One-two punch: when foster care fails, victims of child abuse and neglect are raised by the criminal justice system

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ONE-TWO PUNCH:
WHEN FOSTER CARE FAILS, VICTIMS OF CHILD ABUSE AND
NEGLECT ARE RAISED BY THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

by

Joe Piasecki

_____________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Joe Piasecki
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks are due to the USC faculty members who guided this work and
offered much encouragement: Profs. Bill Celis and Michael Parks of the Annenberg
School for Communication and Journalism, and Prof. Ralph Fertig of the School of
Social Work.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iv
Preface: Research Challenges vi
Chapter 1: Introduction: Project Origins and Goals 1
Chapter 2: A Pipeline from Foster Care to Juvenile Hall 4
Chapter 3: No Place to Grow Up: Dangers Await Juveniles in Custody 8
Chapter 4: Mapping the Road from Victim to Criminal 12
Chapter 5: Procedural Bias Against Foster Youth and African-American 20
Overrepresentation
Chapter 6: Jessica’s Story: One Crossover Youth’s Experience 25
Chapter 7: Los Angeles County Court and Probation Department Reforms 29
for Crossover Youth
Chapter 8: Rethinking Juvenile Justice as Social-Services Institution: 34
Detention Alternatives, Boys Republic and The Missouri
Model
Chapter 9: The Recession’s Implications for Child Welfare 48
References 54
iv
ABSTRACT

In Los Angeles County, Calif., two agencies are responsible for raising children who
become wards of the court. The Department of Children and Family Services
intervenes to protect victims of child abuse and neglect, in some cases placing
victims in the care of foster parents and group homes. The Probation Department is
tasked with the discipline of children who commit criminal acts, utilizing facilities
that include juvenile halls, group homes and probation camps. Many children who
enter the delinquency system first came to the court’s attention through child welfare
cases. A large number experience their first arrests in foster care, making an almost
instantaneous leap from protective care to punitive custody.

This paper examines the causes and consequences of overlap between the child
welfare and juvenile justice systems and explores possibilities for reform. Research
identifies child welfare group homes as catalysts for juvenile arrests, which
especially impacts African-American youth, who are disproportionally housed in
group homes. Foster children are also at a disadvantage in the delinquency system,
often winding up in more restrictive settings because they are without permanent
homes.

L.A. County juvenile courts recently implemented reforms that allow some foster
youth to retain child welfare status and access to its unique services despite
v
involvement with the delinquency system. A number of other programs suggest
greater reform is possible, such as remodeling juvenile probation facilities to
prioritize delivery of social services.
vi
PREFACE
RESEARCH CHALLENGES

Journalists and other researchers who write about the experiences of youth involved
in the foster care and juvenile justice systems face one tremendous obstacle: secrecy,
both court-ordered and self-imposed.

Dependency and delinquency court proceedings in Los Angeles County are typically
closed to the public. Reporters and academics must seek special permission to
interview or otherwise interact with youth involved in either system, whose identities
also are protected by law.

Privacy rights make sense for children who cannot rely on parental protections, but
the veil also obscures public scrutiny of their treatment by government agencies. The
same rules that protect minors also frequently conceal the actions, helpful or
harmful, of those charged with their care.

In the course of this project, attempts to interview former foster children sent to
juvenile hall were frustrated by court privacy provisions. A research attorney for the
Los Angeles Superior Court rejected the author’s media request to visit juvenile hall
on grounds that she felt this project’s scope called for an academic research petition.
vii
Obtaining a research petition is a lengthy and complicated process that risked both
indefinite delay of the project and restraints against elements of it being later used
for journalistic purposes. Although it was not possible to interview juvenile hall
youth, Los Angeles County Court Commissioner Robert Leventer allowed a visit to a
juvenile court he supervises in Pasadena on condition that the names and case
information of juveniles would not be disclosed.

Court-imposed privacy protections also put up walls when it comes to interviewing
former wards of the foster care and juvenile justice systems. Juvenile court files are
sealed after cases are closed and wards of the court reach adulthood, hampering the
ability to verify the backgrounds of those relatively few young adults who are willing
to discuss their experiences. Former wards may petition the court to release their
juvenile files to them, but again the process is time consuming and out of
researchers’ or journalists’ control.

Due to the social stigma of juvenile crime and the ease with which potential
employers and others can find information on the Internet, few young adults who
were formerly involved in both the foster care and juvenile justice systems were
willing to be identified for this project. Some who were willing had trouble recalling
or understanding specific details of their histories — for instance, whether a group
home assignment was made by a delinquency or dependency court — and were
unwilling to petition for their case files. Many of the young adults contacted in the
viii
course of this research ultimately did not fit into the project’s scope, having very
limited backgrounds in either of the two systems.

Some nonprofit, nongovernmental agencies that serve current or former juvenile hall
or probation camp wards are also reluctant to work with journalists and researchers.
While staff of several agencies worked to connect the author with clients willing to
be interviewed, a prominent mentorship program for juvenile hall wards refused to
facilitate contact with former members of the program for fear of jeopardizing
relationships with the Los Angeles County Probation Department. Others who
sought to facilitate contact with current or former clients encountered obstacles.
Some did not have clear records of whether their clients had been involved in both
foster care and juvenile justice proceedings. In a few cases, contact information for
potential interview subjects was not current and the client’s whereabouts unknown.

1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: PROJECT ORIGINS AND GOALS

The important and often overlooked connections between the foster care and juvenile
justice system in Los Angeles County first became apparent to me while writing a
series of articles about youth homelessness for the Pasadena Weekly in 2006.

During formal interviews and other conversations with dozens of homeless young
adults in Pasadena and Hollywood, a pattern became apparent: Nearly all were
previously wards of the foster care system (Piasecki, June 2006). In addition to
improving the oversight and stability of foster homes, the articles came to focus on
an apparent need for teens who exit county care to receive additional life-skills
training and increased access to transitional housing.

Prior to publication of the fourth article in what became a five-part series, the
newspaper received a call from a Los Angeles Department of Children and Family
Services employee who objected to assertions that foster care contributed to the
homelessness of one of the subjects (Piasecki, July 2006). This particular homeless
youth, the official said, had left county care as a ward of the Los Angeles County
Probation Department after being arrested in foster care, and thus had not been
entitled to foster care benefits upon reaching adulthood. The discovery, after further
2
reporting, that youth in foster care frequently cross over into the juvenile justice
system was the impetus for the project that follows.

