half brothers from the same mother. She was a heroin addict. Every other year she'd have a baby, malnourished, underweight, in withdrawal, neglected taken away." That's truly tragic. You've been a blessing to those children, and that's beautiful. Given the harshness of this reality, I understand why past generations looked to forced sterilization. There's really no winning with that, but after 4 kids (to date) with that fate, it's a legitimate moral debate (not an easy one, nor should it be) as to the relative good. I guess it's a sibling to the abortion debate.
- LatteLazy 6y ago
  I'm a brit, around the same time a US based charity set up here that paid drug using women to get (temporary but long term) Birth Control. I thought it was a good idea but it was (is) very controversial. They started after a similar experience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Prevention The kids I worked with were so lucky to get a nice loving family, a very strong community to support them, lots of opportunities for socialisation and education etc. God knows what happens if you're not that lucky. Edit: I have to be honest, I enjoyed the work. I wouldn't have done it otherwise. :) the kids had their moments but mostly they were really excited to do anything and getting male attention was a big draw for them (one they got over the fear of men they all arrived with).
  - eplanit 6y ago

fuhry 6y ago

Wife and I are hopefully less than 2 months away from being licensed. If we can do it in our tiny 2 bedroom house, you can too!

bluGill 6y ago
Good luck. My parents did it when I was little. They remember showing real love to kids and being hated for it.

pinipedman 6y ago

Is this really a surprise to anyone? The US is second only to the USSR in incarceration rate. The disenfranchised, e.g. foster children, will certainly suffer disproportionately under such a system. The lack of social safety nets, mental health services, etc. certainly play a role, but the larger issue is the authoritarian nature of the US regime.

brink 6y ago
While we do incarcerate too much, I don't think the solution is necessarily "incarcerate less" as much as it is "Nurture families more and create stable environments for children to grow up in so that they feel wanted."
- pinipedman 6y ago
  I don't think anyone would disagree that a better home environment is fundamental. But do you think that, in general, the longer sentences and higher rates of incarceration (especially for non-violent crime) in the US compared with other developed nations are beneficial? Publishing names and mugshots of arrestees prior to convictions, the existence of the sex offender registry, rampant human rights abuses in prisons, loss of voting rights for felons, and the explicit allowance of slavery as punishment do not make it seem like the US "justice system" even approximates the humanist notion of justice that other developed nations apparently aim for.

the-dude 6y ago

That is literal survivorship bias there. I know multiple stories of deeply unhappy/unstable foster children, no matter how much stability, love & care they were given ( I knew some of those foster parents ).

gogopuppygogo 6y ago
I knew two kids adopted as infants who were born addicted to drugs. The family that adopted them was wealthy. They poured enormous amounts of time and resources into raising those kids. One turned it all around and works for Google, the other ram away and hasn’t been heard from in 20 years. Same birth mother, born two years apart, she was an addict.
- kevincox 6y ago
  I think it is a fairly safe assumption that raising children has aspects of a chaotic system. Small changes to upbringing can cause large impact on the result. Of course not all "inputs" have this chaotic nature, and there are lots of inputs that aren't under direct control of the parents. There are just so many variables that it is hard to tease out patterns.
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    Fair, but as far as controlled experiments are possible in this kind of thing, it doesn't get much better than two kids with a shared birth parent and the same adoptive parents/environment. Anyway, you're not wrong about the chaotic environment that is child rearing— the other side of this coin is sets of identical twins with differing sexualities, eg: https://kinseyinstitute.org/news-events/news/2019-07-26-twins-sexual-orientation.php https://kinseyinstitute.org/news-events/news/2019-07-26-twin...
    - kevincox 6y ago
      No, it doesn't get much better than that scenario. But something as simple as which other kids are sat next to them in school can completely change their childhood. Observations like these are the best we have, and should not be ignored, but there are just so many variables that can never bet (ethically) controlled.

jriley 6y ago

I know volunteers for CASA. It is both uplifting and heartbreaking work. https://nationalcasagal.org/ https://nationalcasagal.org/

elmo2you 6y ago

“A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.” ~ Mahatma Ghandi I think that says it all. Despite all the propaganda/cultural brainwashing, convincing many Americans that their country/culture is somehow better than others.

