CPS

British Social Workers Tear Apart Happy Families, Seize Children from Loving Parents

by Hans Bader on July 18, 2011

in International, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty

In Britain, social workers and child-protective services are tearing apart happy families, and seizing children from loving parents “for no good reason,” notes Christopher Booker in Sunday’s London Daily Telegraph. For example, one case

concerns a responsible mother who holds down an expert job in a law firm. A year ago, she was in the kitchen preparing packed lunches for her two children when her 11-year old daughter kept on interrupting. The mother tapped her daughter on the arm with a roll of clingfilm and told her to go upstairs. The following day the girl casually mentioned to a teacher that her mother had “hit” her. This was reported to social workers who took her into care, on the grounds that her mother had hit her with an “implement”. They did so under a voluntary “Section 20” agreement, which the mother was prevailed upon to sign – like many other parents before her – in the belief that such a silly misunderstanding would quickly be sorted out and her child would soon return home. However, the council then paid £14,000 to have the mother “psychiatrically assessed” by an “expert”, who produced a 235-page report which, on astonishingly flimsy and muddled grounds, found she had an undetermined “personality disorder”. On this basis, three days before Christmas, at 11pm, the girl’s nine-year-old brother was also taken into care, provoking such a severe panic attack that an ambulance had to called for him.

In another case,

A young mother of three children, married to the father of her youngest, a baby less than a year old, took part in a charity walk with her oldest daughter, aged six. She tripped over, pulling her daughter to the ground, and although the child sustained no more than a graze, reported the incident to the first-aid tent. The child continued going happily to school for several days, but when the mother tried to explain the small mark on her arm to a health visitor (who did not ask the child to comment), social workers arrived, escorted by three policemen, to take all three children into care.  The council commissioned a psychiatric assessment, which found that she was a competent mother. A second report found the same. The social workers then paid for a third report, which described the mother as suffering from a “borderline personality disorder”. Solely on these grounds, a court has now ruled that the three children must be put out for adoption. In each case, the evidence seems to indicate that the distressed children want only to be reunited with their loving parents.

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More Disincentives to Work, Thanks to the Federal Government and the Stimulus Package

by Hans Bader on December 12, 2010 · 3 comments

in Employment, Stimulus to Nowhere

Thanks to food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies, and other welfare benefits, many “poor” people have far more disposable income than self-supporting households earning $40,000 to $60,000 a year.  Veronique de Rugy points to a finding that “a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year” — even excluding benefits from Supplemental Security Income.  “America is now a country which punishes those middle-class people who not only try to work hard, but avoid scamming the system.”

These disincentives to work were expanded in the job-killing $800 billion stimulus package, which largely repealed welfare reform and increased the refundable tax-credits given to non-taxpaying “poor” households.  These refundable credits are being perpetuated in the costly $900 billion deal recently reached between Obama and congressional leaders.

The analysis de Rugy cites actually understates the disincentives to work, because it ignored the fact that many households that are “poor” in terms of taxable income are not poor at all once you factor in tax-free income from non-governmental sources.  For example, child support is tax-free to the recipient family, no matter how huge the payments they receive (for example, a billionaire may pay several million dollars a year in child support to each of his ex-girlfriends with kids, leaving them in tax-free luxury, and under New York’s child support guidelines, everyone is supposed to pay at least 17 percent of their gross income in child support for just one child, regardless of how high that income is.  In Massachusetts, middle-income households pay 25 percent of gross income for just one kid — which is around a third of their after-tax income — under that state’s child support guidelines).

The stimulus package contained provisions encouraging states to temporarily ratchet up their child support guidelines to reap more federal matching funds.  Maryland recently increased its child support guidelines to excessive levels, permanently.  Ohio is now weighing a massive proposed child-support increase, also apparently based on erroneous reasoning.  However, these increases probably will not provide a net benefit to state budgets, because increased federal funding is offset by incarceration and other direct and indirect costs associated with enforcement of excessive child-support guidelines).

Federal matching funds are having a negative effect on child welfare in other contexts, such as unwarranted CPS seizures.  (The federal government is increasingly using matching funds to meddle in areas of tort, criminal, family and domestic violence law traditionally handled by the states, sometimes in ways that actually increase domestic-violence-related deaths and injuries.) Financial obligations imposed by divorce courts are also harming soldiers and small businesses.

Federal food stamp allotments are so generous that they clearly exceed the amount needed to actually feed a family on a bare-bones budget.