As was the case in 2006, my current research is the beginning of a much larger quest
to trace cycles of poverty and crime from traumatic childhood to troubled
adolescence to adult life on the margins of society — a story so vast and complicated
that only publication of a full-length nonfiction book could do it justice.

The pages that follow outline the course for such a book project: Chapter Two
examines the structural overlaps of the child welfare and criminal justice systems.
Chapter Three reviews current literature and news reports raising questions about the
effectiveness of current interventions. Chapter Four explores the mechanisms that
tend to push kids from the protection of child welfare to the punishment of the justice
system. Chapter Five looks into the overrepresentation of minorities and other
possible biases that foster youth face in criminal courtrooms. Chapter Six takes
individual experiences into account to better understand motivations and mindsets of
children in county care. Chapter Seven looks at current reforms that are helping
foster youth avoid becoming probation wards. Chapter Eight discusses other possible
juvenile justice frameworks that promise improvements over current systems.
Chapter Nine attempts to put child welfare and juvenile justice into the context of
poverty and other urban issues.

3
With greater cooperation from advocacy organizations, additional verifiable personal
accounts and increased participation of government and care providers, this research
could blossom into a book that could make a difference in a number of young lives.
4
CHAPTER 2
A PIPELINE FROM FOSTER CARE TO JUVENILE HALL

The line between the protection of foster care and punishment in the juvenile justice
system can be a thin and blurry one in Los Angeles, where the nation’s busiest child
welfare system has become a farm team for the largest juvenile justice system in
America.

On any given day, some 33,000 victims of child abuse and neglect come under the
protection of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services
through the child dependency courts (Los Angeles County Department of Children
and Family Services, September 2010). For more than 15,000 of them, home is
deemed so unsafe that they are brought into foster care to live with relatives or foster
parents and, in some cases, at group homes and other institutions that have taken the
place of yesterday’s orphanages.

On the other side of the coin, the Los Angeles County Probation Department is
tasked with supervising more than 20,000 children from whom delinquency courts
have ruled society needs some level of protection (Webb, 2010). In most cases,
probation officers simply monitor compliance with court orders for truants, vandals
and other young troublemakers. But in a few thousand cases where kids have
5
committed severe acts of violence and other serious crimes, they become residents of
juvenile halls, probation camps and correctional group care facilities.

In the protective and punitive systems, group homes are a common denominator. A
default option both for wards of the child welfare system whose behaviors are too
troublesome for foster families to handle and for probation kids who haven’t broken
the law seriously enough to merit the lock-down discipline of a county probation
camp, group homes are a way station in the county’s continuum of care.

According to a California Department of Social Services database, there are 1,215
group home facilities in California, 214 of them in Los Angeles County — each
typically housing six to 12 wards from either system (2010).

And just as the experience of group home living can be much the same for a foster
kid as it is for a court-adjudicated juvenile delinquent, there’s a good chance that
today’s probation youth was yesterday’s child welfare beneficiary.

In July 2008, an internal Probation Department survey found that at least 17 percent
of its wards — nearly one in five of the 23,974 kids in the juvenile justice system at
that time — had histories with the Department of Children and Family Services (Los
Angeles County Probation Department, 2008).

6
The survey also revealed that kids with current or former child welfare cases tended
to plunge deeper into the juvenile justice system.

Only 5 percent of the 1,627 kids then-detained in one of the county’s three juvenile
halls (holding tanks for youth awaiting adjudication and disposition, the delinquency
court’s terminology for conviction and sentencing) had child welfare backgrounds.
But 22 percent of the 2,417 kids serving time in probation camps — the court’s
harshest punishment outside of confinement by the state Department of Juvenile
Justice — had child welfare system histories.

And while 15 percent of the nearly 18,000 kids who remained free from confinement
while reporting to probation officers had first come to the court’s attention as a child
welfare case, 32 percent of the roughly 1,700 probation youth sent to live in a group
care institution had Department of Children and Family Services backgrounds.

That a large number of children enter state care as victims of crime only to be
reclassified as juvenile delinquents is a cruel irony: Many of those who cross over
from the protective system to the punitive system experience their first arrests while
living in child welfare group homes — sometimes for behaviors that likely would not
have gotten them arrested had they lived any other place.

7
And if life as a foster kid was tough, the experiences of some juvenile delinquents in
county camps and halls can be terrifying.
8
CHAPTER 3
NO PLACE TO GROW UP: DANGERS AWAIT JUVENILES IN
CUSTODY

Children who become entangled in the juvenile justice system face grave dangers,
both during their time in custody and for years to come.

Widespread physical, sexual and psychological abuse of L.A. County juvenile hall
and probation camp wards has been well documented for more than a decade. In
2000, the Los Angeles County Grand Jury issued a report condemning many county
youth detention facilities as unsanitary and unsafe, with probation officers routinely
using pepper spray on wards to keep order (Landsberg, June 24, 2000). That report
led to a follow-up investigation by the federal Department of Justice’s Civil Rights
Division that uncovered deeper patterns of violence and abuse, including unchecked
youth-on-youth violence, improper use of force by probation officers, lack of
educational opportunities, substandard medical treatment and overutilization of
psychotropic drugs (Briscoe, April 19, 2003). In 2004, federal and county officials
reached a settlement agreement to improve conditions at juvenile halls, which
investigators had found violated youths’ constitutional rights (Blankstein, Aug. 26,
2004).

9
But in 2010, county officials were still struggling to implement changes and pleaded
for an extension of the agreement to avoid federal takeover (Therolf, May 12, 2010).
That same year, the Los Angeles Times uncovered numerous incidents of probation
officers abusing wards of juvenile facilities. These included a probation officer at
Barry J. Nidorff Juvenile Hall ordering five youths to beat another detainee she
mistakenly blamed for stealing her cell phone, and another officer carrying on sexual
affairs with three wards of Central Juvenile Hall in downtown Los Angeles
(Hennessy-Fiske, Feb. 21, 2010). The Times later found that at least 170 probation
department employees had escaped punishment for misconduct, including incidents
of excessive force and child abuse, and remained on the job because the department
was unequipped to enforce its own employee discipline procedures (Hennessy-Fiske,
March 3, 2010).