seebetter 6y ago

I worked on this issue in 2008. My best friend had directed a film called Where the Day Takes You about homeless kids in Hollywood. A Harvard lawyer I knew added me to her non profit and asked me to produce a documentary about homeless teenagers in Colorado. I wanted to call it STATE OF NEGLECT and push for an efficient form of social programs ran by the state. My infinitely educated friend, she was a project attorney, had no concept of filmmaking or project management. She tried to put a bad director with no technical production in charge with me. Harvard lawyer was scared Comcast wouldn’t give us $25 million so she asked me to sanitize the criticism towards state foster programs. Months later, her foundation closed. In Where the Day Takes You, it was Will Smith’s movie. Tom Cruise’s partner Paula was my best friend’s agent at the time. This and the CIA is how I know about the UFO scientology religion by Kit and Hal. Of course, Hacker News shadowbanned me for this comment on my other account. Even though I work with the Office of Director of National Intelligence and JASON Group. My friend is currently the Chair of the Defense Policy Group. Today President Trump is going to free Ross and Drew. Hackers aren’t marketers who made SaSS and rattle on about series A. There are no hackers here. There are no painters here. Come to EFNet where real hackers are, not corporate grifters like Y Combinator. I know everyone important in Atherton and SV and the IC. We don’t need your corporations startup bros and CIA In-Q-Tel fronts. Overthrow everything government, religion and corporations. Just like the Bavarian Illuminati planned for their sinister conspiracy to enact the Futuristic Past.

paulmendoza 6y ago

My wife and I adopted two older boys (10 and 12). Most of the families trying to adopt are looking for babies but we were looking for older kids. It still took almost 2 years to get our first kid placed with us because I think the social workers weren’t sure if my wife and I really knew what we were getting into. But once we got the first kid I think they realized we were good. Then a year later they called us out of the blue about a second kid.

Broken_Hippo 6y ago
I always find this a bit ridiculous - do folks that want babies really know what they are getting into? Heck, do folks that have babies? Probably not. The difference is that we can do things to prepare foster parents or adoptive parents for it - more so than natural birth.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Babies are easier because they don't start off bad. Teens have had years of abuse behind them. Read the reports of others here and you will see it is rare and hard to fix the kids after that trauma.
  - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
    Sure, babies don't start out with years of trauma. So what? People are willing to take classes and things and learn, are they not? It just isn't the same as babies. And to be fair, you aren't "fixing" a baby: You are doing the same thing - providing a loving home, trying to give another person the things they need. You just have a head start on some of the problems you'll be facing with a teenager - the sort of thing that blindsides parents of babies if it happens. I'm not sure why it is an issue that "things are hard".
    - watwut 6y ago
      > Sure, babies don't start out with years of trauma. So what? I think that you should look up what trauma and dysfunctional early setup does with kids. Because it can be very hard on caregiver and test all their abilities including self control. The adoption agencies themselves are quite open about these issues - they do not want people to adopt and then be unable to handle things. Which are all euphemisms mind you. Basically, there are issues with violence, inability to create relationship or even inability that relationship can be "true". Which causes whole other bunch of behavioral problems. Like, the eagerness to "test" caregiver by really going out of way to create trouble. And if caregiver fails, result is basically abuse. And the kid can't help itself, but adults should. And adults when they see they don't have time and resources and patience to deal with above, do better to adopt baby. > People are willing to take classes and things and learn, are they not? It just isn't the same as babies. What did that even means?

throwawaypali 6y ago

Can we just go ahead and admit that the foster program is not superior to the orphanages that it replaced?

yarcob 6y ago
I think that in general foster families are better than group homes. The problem is that most children shouldn't be taken away in the first place.
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >The problem is that most children shouldn't be taken away in the first place. Sure. To be clear though, the state doesn't really take children away for no reason. I'm sure there are isolated incidences, but in general, the kids who end up in the foster care, did not land there because they came from loving stable environments.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Most kids are not taken away from their homes. The exceptions horrible cases.
- chopin24 6y ago
  How do you run A/B to prove this hypothesis?
- frankydp 6y ago
  Spoken by someone that is hopefully truly ignorant of child welfare.
  - yarcob 6y ago
    Everything that I've learned about foster care tells me that removing children from their surroundings is a traumatic event, and should be only a last resort. In many cases, there are a lot of things that can be done instead of just taking kids away. If there's any research that shows I'm wrong, and that taking troubled kids away from their families is actually the best thing for their development, I'm eager to hear about it.

dcolkitt 6y ago

This is a good time to remind people that there's a huge backlog of stable, middle-class Americans desperate to adopt. This persists primarily because of huge regulatory and legal burdens placed on the adoption process. The most despicable of which is a constellation of bigoted state-by-state policies on "racial matching". The end result is that black foster kids on average spend twice as long in the system as their white counterparts.[1] [1] https://ij.org/press-release/institute-for-justice-challenges-barriers-to-interracial-adoption/ https://ij.org/press-release/institute-for-justice-challenge...

