To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (21 page)

Ten years after a surgeon general's report that showed kids in therapeutic foster care are less likely to run away or become incarcerated than those in residential treatment centers,
the state of New York began to scrutinize its residential treatment facilities for both their effectiveness and their safety. The first decade of the new millennium had been a troubled one for OCFS, which contracts with both residential treatment facilities like Graham Windham and juvenile detention facilities, which are exclusively for young criminal offenders. A teenager died at the hands of two adult aides at the Tryon School for Boys,
leading to a Department of Justice investigation of Tryon and three other facilities. The investigators discovered extensive abuse; for instance, the forty residents at an all-girls facility were restrained an average of fifty-eight times per month, resulting in 123 injuries like concussions, knocked-out teeth, fractures, and shoulder separations and displacements.

The governor convened a Task Force on Transforming Juvenile Justice to probe more deeply, and to propose improvements. Composed of local and national nonprofit directors, commissioners, judges, and professors, the task force made a clear recommendation: Stop sending so many kids to institutions. They called institutionalization a “choice of absolute last resort.”

But the group homes, which are the next rung down in terms of restriction and are run by the city, have come under fire too. In 2003, investigators from three major advocacy and legal organizations launched a study of New York City's group homes and found that kids needed, but were not receiving, “family-like settings.” Instead they were living with poorly trained staff, in subpar facilities. Mental health services were lacking, as were the systems to help kids stay connected with their biological families. The report's authors were blunt. They recommended that ACS stop sending so many children into group homes and instead find them families. If group homes were to remain open, they said, they would have to turn them on their heads, demanding that “the current group residence model with its focus on behavior control must be replaced with a service-based, family-like model.”

By 2005, ACS had closed more than fifty group homes with close to six hundred beds.
And in 2010, ACS announced a further reduction in group home beds—by about 25 percent—by April of 2011.

I thought that both of these trends—closing the RTCs and the group homes—were undoubtedly good signs. But it would have to mean more than shuttering buildings. ACS would also have to find enough new good foster parents. And they'd have to train the parents to weather the children's inevitable storms. It would mean viewing the kids as traumatized, rather than oppositionally defiant; seeing coping strategies rather than delinquency. And it would mean changing the entire culture of child welfare, so kids no longer tumbled down the ladder of more and more punitive placements. As Jonathan said, and all system kids know: “When you're a foster kid, an RTC or a group home is the last stop for you before jail.”

I had hoped, when the first group homes began to close, that the link between child welfare and criminality, both perceived and actual, would begin to fade. But then the mayor made a big announcement in 2010, which collapsed this hope. In New York City, juvenile justice would be merged with foster care, under ACS.

City officials said the reason behind the move was to provide better services: so many of the kids were dual-involved. They were juvenile offenders who were also foster children, and if their needs were met by one big umbrella agency, they could have one case manager, one lawyer, one judge, and one goal: to clear up the troublemaking and get integrated back into a family and community. The big idea was to reduce recidivism and close more juvenile jails, reserving the locked facilities for only the most serious or violent offenders.

At the state level, a merger like this had already happened twelve years prior, with the creation of New York State's Office of Children and Family Services. Progressives generally applauded the move because it meant the judges who sentenced adolescents had more options. Rather than facing a short list of locked facilities or detention centers, these judges could now rely on the services of foster care too; they could send a kid back home with extra monitoring or counseling; they could send him to a foster or boarding home; they could bring in social workers and shift the general approach from one of punishment to one of support.
And fiscal conservatives liked the fusion as well, since one agency was cheaper to run than two.

When the mayor made his announcement, there was almost no negative response from the press. The numbers were clear: abused or neglected children were more likely to be arrested,
so providing them one large pool of services made some kind of intuitive sense. But I felt the low hum of dread beneath all the logic and evidence-based practice; there was nothing visionary in this move. It was entirely reactive, predicated on the belief that many foster kids would, by necessity or design, become criminals.

 

I met with the new ACS commissioner a few years after the merger had been announced, and he had inherited this combined agency—as well as a radical, and exciting, new plan. All of the juvenile delinquents from the city who had been housed in RTCs upstate (save for the more serious criminal offenders) would be handed back to ACS. Whether or not they were foster kids when they committed their crimes, they would become foster kids now. When we spoke, Commissioner Richter was just about to move the first wave of 250 kids into brand-new urban facilities.

“They'll be residences with six to twelve kids each. The largest will be twenty-four,” Commissioner Richter said. “All of the residences are required to have a strong program model, like the Missouri Model.” The Missouri Model is an approach to juvenile justice that favors a high staff-to-child ratio, therapeutic group treatment, individualized attention, and supportive peer relationships rather than harsh and punitive coercive techniques. The main thing, the commissioner said, was that the kids would be closer to their families, who could be newly involved in their lives. And they could take regular classes in accredited schools, earning crucial credits toward a high school diploma.

But the foster kids at places like Graham Windham wouldn't be coming home, wouldn't be getting new programming or higher-level education. The “last stop” foster kids would still be going into the RTCs that contracted with the state and housed their own mix of kids with records and substance problems and mental health needs.

So in these early stages, it looked as if the delinquent kids would get more perks from the agency merger than the foster kids. I know it's not a competition between the groups, but I worry about the philosophical implications of foster care sharing its administrative home with juvenile justice. Without the managerial and cultural divisions between the two, will a new foster kid envision jail, even more, as the next logical link in the chain? So many feel already imprisoned by their status as wards of the state and shackled by the stigma of being wild, unlovable foster kids; an expanded ACS mission expressly contrived for delinquents may only deepen this notion—for the kids, the workers, and the foster parents too.