Juvenile hall and probation camp wards tend to enter county custody with dismal
levels of academic achievement. Statistics provided in 2006 to the Los Angeles
County Children’s Planning Council by the Los Angeles County Office of
Education, which runs detention facility classrooms, revealed that incarcerated youth
score well below their grade levels in state reading and math assessments. In
November 2005, youth who entered juvenile halls, most of them at high-school age,
read below a fifth-grade level and performed only slightly better on math tests
(McCroskey, 2006). Probation camp wards posted similar results.

10
In January 2010, three former probation camp wards filed a class-action lawsuit
against the Probation Department and the Los Angeles County Office of Education
alleging inadequate classroom instruction and oversight that resulted in at least one
student being granted a high-school diploma despite being illiterate (Therolf, Jan. 13,
2010). Later that year, a former probation camp teacher was arrested after security
camera footage revealed that he had allegedly organized a series of fistfights
between rival gang members in his classroom (Hennessy-Fiske, March 17, 2010).
Videos of similar classroom bouts at a different probation camp surfaced on
YouTube between December 2009 and April 2010 (Hennessy-Fiske, June 12, 2010).

Lack of educational attainment may contribute to the likelihood that juvenile
delinquents become adult criminal offenders. In 2009, the Rand Corp. published a
study that detailed the lives of several hundred former wards of L.A. juvenile halls a
full seven years after their detention, finding that the vast majority had grown into
adulthoods marked by crime and desperation (Ramchand et al., 2009). Of 395 boys
and girls detained at L.A. juvenile halls between February 1999 and May 2000,
almost half were in jail or prison in 2006 and 2007, when researchers resumed
contact. Many more subjects reported committing other criminal acts that went
unpunished, with only 87 subjects —20 percent of the sample — not committing
crimes or spending time behind bars. So for four out of five kids locked up in
juvenile halls, the system essentially failed to provide lasting rehabilitation.

11
Crime and its consequences weren’t the only struggles former juvenile hall wards
faced as adults. Half of study participants reported abusing alcohol and drugs. Nearly
two-thirds did not have full-time employment, and 14 percent were homeless. More
than 40 percent did not have a high school diploma or equivalency certificate.
Twelve had died, all but three of them as victims of gun violence.

The Washington D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute also suggests that youth
incarceration is, for many, simply an initiation into a life of crime. “Instead of
reducing crime, the act of incarcerating high numbers of youth may in fact facilitate
increased crime,” concludes the group’s “Dangers of Detention” report, which cites
evidence from studies in other American cities that youth who spend time in juvenile
halls are more likely to find themselves behind bars later on than any other group —
even gang members (Holman & Zeidenberg, 2006, p. 4).
12
CHAPTER 4
MAPPING THE ROAD FROM VICTIM TO CRIMINAL

The expansive overlap of L.A. County’s child welfare and juvenile probation
systems was explored in depth for the first time only recently by a team of academic
researchers given unique access to government records otherwise sealed from public
view. Teams led by Cal State L.A. criminology Professor Denise Herz and
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign social work Associate Professor Joseph
Ryan published several studies between 2007 and 2010 that revealed systemic bias
leading to the criminalization of foster kids, especially those sent to live in child
welfare group homes.

Researchers traced the flow of child welfare wards into the juvenile justice system by
viewing case records of 91,860 youth involved with the Department of Children and
Family Services between 2001 and 2005 and comparing those against Probation
Department records for the 82,376 youth who had one or more arrest during that time
(Ryan et al., 2008). In a report published in 2007 (using 2002 through 2005 data), the
researchers found that over four years, 4,811 first-time offenders entered the juvenile
justice system via foster care placements — about 7 percent of all 69,000 first-time
offenders, or about 1,200 kids per year (Ryan et al., 2007). Researchers and others
13
frequently use the term “crossover youth” to describe dependency court wards who
enter the delinquency system (Herz, Ryan, & Bilchik, 2010).

As was also evidenced by the Probation Department’s 2008 findings of a 17 percent
connection (Los Angeles County Probation Department, 2008), Ryan cautioned
during a telephone interview that 7 percent doesn’t paint nearly a complete picture of
how many abused and neglected kids eventually wind up in the juvenile probation
system:
Some people think [7 percent] is kind of low, but those are just
simultaneously open cases. That doesn’t involve a whole host of [child
welfare] cases that have closed [before arrest] or where they never had an
open case but there was an investigation. That would drive the number way
up. (Ryan, 2010)

But instead of widening their net to include all abused and neglected children, the
researchers drilled down to examine how and why kids were entering criminal
probation directly from county protective care. What they found was a direct link
between probation and foster care, specifically when foster care involves placement
at a group home.

By comparing arrest records for kids in group homes against those in other forms of
foster care, researchers determined that children with at least one group home
placement were 2.5 times more likely to be arrested, even when controlling for
variables including age and gender. And while only 26 percent of the study’s sample
14
population had ever set foot in a group home, 40 percent of all arrests that occurred
in the child welfare system were associated with group homes (Ryan et al., 2008).

One explanation that researchers considered was a theory called peer contagion —
the idea that at-risk kids feed off the bad influences of other at-risk kids:
Taking 12 high-risk kids and putting them together — that’s a bad idea.
Peers, outside substance abuse, are the biggest determinant of delinquency.
Unlike adult crime, juvenile crime is a social behavior. If these kids had at
least some low-risk friends to begin with, now they don’t even have a mix.
(Ryan, 2010)

But the effects of peer contagion, researchers wrote, often take months or even years
to fully develop, while for group homes the increased probability of arrest was more
immediate (Ryan et al., 2008). So they turned the magnifying glass on group homes
themselves, positing that group home workers were simply more likely than parents,
foster parents or other guardians to rely on law enforcement to resolve conflict and
anti-social behavior.

While teens arrested at group homes were only half as likely as those in other foster
care settings to be charged with a weapons-related crime, they were three times as
likely to be charged with a threat-related offense (Ryan et al., 2008). Thus, either
criminal threats were more likely to occur in group homes, or foster parents and
group home workers were responding differently to such threats.