deleted 6y ago
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rstupek 6y ago
Isn't having white couples adopt black foster kids something the black community has pushed back on?
- haram_masala 6y ago
  It's something that Ibram Kendi has pushed back on: https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/26/anticapitalist-sponsored-by-twitter-ceo-accuses-amy-coney-barrett-of-colonialism-for-adopting-from-haiti/ https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/26/anticapitalist-sponsore.... But he does not represent the Black community, despite the amount of media he gets.
frankydp 6y ago
Georgia was sued a decade ago and lost for letting children languish in care, because of racial matching "rules" in certain counties. This resulted in a hugely disproportionate number of specifically african american children never finding adoptive homes due to a lack of racial matched adoptive resources. There are now reporting requirements for this specific issue in the egregious counties Fulton and Dekalb.
- soccerz 6y ago
  We had a sibling pair for a year and were on the verge of adopting them. DFCS was more than a year late than was legally required to file TPR and at the last minute moved them to yet another home, this time based on skin color. These kids are pawns of a harmful ideology.

DanielBMarkham 6y ago

My SO works with foster kids. Her job is to find foster families, work with the kids, and try (if possible) to heal the family and put them back together. She loves and is good at her job. Most folks have no concept of the types of trauma many of these children go through. Sadly, by the time the state has to step in, it's no easy journey forward. People watch movies and TV dramas about these kinds of things. It does not prepare anybody involved for the reality of the problems. I've heard second-hand stories I wish I could forget.

hvasilev 6y ago

What does this have to do with technology?

sound1 6y ago
Kids who can potentially become Steve Jobs are unfairly ending up in jail?
- spazx 6y ago
  A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

macspoofing 6y ago

>Texas lawmakers recognized the existence of a possible foster-care-to-prison pipeline several years ago. The 'foster-care-to-prison pipeline' metaphor is such a misnomer and completely unfair. Nobody is moving these kids into the prison system. Traditional parenting can provide personalized rearing and still have that child end-up in prison. We also know that a single-parent household, even with a dedicated loving parent, will have challenges rearing children. How is the state supposed to do it? Worse, the kids who end up in foster-care, more often than not, will already have significant trauma and behaviour or mental issues. So to summarize, you have the State dealing with two major issues that individually create an immense challenge, but together make it even harder: 1) The state can never scale resources to match typical parental rearing. 2) The state has to deal with a population of kids who are already suffering from behavioral or mental issues, drugs, or trauma. An affluent two-parent household with dedicated support workers would have trouble raising kids like that. How is the State supposed to do this? I'm not sure what the right approach is here but it's clear as day that there is no easy answer here.

Helloworldboy 6y ago
No idea why you’re being downvoted.
frankydp 6y ago
Intervene early and permanently. Trading second and third chances for bio parents at the cost of children's futures is too high a cost in my opinion.
- ativzzz 6y ago
  The early and permanent intervention would be to somehow convince (or forbid?) parents who are likely to raise such a child from having a child, but this opens up a giant can of ethical worms e.g. eugenics. Better education around sex and children, as well as easy access to birth control would go a long way.
  - frankydp 6y ago

LockAndLol 6y ago

Instead we see how people go onto Facebook to get inseminated by strangers. People would literally rather be injected with somebody else's semen, go through 9 months of crazy hormones and multiple hours of the worst pain in their lives, than take care of an existing child. If people did something to actually help children instead of voting for pro-surveillance laws or "against those people I don't like", maybe kids would get some help. I think that says a lot about our society.

macspoofing 6y ago
>I think that says a lot about our society. No it doesn't. People have children because having a genetic connection is important to them. That's not a 'society-thing'. That's just humanity. There are exception to this, and that's why foster parents should be applauded because fostering and adopting is great moral act. But I wouldn't impugn the rest of society because most people don't adopt, but instead choose to have biological children.

everdrive 6y ago

Do we know if these kids would have been better off in their own homes? I don't have any statistics here, but one wonders if we can measure the outcomes here. ie, is abusive stability better than what the foster system produces?

jfrankamp 6y ago
Recent research has swung the state child welfare policy pendulum back toward this thesis in my state (Oregon) and a few others I'm aware of., e.g. if the situation isn't totally irredeemable, bio fam is the best in terms of average outcome.