Child-Snatching to Reap Federal Funds: The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997

by Hans Bader on December 9, 2010 · 8 comments

in Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty

An article called “The 7 Most Horrifying Cost-Cutting Measures of All Time” decries the role of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 in children being snatched from loving families by state officials and then put into foster homes by Child Protective Services (CPS).  According to the 1997 law, “for each child adopted into a foster family, the responsible state receives $4,000 to $6,000, with an additional $20 million bonus if it exceeds the average number of adoptions from previous years.”  The article says that that incentive “encourages CPS to make an increasingly liberal interpretation of the term ‘rescue.’  Consider that, a few years ago, CPS employee Pat Moore was fired for refusing to put a child in a foster home simply because everyone in the foster family had a felony conviction, and the family occasionally hired a convicted sex offender to babysit. “  Similarly, the article alleges that “when Vanessa Shanks’ child was taken away and she fought the decision in court, CPS responded . . . by taking away children of her relatives, and after Shanks finally won in court, they took away her attorney’s children.”

The problem of government officials seizing children and adopting them out to receive bonuses is even more severe in England, as I explained a few years ago at Point of Law.  But improper seizures of children from loving parents is also a problem in the United States, as I previously chronicled.

English children have been taken from their parents based on mere speculation that they may abuse them in the future, even if the government concedes the child has never actually been abused.

Most newspapers and legal commentators don’t cover this sort of thing, assuming that such actions are either non-existent, or isolated aberrations, and that CPS officials are omniscient and wise when they seize children from their parents.  A few exceptions are the Washington Examiner, and Walter Olson, the dean of law bloggers.  Olson has discussed the subject, and the devastating effects when parents are not in fact abusive or dangerous yet are put through investigations, or worse yet see their children taken away, at his web site Overlawyered, the world’s oldest law blog, which has been cited by federal court rulings on other subjects.

Children seized by CPS often experience devastating harm. In Doe v. Lebbos, 348 F.3d 820 (9th Cir. 2003), Judge Andrew Kleinfeld’s dissent described the tragedy that befell a little girl who was seized from her father as a result of false abuse accusations:

After being bounced around in the agency and foster parent bureaucracy for over a year, Lacey . . . was ‘diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, hearing voices, and suicidal ideation.’ She was put on anti-psychotic medication. She had taken to smearing feces and to other abnormal and highly disruptive behavior. . . what the county did to her to ‘protect’ her apparently destroyed her. Something in this experience, perhaps being ripped away from her father for whom she consistently expressed love during the whole miserable period, perhaps having strangers strip her and search her heretofore private parts, perhaps being put with caretakers instead of her father, amounted to a trauma that was too much for her.

Ironically, after CPS seizes your kid and places him or her with a foster family, it will sometimes argue that the child should not be returned to you even if you prove you did nothing wrong and that the allegations were false.  Why?  They’ll argue that the kid has bonded with the foster family and thus would suffer emotional harm from being returned to you.  Yet the emotional harm that kids experience being taken away from their parents in the first place seems to be given little weight.

Stopping Wasteful Spending: Better Latte Than Never

by Richard Morrison on January 7, 2009 · 1 comment

in Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

Working in Washington, D.C. for the last decade, I’ve become familiar with the experience of criminal conduct in city government. The city sports a culture of corruption so brazen that it has included everyone from the (former) mayor down to local beat cops. The crimes perpetrated include everything from selling drugs to demanding kickbacks from government contractors to a $50 million embezzlement scam perpetrated by local tax officials.

It is therefore with a spirit of weary amusement that I read about a group of Chicago Public Schools officials and their recent purchase of $67,000 worth of espresso makers:

Chicago public school bureaucrats skirted competitive bidding rules to buy 30 cappuccino/espresso machines for $67,000, with most of the machines going unused because the schools they were ordered for had not asked for them, according to a report by the CPS Office of Inspector General.

That was just one example of questionable CPS actions detailed in the inspector general’s 2008 annual report. Others included high school staffers changing grades to pump up transcripts of student athletes and workers at a restricted-enrollment grade school falsifying addresses to get relatives admitted.

In the case of the cappuccino machines, central office administrators split the order among 21 vocational schools to avoid competitive bidding required for purchases over $10,000. As a result CPS paid about $12,000 too much, according to Inspector General James Sullivan. “We were able to find the same machines cheaper online,” he said.

So is that the problem – not that someone spent $67,000 on fancy coffee makers – but that they paid slightly too much for them? Would things have been acceptable if they had ordered them off of the website the IG found for $1,833 each instead of the actual purchase price of $2,233? More importantly, are they keeping them or can I buy one off of eBay at a massive discount?

One more thing: D.C. has, of course, had plenty of public school officials playing fast and loose with government money as well – amazingly, some of them even went to jail! In their defense, though, D.C. public school employees can be forgiven for thinking the District has an unlimited supply of cash. We spend about $24,600 per pupil per year — about $10,000 more than the average for area private schools.