15
In other words: “What would have to happen for you to call the cops on your kid?”
asked Ryan, who is convinced that many group homes rely too heavily on law
enforcement to control behaviors (2010).

In one case that researchers examined, a teenager was arrested and booked at
juvenile hall for assault with a deadly weapon after throwing an unripe avocado at a
group home staff member (Herz, Ryan, & Bilchik, 2010).

Though they flagged that particular case as one of the more egregious examples of
overreliance on law enforcement by a group home, “No one’s saying it’s an
anomaly. It’s a shoe or a threat or a rock or whatever’s close by,” said Herz (2010).

The frequency of arrests in foster care settings has not gone unnoticed among those
closest to the system. Some even have a name for the kinds of incidents that get
foster kids, and only foster kids, in trouble with the law.

“We call it placement crime: crimes that only happen to foster youth because of
where they’re placed,” said Jacque Lindeman, director of development for California
Youth Connection, an advocacy group that organizes current and former foster youth
to lobby state policymakers (2010).

16
In 2007, the group sponsored legislation that would have allowed child welfare
departments to retain jurisdiction over California foster youth who enter probation
departments, with child welfare continuing to provide and oversee services for
foster-turned-probation youth even while they are housed in juvenile corrections
facilities (Child, 2007). The bill, carried by then Assemblywoman Karen Bass, a Los
Angeles Democrat, failed to find a vote on the Assembly floor and was dropped mid-
session (Legislative Counsel of California).

Children who enter the juvenile justice system frequently don’t have access to the
same level of therapeutic and developmental services that child welfare agencies can
provide, according to the bill’s text (Child, 2007). Foster youth who turn 18 as
juvenile justice wards also frequently don’t have access to child welfare programs
that help them learn to live on their own outside the system.

Jennifer Rodriguez, a staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center
who worked for California Youth Connection at the time, said the legislative effort
was an attempt to address underlying behavioral health issues that get kids in trouble.
“The very behaviors that get most of these kids sent to group homes end up being the
same reasons [group homes] end up involving law enforcement and sending them to
a juvenile hall,” said Rodriguez (2010).

17
Herz said her research and experience paints a similar picture. But she points out that
it’s the foster care system that initially fails to address trauma and antisocial behavior
before it is expressed as delinquency:
When you read the files on these kids, you see they typically came into the
system at a very young age and experienced traumatic events like seeing their
mother get beaten up or were getting beaten up themselves. There’s a
diagnosis for trauma, but you look at what they get [in foster care] and there’s
no treatment for trauma. So when they get to be 13 or 14, that unresolved
trauma is coming out as oppositional defiance [disorder]. (Herz, 2010)

County officials expressed concern about the number of arrests coming from group
homes, but also acknowledge that group homes are tasked with housing the most
troubled foster youth.

“More kids do get arrested in group homes, but in fairness to the group homes, that’s
because they’ve been to many other placements and failed, and usually have
behavioral issues,” said Dave Mitchell, an L.A. County Probation Department
bureau chief (2010). “I think kids cross over [to probation] because mental health
issues aren’t being treated appropriately, and mainly because they don’t have
connections with adults, and no permanency plan for their lives. There’s a sense of
hopelessness.”

Nonetheless, the high arrest numbers generated by group homes calls into question
whether they are equipped to handle difficult youth. “There’s also a training issue,”
18
said Jithadi Imara, who was deputy director of Probation Department juvenile
operations before retiring in late 2010. “Just as we train our staff in adolescent
development, [group home workers] need to show the same kind of training, at least
an intellectual understanding of acting-out behavior” (Imara 2010).

Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Richard Doyle, an office bureau chief,
said that juvenile prosecutors weigh the circumstances surrounding delinquent
behavior before filing a case, but once an arrest is made it is often too late to reverse
course:
In the child welfare system a group home is sort of the end of the road. So if a
kid acts out, they’re going to call the police, the police are going to give us a
report, and all we do is look at the facts and the law and determine if a crime
has been committed. Could that have been better handled with some
additional assistance to the child? Quite likely so. But now the potato’s in our
lap, and we don’t have a social work function. If a kid has a long history, that
may militate towards us wanting to file a case just to get the kid back in front
of a judge to say ‘something isn’t working here, judge.’ If there isn’t a long
history, we send it back Probation’s way first to let them have a crack at it.
Our tools are relatively confined. There’s an aspect of criminalizing behavior
because we don’t know what else to do with it. (Doyle, 2010).

In many cases, Herz said, foster kids are being arrested at group homes after
threatening or getting physical with other kids and staff members, typically over
things like restrictions on telephone use, overall lack of privacy and frustration about
being separated from siblings:
The sad thing is that many group homes are trying to do the right thing, but
they’re set up for failure. Until these kids are adjudicated as delinquents,
there aren’t many other options than a group home. But when they’re
19
adjudicated, they end up in another group home, and maybe it will be the
same group home, because [the Department of] Probation and DCFS use
some of the same group homes. That’s the grand irony here. They wind up in
the same exact environment, only now they have a probation officer who can
threaten to make things worse for them. (Herz, 2010)
20
CHAPTER 5
PROCEDURAL BIAS AGAINST FOSTER YOUTH AND
AFRICAN-AMERICAN OVERREPRESENTATION

For many foster kids who have crossed over into the delinquency system, things do
get worse — if only because of where they started out from in the system.

Juvenile delinquency courts have only a limited set of dispositions for young
offenders: send them home on probation; order a “suitable placement,” such as a
foster or group home; or remand them to the custody of a juvenile probation camp
or, in severe cases, the more jail-like setting of a state Department of Juvenile Justice
facility.

Most nonviolent offenders are sent home on probation and head to more restrictive
settings only if they reoffend. But because foster children technically don’t have a
home to go back to, they’re automatic candidates for the more restrictive “suitable
placement” designation — even if that means simply sending them back to the foster
home or group home where they lived before.

21
“The courts have to do a suitable placement order for all kids in foster care,” said
Lara Holtzman, an attorney for the L.A.-based nonprofit legal services agency
Alliance for Children’s Rights (2010):
A home on probation order for a [foster child] severs all ties to the federal
and state funding streams that entitle you to foster care benefits. Technically,
they’re releasing you home to a parent, so you are no longer considered a
foster child.