selimthegrim 6y ago

I have a friend who has tried to foster parent during COVID but the shifting goalposts, school openings and closings demanding childcare availability instantly (both parents work) and lack of timely reimbursements from the state combine to make it a nearly impossible endeavor. Last I heard the child had made some unfortunate choices after going back to the birth family and might be headed to institutionalization

hamolton 6y ago

It's obscene how we have this foster system that pays these parents for kid's hit-or-miss experiences rotating between families, when adoption, a generally better solution, costs over $10k in fees after proving via background checks that you're an angel. The system is so broken.

ketzo 6y ago
Not to be obtuse, but some would say you're reversing cause and effect -- that the $10k and exhaustive background checks are the reasons that adoption has better success rates. I couldn't be less of an expert, but it's hard for me to imagine that the solution is as simple as "adoption is always better." It does absolutely seem like there are many wonderful homes out there who aren't able to adopt because they aren't quite well-off enough, or the couple is gay, or some other factor that a reasonable person could look at and say "this shouldn't disqualify you from adopting."
- hamolton 6y ago
  Agreed that success rates are irrelevant to this conversation and it's certainly not true that adoption is always better. I think that most people would agree that the relative stability of having permanent parents would be, on average, better than being in the awkward foster system for ages. The foster system is meant to be temporary until a child can be placed in a permanent home [1] but 29% of children placed in the foster care system are stuck for at least 3 years [2]. [1] https://pathwayfs.org/foster-care-vs-adoption-differences-and-similarities https://pathwayfs.org/foster-care-vs-adoption-differences-an... [2] https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a35860/adoption-statistics/#:~:text=There%20are%20107%2C918%20foster%20children,three%20years%20in%20foster%20care https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/a35860/adopt....
  - frankydp 6y ago
    Keep in mind that adopting directly from your state DFCS is generally free or reimbursed.

throwaway9870 6y ago

I had an employee adopt a foster child around 10-11yrs old. Quite an eye opener for me. Employee missed a huge amount of time (which I allowed with no questions) because the child just could not function. When they put the child in school, the police were called a couple times a week (I am not exaggerating). Finally, the child accused one of new parents of child abuse because they were not allowed to do something. Child services took the child back in custody but no charges were pressed because everyone involved knew what was going on and what happened. My employee that adopted this child was heart broken and talked to them everyday even a year later. Truly a terrible situation. Bottom line: young children can be broken severely at a very young age and it is extremely hard to fix then going forward.

frankydp 6y ago

50ish percent of all reunified children in the state of Georgia are back in care in less than a year. There is no data available for total recidivism, but I would more than guess that the vast majority of the negative outcome foster stats come primarily from multi-cycle children. Meaning they go in to care, get reunified, then go back in care, and wash and repeat. Tada we are at 16 years and the trauma fruit of "family preservation" policy is ripe for the picking. "Family preservation" is the pervert uncle of a mantra that is the anchor that has dragged foster care outcomes down for decades. Supported by the "evidence based policy" con that has been propagated by services companies. I have not had a child in my home that was not the victim of the family preservation cult. In case you don't know, let me explain the toxic buck passing shit storm of terrible that family preservation programs are. This practice is the plan of taking child neglect cases and not removing children, but assigning a social worker to write a safe plan, such as parent can have no contact and child must live with grand parent that lives in the same house as the parent. Then when that fails 90 day later(80%), we do it again and wait 90 days, and then we wait 90 days, and then maybe we remove the children from the then child cruelty or child endangerment case. Then the charges, which have no impact on the permanency case for the child are usually dropped. We then reunify the children after 12-18 months, and then start the 270 day safe plan again after 6 months or so, and then place the children in care, and then reunify after 12-18 months and then start all over. So all of the people that are telling the kids that they are there to help just keep placing children back with the parent that has demonstrated over 2.5 years at first reunification, their in ability to provide for the child. This legal/policy structure allows for children to exist in a grossly traumatic cycle of permeant psychological and physical damage. This is a legal problem and not a foster care problem. So much of the entire legal system is structured around 'reunify at all cost' that children simply pay all the risk cost of the second chances that bio parents are given. For this type of "justice" that is propagated by people that have no experience or non-"academic" knowledge of long term trauma in children. Children should at least have the right to speedy permanency, and should not be forced to dole out second chances to bio parents that they can never get back. You only get one chance to by 5 or 4 or 3 or 2. There is also a lot to be said for separating child welfare laws from family laws. I mention that because in many states we end up with divorce law that bleeds into welfare cases, specifically regarding visitation of children with parents, even physically or sexually abusive ones out of fear that a TPR may be overturned.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 6y ago