8

W
HEN I MET KECIA PITTMAN
, she was serving a twelve-year prison sentence for burglary. She had a BA in sociology, which she earned while she was locked up, and her thesis was on the connection between child welfare and criminal justice. Her teachers brought her books about discrimination in foster care, books like
The Lost Children of Wilder
, and
Shattered Bonds
, and
Nobody's Children
—the same ones I'd read over the years—but the links Kecia made to the justice system were her own.

When we talked at Bayview, the medium-security prison where I teach writing, Kecia had just turned forty. She was long and lean, with clearly defined muscles roping around her arms and shoulders, evidence of her daily workouts in the prison gym. She kept her dreadlocks tied in a loose knot behind her head. Kecia explained that the first of her theories was the most basic and obvious: group homes led to jail because of the connections that you made in care. The kids you met could lure you into trouble, and the adults were strangers you couldn't trust. One thing led to another.

“It's much easier to deviate in a group home,” Kecia said, blandly. “You're not held to anybody's standard. I mean, there's not enough love in a group home to keep a kid loyal to any particular person.” Even with adolescent rebellion, depression, experimentation, and all the rest, a teenager in a family can be bound enough to another's affirmative view of herself to pull through the tough years. Sometimes friends provide the positive mirror. But in a group home, that all goes awry. A teenager makes herself anew, in anyone's image.

“There's a lot of movement, they pull you out of school all the time, and you never feel stable. It's easy to jump into anything because group homes promote that kind of lifestyle,” Kecia said. “You're always free to do mischief. You don't owe anyone anything anymore—that's really the connection to the criminal justice system.”

Kecia and I were alone in Bayview's conference room, though the door was open and a guard was stationed right outside, listening to gospel music on a hand-held radio. Like most of Bayview, the room was depressing: scuffed beige walls and floors tiled in a sickly green linoleum, sealed and barred windows, an old wooden table, and then, randomly, some stuffed floral chairs in the corners. We sat as far from the guard as we could as Kecia described the way her mother dropped her off at the child welfare offices when Kecia had just turned fourteen. By Kecia's telling, she was going through ordinary teenage rebellion, but her mom couldn't handle the challenge and filed a petition in family court to have Kecia declared a Person in Need of Supervision, or a PINS kid. Her mother was free of all responsibility; the city would take over from there.

Kecia sat back and started counting off the group homes she'd lived in: Edwin Gould, Hegeman Diagnostic Center, Graham Windham, “a house on Park Avenue and 21st,” Saint Barnabas, Ashford, Mount Hope, Euphrasian, and then, for a stint, Bellevue's psychiatric unit. She said there were others, but she couldn't remember all the names. At first, Kecia said, she cried and cried for her mother. Then she got angry at what she felt was abandonment; she refused to even look at her mom when she came for visits. “I felt like she didn't love me enough to hold on to me, and then I felt like nobody could love me enough. Now I got twelve to life, and it all started from the group homes.”

 

There's one commonly cited statistic—that 80 percent of all inmates have spent time in foster care—but when you look more closely at the data, you see that it's limited, and that little analysis has been conducted on the causal relationship between the two institutions. The 80 percent figure actually comes from a study on a single state (Illinois),
though reputable sources
have extrapolated the figure to represent the entire country. A California State Assemblymember, pushing through new legislation, claimed that 70 percent of the state's adult inmates came from child welfare,
and Connecticut officials determined that 75 percent of the youth in the state's criminal justice system were former foster kids.
Nobody has really conducted a full national count, so some people guess more conservatively; ABC News, for instance, ran a series on foster care and put the number at a careful 25 percent.

Even more significantly, nobody is looking at what
type
of foster care these inmates are coming from. Kecia pegs the blame squarely on the group homes and the RTCs, but what about the kids who have more stable placements, or live with families, or keep connections with their parents? Does the trouble lie with foster care as an institution, or with certain things that happen in foster care and not others—or is foster care just the fall guy for a child's earlier traumas?

Doreen Soto's daughter, Shameka—the little girl who was removed when Doreen left her alone in the apartment to buy drugs—did not live in a group home. Shameka was immediately placed with a loving family in Brooklyn who eventually adopted her. She lived with them until she was nineteen. And then she went to jail.

I met with Doreen many times, both when she was an inmate at Bayview and after she was released. At first she lived in a halfway house in Harlem, and then another one in Queens; eventually she got her own single room with a shared kitchen in Brooklyn, which meant she could qualify for the apartment in the Bronx. Each time I saw her, Doreen looked happier and healthier. She had always marshaled a hearty laugh, but she emanated a deeper kind of contentment and equilibrium once she was free, had found a job and a church, and could attend twelve-step meetings every day on her own. She was losing weight to take pressure off her knee, and she was growing out her hair and getting manicures. She wore big pink polo shirts and khakis for her full-time job at a telephone answering service, and her ever-present pinkie ring was soon accompanied by a gold chain at her neck and sparkly studs in her ears, all bought on sale at Macy's. Still, Doreen saved most of her extra spending money for presents for Shameka's daughter, whom she was hoping to rescue from foster care someday.

Talking about Shameka was a visible struggle for Doreen, but she did it a lot. She volleyed between worry and resentment; whenever Shameka called her mother now, it was to demand money. Still, Doreen didn't blame foster care for Shameka's sour attitude or her run-ins with the law—she blamed herself, and the early separation.

“When she got taken, that was the best family she could have went to, but she was still placed in a home she didn't know,” Doreen said one day when we met up in a diner for matzoh ball soup. Shameka's family, the Taylors,
lived in the projects in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, near the Navy Yard. They were religious and community-minded: Mr. Taylor served as the sergeant-at-arms for the building's tenants' association, and Mrs. Taylor turned on lights and appliances for her Orthodox neighbors every Sabbath. They easily folded Shameka into their large family, composed of eight biological and four adoptive children.