The trouble with bypassing probation to automatic suitable placement for a first-time
offender, Holtzman (2010) said, is that probation camp becomes the automatic next
step in the system for those who reoffend. Recall that 22 percent of those in
probation camps had a child welfare background, according to the Probation
Department survey (Los Angeles County Probation Department, 2008).

“Once you put kids in the system, they’re going to remain with us and that does more
harm than good,” said Ron La Fleur, a juvenile division director with the Los
Angeles County Probation Department (2010):
If a kid is acting up and DCFS can’t do anything about it, they can put him in
[probation] placement, but he’s still got the stigma of [being an adjudicated
delinquent], and the next time it’s camp … every time into a more restrictive
area.

Herz and Ryan also concluded that foster care status works like a fast track through
the juvenile justice system. While analysis found no delinquency court bias against
foster youth in terms of adjudications of guilt, a statistical bias emerged in terms of
22
sanction, with foster children much more likely than others to get suitable placement
or correctional placement (Ryan et al., 2007).

“Foster youth are already stamped as being involved in some sort of treatment, even
though that has nothing to do with them. It has to do with the actions or lack of
actions taken by their parents,” said Ryan (2010).

Another factor out of foster kids’ control: ethnicity.

While Herz and Ryan had noted that 7% of all first-time juvenile arrests come out of
the child welfare system, they also found that child welfare cases produce 14% of all
new arrests of African-American youth (Ryan et al., 2007).

Of all 69,009 juveniles arrested for the first time between 2002 and 2005 in Los
Angeles, 23% were black. Of the 4,811 of those who were arrested while part of the
child welfare system, twice the proportion — 46% — were black (Ryan et al., 2007).

Because the number of foster care arrests is only a fraction of total arrests, foster care
arrests alone do not explain African-American over-representation in the juvenile
justice system as a whole. Ryan et al. conclude, however, that it is “a contributing
source” of black overrepresentation in the juvenile justice system, where by contrast
23
39% of child welfare arrests were of Hispanic youth and only 11% were of
Caucasian youth despite greater overall population numbers (2007).

“African-Americans in the foster care system are arrested at a much higher rate than
white and Hispanic kids,” said Ryan (2010).
In the general population, we talk about poverty and family dynamics in
terms of higher arrest rates. The differences between black, white and
Hispanic families involved in the child welfare system are much less
pronounced. Virtually all are poor and have problems with substance abuse
and mental health.

One possible explanation is that African-American youth are represented more than
other groups in foster care as a whole and in foster care group homes, which Herz
and Ryan found were more likely to generate arrests than other foster care settings
(Ryan et al., 2008).

African-American youth are overrepresented among foster youth and foster youth
who live at group homes. While only 8.7% of Los Angeles County residents are
black (U.S. Census Bureau), the Los Angeles County Department of Children and
Family services reported in September 2010 that 29.4% of the children involved in
the entirety of the child welfare system were African-American (Los Angeles County
Department of Children and Family Services, September 2010).

24
Further information obtained from DCFS under a California Public Records Act
request showed increasing representation of black youth in out-of-home care. Of
15,475 youth in foster care settings, nearly one-third (4,974) were black, while
52.5% (8,134) were Hispanic. But of the 953 foster youth assigned to live at group
homes, comparative racial representation is nearly reversed: Close to 38% (361)
were Hispanic, but more than 45% (432) were black (Los Angeles County
Department of Children and Family Services, Oct. 20, 2010).

That 45% of foster youth in group homes were African-American and African-
American foster children made up nearly the same percentage of total arrests in
foster care suggests a possible conclusion that black foster children are at greater risk
of arrest because they are overrepresented in group homes.

Looking at the DCFS group home numbers another way, close to 8.7% of all black
foster youth live at a group home, while only 4.4% of Hispanic foster children do. In
other words, blacks are twice as likely as Hispanics to live in the very places Herz
and Ryan had identified (Ryan et al., 2008) as the No. 1 source of arrests in the foster
care system.
25
CHAPTER 6
JESSICA’S STORY: ONE CROSSOVER YOUTH’S
EXPERIENCE

Behind every number in the foster care and probation systems is a story. Jessica
Chandler, who experienced both systems in Los Angeles, hopes hers will make a
difference for others.

At 13, Chandler was forced to trade the horror of child abuse for the indignity of a
jail cell. As Chandler remembers it, she was screaming hysterically during a fight
with her mother the night police arrived at their South Los Angeles home to take her
to Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, located in Downey, Calif. Chandler’s mother, a
devout churchgoer whose behavior had become increasingly erratic after her divorce
two years earlier, was convinced the admittedly rambunctious teen was possessed by
demons. Trying to cast the evil spirits out of the girl, she pinned Chandler to the
ground and covered her face and body with ceremonial oils.

That Chandler, who is African-American, was taken to juvenile hall instead of into
protective custody may be an unusual injustice. But her experience thereafter
illustrates the potential for personal trauma and re-victimization of abused youth who
enter punitive custody. At juvenile hall, the probation workers who cleaned away
26
the oils that had drenched Chandler’s body also strip-searched the girl before locking
her up.

“When they were looking inside of me I thought maybe there were demons in me
after all. It was degrading,” recalled Chandler (2010) at age 22 and a California State
University student.

A short time later, Chandler faced a juvenile court judge accused of alleged battery
and making terrorist threats against her mother. The court didn’t exactly throw the
book at Chandler, but unlike kids with stable parents she couldn’t just go back to her
dangerous single-parent home — mom, who didn’t even bother to show up for
Chandler’s hearing, already had another girl in the juvenile justice system and would
eventually lose her other children to foster care.

While Chandler was awaiting her first placement in a Los Angeles-area group home,
she had nowhere else to go but back to Los Padrinos. For several weeks until
arriving at the now-defunct Florence Crittenton Center for foster and probation
youth, life as a child inmate was the best anyone could offer her. Delays in
placement arrangements for children who cannot return home often cause needlessly
extended stays in juvenile halls, according to Holtzman (2010).

27
Living with other troubled youth and apart from her siblings was another challenge.
Chandler would often run away to visit her older sister, who wound up at the nearby
Booth Memorial Center for pregnant teens after stealing underwear from a Ross
department store. At home “we used to have cardboard on the bottom of our shoes,”
Chandler explained.