So the big reality disconnect is that the courts are totally in love with the child "protection" agencies and hang on every word they say in the delusion that they are saving the child by putting them them into foster care, when in fact they are just putting fodder into the prison system.

throwaway-23050 6y ago

I've done ok as a foster child, so I thought I would share why. This is a throw-away account because I'd rather not be identified. First, my foster home cared for me. Somehow there is this idea out there that you shouldn't form an attachment to your foster kids, but I think that advice is plain wrong. I know because years later I attended foster-parenting orientation out of personal curiosity, and this is more or less what they told prospective foster parents. For me, that change made a massive difference. My foster home parent made sure my teacher, my school principals, my coaches...etc knew of my situation. They even went as far as letting me stay in my school district despite living outside of it. Second, because of this community-awareness, I had allies at every turn. Teachers spent extra time getting me caught up during tutoring hours. My school counselor sent me email reminders about college application due dates. My AP & SAT tests were paid for. My school lunch were covered...etc. Third, and perhaps most importantly, I wasn't a pay-check to my foster parent. I think that somewhat ties back to my first point, but you'd be surprised at how many folks do this for the money (at least in the state were I was based). How to fix the foster system: This is a really tough one, but I think more emphasis should be placed on putting foster kids inside existing families, if possible. Maybe more outreach is needed to find such folks, and maybe the economic incentive of it should be held back until a kid has been successfully placed for more than a. year inside a family. Furthermore, the whole notion that no attachment should exist is flawed. Lastly, getting the community involved. It really does takes a village to raise a foster kid.

frankydp 6y ago
The do not get attached climate is really a recent manifestation of welfare policy coming out of California and Oregon in the last 20 years or so. It is rooted in the family preservation and reunification first policies, vice the children permanency first policies. These policies are sold as evidence based and are generally just what was measured based, and the research is usually conducted by the largest social services companies in the given states.
- heimatau 6y ago
  I'm not a historian but you're clearly turning this into a political issue (by talking about CA/OR as the origin). Instead, let's focus on the policies. I was in Florida (mostly GOP ran) and they had similar training. These policies (to not be attached) sounds very wrong, especially when numerous studies support attachment parenting as the best way to nurture child development. Let's focus on the a mutually agreed problem (shit training) and work towards a better solution through better policies that either experiment with attachment or outright support it.

rossmohax 6y ago

There is a lot of injustice in social care. Forced adoption is a thing some countries like UK, where children taken from families even if parents committed no crime or no actual harm done to child. Ruling is often based on a social carer opinion and prediction of a possible harm.

arminiusreturns 6y ago

I just want to point out that much of the things that supposedly justify sending kids to foster care, actually happen just as much (if not more) in said care of the state. There are major issues with lack of oversight of foster parents. I just didn't see this mentioned thus far and thought it relevant.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

Most states spend a fraction of their budget dollars on family preservation efforts, even though more kids are removed for neglect than abuse. The best solution to this kind of problem is making a more family-friendly society so we end up with fewer kids in foster care. I don't know how we get there from here. The past decade has really taken its toll on my faith in humanity and the past year has put the world at large through the wringer and trying to focus on doing something positive seems overwhelmingly hard and entirely pointless. America doesn't actually value having a functional society. It values "heroics" and that fact means we don't want to actually take care of our citizens simply for existing. We only want to do something after it's so bad, they need a hero to fix something and then good luck with that. It's too far gone to ever really be functional again. We need housing solutions. We need healthcare. We need to stop enriching the billionaires and giving money to charity while not taking care of ordinary citizens and no one wants to do that. Some people want to provide UBI -- which I think will not take care of people -- or they want to claim that people who aren't making it are just lazy or something. Bezos gave about a billion dollars to his workers in 2020 as either Covid relief in, I think, June or as Christmas bonuses. It amounted to as little as $150 twice for part-time workers. Then he was lauded for giving $10 billion to charity. He could have given $10 billion to the people who helped make him obscenely wealthy, thereby providing a total of $3000 to his least paid workers and more for others and still given a billion dollars to charity. Why do we need so much charity? In part because we don't bother to take care of our people unless they are "charity cases" and then we still don't really take care of them. (Yes, I know, he gave money to climate change. Irrelevant to my point.) We actively turn our people into charity cases and then blame them when their lives don't work and punish them and no amount of virtue is enough to make your life work for far too many Americans.

musicale 6y ago

And prison costs more than college...

hi41 6y ago

The lyrics of the poignant song Runaway Train by Soul Asylum come to my mind.