After six months Chandler tried to duck the system for good, staying with a friend
until an arrest for assault during a fight brought her back to court and, after a brief
stay in juvenile hall, on to another group home. Chandler spent the rest of her
childhood as either a foster kid or a ward of the probation system, or possibly as a
dependency court ward under the supervision of the Probation Department (Nash &
Bilchik, 2009). She was too young then to recall now which of her many housing
arrangements were as a dependant and which were as a delinquent — either way, the
lifestyle was the same, Chandler said (2010):
These places never dealt with our problems. You’re not around people who
behave differently than you, you’re around people who have the same
problems. I would bang my head against the wall because it was so hard
being a kid and nobody would listen. My sister, the first thing she did when
she got out was porn. Then she did prostitution. (Chandler, 2010)

Chandler chose a much different path. Her story turned around in the most unlikely
of circumstances — a third arrest, again for fighting, but now as an 18-year-old
living in state-sponsored transitional housing. Back in court, this time holding a
28
newborn son, she had a life-changing epiphany: “I was looking at him and thought,
‘They can take him away from me and he’ll be in the same system I hated.’”

Chandler successfully completed a last-chance probation order and channeled her
newfound resolve to stay in her child’s life into advocating for others still in the
system. In August 2011, Chandler was one of 13 former foster youth chosen as youth
ambassadors to a panel convened to influence child welfare policy. The group is a
pilot project by the California Child Welfare Co-Investment Partnership, a
collaboration of the state Department of Social Services and the County Welfare
Directors Association of America (Chandler, 2011).
29
CHAPTER 7
LOS ANGELES COUNTY COURT AND PROBATION
DEPARTMENT REFORMS FOR CROSSOVER YOUTH

A Los Angeles-area teenager involved in both the child welfare and juvenile justice
systems in 2011 had a better chance for positive experiences than Chandler did in
2001, thanks to changes in state law that paved the way for recent juvenile court
reforms in Los Angeles County.

At the time Chandler entered the system, California Welfare and Institutions Code
(WIC) 241.1 prohibited a minor from holding simultaneous status as a ward of both
the dependency court — eligible for all the services the child welfare system can
provide — and the delinquency court, removed from social workers’ care (Nash &
Bilchik, 2009).

In September 2004, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law Assembly Bill
129, written by then-Assemblywoman Rebecca Cohn (D-Saratoga), which amended
WIC 241.1 to allow children to retain dual status as both dependency and
delinquency wards (California Legislature, 2004). Foster youth who retained their
child welfare status while also supervised by the delinquency court would maintain
continuity of social services, including representation and relationships with social
30
workers, while benefitting from interagency collaboration designed to reduce the
duration of delinquency jurisdiction (Nash & Bilchick, 2009). In short, foster kids
would remain foster kids — even when adjudicated also as juvenile delinquents.

Los Angeles County was one of eight counties in California to implement a dual
status plan, which required consent from heads of child welfare and probation
departments as well as the county’s presiding juvenile court judge (Nash, 2010). In
May 2007, the Los Angeles County Juvenile Court established its AB 129 Pilot
Project, a dual dependency/delinquency court that operated on Tuesdays at the
Pasadena Courthouse (Los Angeles Superior Court, 2010). The court serves foster
youth who are housed or arrested in Pasadena and surrounding areas (Nash, 2010),
but have not committed murder or most serious violent felonies (La Fleur, 2010).

Juveniles who appear before the AB 129 Pilot Project court receive special
assessment by a court-assembled Multidisciplinary Team, including a social worker,
probation officer, education advocate and Los Angeles County Department of
Mental Health clinician, who collectively recommend to the court remedies for
delinquent behavior (Nash & Bilchik, 2009). The Multidisciplinary Team process
has resulted in “better assessments and fewer delinquency dispositions, preventing
kids from crossing over and hopefully limiting their stays in the [probation] system,”
said Los Angeles County Presiding Court Judge Michael Nash (2010).

31
All 125 youth who appeared before the AB 129 Pilot Project court between May 15,
2007, and Feb. 11, 2010, retained their foster care status, despite one in five
receiving adjudications for misdemeanors and felonies, according to a summary of
court records (Los Angeles Superior Court, 2010). Of those 125 youth, 95 (76%)
received informal probation or deferred entry of judgment, remaining wards of the
dependency court only. Four had their delinquency cases dismissed. Of the 24 who
were adjudicated as juvenile delinquents, 19 received disposition orders in which the
Department of Children and Family Services remained the lead agency. The
Probation Department was assigned as lead agency in only five cases.

During a June 2010 visit to the AB 129 Pilot Project court, a teenage girl whose
evaluation determined that she suffered from mental health issues was adjudicated as
a delinquent for throwing a rock at a group home staff member. Commissioner
Robert Leventer, who supervises the court, ordered the girl not to a Probation
Department camp or group home but to a DCFS-contracted treatment center
(Leventer, 2010).

Outcomes outside of the AB 129 Pilot Project court differ greatly. Prior to L.A.
County’s implementation of WIC 241.1 in 1997, when Nash became presiding
judge, the majority of dependency wards charged with crimes became delinquency
wards. Sometimes social workers “were more than willing to wash their hands of a
kid convicted of a crime, which we called ‘system dumping,’” said Nash (2010).
32
WIC 241.1 required joint assessments of youth by DCFS and the Probation
Department, but these assessments were not as thorough as Multidisciplinary Team
assessments under AB 129 (Nash & Bilchik, 2009). Under WIC 241.1 before the
AB 129 Pilot Project, 28% of dependency court wards charged in the delinquency
court became Probation Department wards, losing their connection to the child
welfare system, according to Nash (2010). About 60% remained with the
dependency court under informal probation, but lack of interdepartmental
coordination by a Multidisciplinary Team resulted in many later becoming
delinquency wards, he said. “There was not a lot of coordination focusing on getting
those kids services to keep them from penetrating deeper into the [delinquency]
system. We did a good job of accumulating facts, but not a good job of analyzing
them,” said Nash (2010).

The success of the AB 129 Pilot Project has spurred creation of a second dual-status
courtroom at the Eastlake Juvenile Courts Building in East Los Angeles, near Los
Angeles Central Juvenile Hall (Los Angeles Superior Court, 2010).

In tandem with the AB 129 Pilot Project, the Department of Probation also
developed new protocols for foster children charged with a crime who were
participating in the experimental court. Foster youth who are detained awaiting
adjudication by the dual status court are held in a separate unit of Central Juvenile
Hall known as the Elite Family Unit. Many dual-status court youth remain in foster
33
care settings and are not detained, but there are 30 to 40 youth in the Elite Family
Unit at any given time (La Fleur, 2010).

“Studies show that kids recidivate more if they’re placed in facilities with individuals
who have committed serious crimes,” said La Fleur (2010):
The concept is to try to put crossover youth in one unit as compared to having
them spread out in the regular juvenile hall system. It keeps them from the
normal population of individuals with serious offenses. A lot of these kids
have serious histories of abuse and the crimes a lot of them commit are a
result of those issues.

Imara said the idea for segregating foster youth originated from conversations with
detained foster youth, a group of whom also named the unit:
Kids repeatedly said they wanted to have their own dedicated unit to receive
the type of services they needed instead of the broader services spread among
the general population. They wanted us to understand them and their history.
They kept saying ‘You don’t understand. You don’t know what it’s like to be
in the system since you were eight years old.’ (Imara, 2010)
34
CHAPTER 8
RETHINKING JUVENILE JUSTICE AS SOCIAL-SERVICES
INSTITUTION: DETENTION ALTERNATIVES, BOYS
REPUBLIC AND THE MISSOURI MODEL

Efforts to better understand why young people commit crime have identified a
connection between juvenile delinquency and prior experience of abuse and neglect.
The Child Welfare League of America has compiled studies that show a large
proportion of children who enter juvenile halls and probation camps — as many as
55% in some locations — were first traumatized by caretaker abuse and neglect
before committing their offenses (Tuell, n.d.). The experience of trauma severely
inhibits normal adolescent development and may account for causational factors that
drive delinquent behavior, including impulsiveness, anger, lack of empathy, acting
out, “intolerable emotions” and a diminished sense of the future that leaves little
regard for consequences of actions (Greenwald, 2002). Greenwald further suggests
that children whose caretakers have violated their trust and sense of security
experience “a perpetual state of alert” that biases them toward hostile behavior
(2002). Studies have also found that residents of juvenile halls and probation camps
disproportionally suffer from behavioral and learning disabilities that require special
education and/or mental health treatment (Malmgren & Meisel, 2004).

35
In effect, not only foster youth but also many other young people entangled in the
juvenile justice system are very likely candidates for high levels of social services.
“Youths’ problems tend to come bundled together, often stacked on one another over
time,” writes Howell et al. (2004). “We have a compelling need to integrate mental
health, child welfare, education, substance abuse and juvenile justice system
services.” Meanwhile, researchers and other professionals have identified the
isolation of the juvenile justice framework from child welfare systems as an
impediment to delivery of social services and more holistic approaches for
addressing youth crime. Although the AB 129 Pilot Project bridges the dependency
and delinquency courts, the Probation and Children and Family Services departments
remain at relative ideological odds:
These two agencies have conflicting missions and philosophies (to protect
versus to punish), different professional training (social work versus criminal
justice), and different funding streams (Department of Health and Human
Services versus State Probation Administration) that prevent coordination
and collaboration. (Herz, Kinsky, & Ryan, 2006)

Frameworks for integrating social services into juvenile justice systems have
followed two basic strategies: A) diverting youth from detention in juvenile halls and
probation camps into services-based programs, and B) reorganizing probation camps
as services- and treatment-based facilities.

Various jurisdictions around the country have reduced reliance on juvenile halls by
adopting protocols developed under the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, a
36
reform strategy developed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (Mendel, 2009). “JDAI
is a process, not a conventional program, whose goal is to make sure that locked
detention is used only when necessary” by encouraging inter-department
collaboration, revising risk-assessment policies that determine whether youth should
be confined, and expediting case processing — all as means to develop and utilize
programs that are alternatives to confinement (Holman & Ziedenberg, 2006, p. 14).
Detention alternatives tend to include day and evening reporting centers, home
supervision programs and community-based organizations (Steinheart, 2010).

The Justice Policy Institute argues that community-based programs are superior to
juvenile halls in reducing recidivism among juvenile delinquents:
There is credible and significant research that suggests that the experience of
[juvenile] detention may make it more likely that youth will continue to
engage in delinquent behavior, and that the detention experience may
increase the odds that youth will recidivate, further compromising public
safety. (Holman & Ziedenberg, 2006, p. 1)

In a subsequent policy brief and literature review, the organization reported that a
majority of 443 studies of juvenile justice systems throughout the United States
found that “young people who received interventions emphasizing community-based
treatment and other alternatives to incarceration were less likely to recidivate than
those who did not” (Justice Policy Institute, 2009).

37
JDAI programming is in effect in 110 local jurisdictions in 27 states, including Santa
Cruz, San Francisco and Ventura counties in California (Mendel, 2009). Los Angeles
County is not a JDAI participant.

“When you start to whittle away at the edges, you find reducing juvenile hall
populations is not negatively impacting public safety at all,” said Santa Clara County
Juvenile Court Judge Kurt Kumli (2010), a former juvenile prosecutor who is
beginning to implement JDAI reforms in his jurisdiction. “There is a great deal of
competent, neutral data that in the overwhelming majority of cases, [handling less-
serious juvenile offenses] is best done out of custody.”

Because detention alternatives are not always available and may be viewed as
insufficient responses to serious violent crimes, social services have also been
introduced in secure custody environments. One such program is already utilized by
the Los Angeles County delinquency courts — Boys Republic, a boarding school
and treatment center that has operated since 1907 in Chino Hills, Calif. Court-
ordered residency at Boys Republic is a “suitable placement” dispositional
alternative, similar to a probation group home, but one that is often ordered by
judges in lieu of a more severe probation camp sentence (Burns, 2010).

Boys Republic operates a 200-acre campus that includes a public high school within
the Chino Valley Unified School District, dormitory cabins that can house up to 143
38
boys, and more than 150 acres of farmland for growing vegetables and raising cattle
(Burns, 2010). During a site visit on Sept. 24, 2010, 120 boys lived on the campus in
cabins of up to 24 each. Much like a boarding school, youth are required to attend a
full schedule of classes. But at Boys Republic, participation in student government
— a framework for group counseling — is mandatory.

“A big part of our treatment model is using group dynamics to reverse the decision-
making process that the kids used to get in trouble in the first place,” said Boys
Republic Executive Director Chris Burns, a clinical psychologist (2010). “Treatment
happens through group counseling, making it an everyday process to evaluate
everything that’s going on, the decisions that you make. [Participants] don’t realize
when they’re in these discussions that they’re engaged in counseling.”

Each cabin elects its own mayor, who represents “citizens” of the cabin before a
broader council elected school-wide. Residents become citizens after demonstrating
adherence to the rules of Boys Republic, a process that typically takes two to three
weeks, according to Burns (2010).

Also different from a typical boarding school, students are required to work several
hours each week to maintain the campus and operate its farm. Many campus jobs
involve occupational skills training in construction trades and are compensated
through wages paid to students upon leaving the program (Burns, 2010).
39
Burns was uncertain of how many Boys Republic residents had crossed over from
the dependency to the delinquency system, but estimated that as many as one in nine
did not have a stable caretaker or home to return to, foster or otherwise. In addition
to day treatment programs in Los Angeles County, the organization also operates
transitional housing programs for those who complete the program but cannot, or
sometimes choose not to, return home (Burns, 2010).

Only one in five graduates of the Chino Hills campus during the 2008-09 fiscal year
experienced an arrest within a year of completion (Boys Republic, 2010). By
contrast, various studies estimate that 40 to 55 percent of the youth who leave
Probation Department care are arrested again within two years (Newell & Salazar,
2010).

“We’ve had tremendous success with the program, but it doesn’t fit into any of the
[government funding] models,” Burns said of the nonprofit, which is compensated
by counties at group home rates but must rely on donations to meet the majority of
its costs (2010).

Use of group therapy techniques to improve juvenile justice outcomes has, however,
found backing from public officials in Missouri, where the state’s Division of Youth
Services has attracted national attention as a model for delinquency system reform
(Mendel, 2010). Unlike Los Angeles County, where the Probation Department
40
oversees programs for both juvenile and adult offenders, Missouri’s Division of
Youth Services is funded and administered by the state’s Department of Social
Services. The separation of juvenile and adult corrections systems in Missouri has
shifted the state’s approach to youth crime from a criminal justice paradigm to one
that prioritizes social work, said Larry Strecker, a regional administrator for the
Missouri Division of Youth Services (2010).

Also unlike Los Angeles, Missouri’s juvenile recidivism rates are consistently
among the lowest in the nation. Only 15.9 percent of youth released from DYS
custody between July 2008 and July 2009 had any involvement — including
probation — with the juvenile or adult corrections system in the 12 months following
their release, and in 2010 the agency’s reported two-year recidivism rate was 24.3
percent (Missouri, 2010):
There are folks who believe that your job in juvenile justice is to pull kids out
of communities into large facilities and teach them to be compliant. We’re
not about creating good inmates. What I want are good community members.
The last thing I want to teach a kid is how to be a good inmate. (Strecker,
2010)

Missouri’s juvenile justice system incorporates or expands on features of both the
Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative and Boys Republic models. In addition to
day treatment and other diversion programs for low-level offenders, DYS houses
youth who are committed to its care in small facilities with dormitory-style
accommodations. Like Boys Republic, each DYS dormitory, or “cabin,” houses
41
about a dozen youth, and facilities contain no more than four separate housing units
(Strecker, 2010).

Levels of security range from unlocked group homes for low-risk youth to those for
violent offenders that remain locked-down at all times, establishing a continuum of
care that aims to place youth in the least-restrictive environment relative to assessed
safety risks (Mendel, 2010). In March 2009, the author toured three DYS facilities:
The Rosa Parks Center, an unsecured group home for girls located on the campus of
William Woods University in Fulton, Mo.; the Fulton Treatment Center, a moderate-
security facility for boys; and the Montgomery City Youth Center, a high-security
facility for violent offenders. In each of these locations, none of the residents wore
handcuffs or uniforms, though there were dress code restrictions. DYS staff —
counselors and others with social work backgrounds — dressed in business-casual
attire and carried radios instead of weapons. In addition to a kitchen and sleeping
areas, each facility included a classroom, recreation areas and a library.

During a tour of the facility, residents of the Rosa Parks Center described group
therapy sessions with peers as a gradual process of 1) identifying emotions that have
triggered their delinquent behavior, 2) identifying root causes of those emotions, 3)
considering more productive ways of expressing strong emotion, and 4) setting
educational, career and lifestyle goals. “You have to figure out what led you here in
the beginning,” said a 17-year-old runaway who was arrested for theft and drug use
42
(Anonymous 1). Names of residents are withheld concurrent to state privacy
protections for wards of the court. Other girls who spoke during the tour had been
committed to DYS for crimes that included fighting and auto theft as well as drug
and alcohol abuse. All youth in DYS facilities are required during group therapy to
acknowledge and admit to delinquent activities and discuss the impacts of those
actions on themselves and their victims before exploring root causes for those
behaviors (Strecker, 2010).

Many of the youth committed to DYS have suffered physical or emotional trauma
prior to committing delinquent acts, said Strecker (2010). The 17-year-old runaway,
who had experienced several months of group therapy, described witnessing extreme
domestic violence before making negative peer associations and committing
delinquent acts:
I grew up with my parents fighting. Mom would be in the hospital with
broken ribs and a punctured lung. So I’d start rebelling and want the attention
on me. I’d go to friends for acceptance, because I wasn’t really accepted with
[my parents] fighting and being focused on each other. I thought if I could get
the focus on me, it would be OK. (Anonymous 1)

Because Missouri’s foster care and juvenile justice agencies are both administered by
the state Department of Social Services, workers in different agencies encounter few
barriers to sharing records across divisions (Strecker, 2010). DYS social workers
make assessments that include individual case history and assessment of mental
health, calling to mind Multidisciplinary Team assessments utilized by the Los
43
Angeles County AB 129 Pilot Project court. “We share a lot of information back
and forth,” said Erica Madison, a supervisor who handles case management for DYS.
That’s important, because we need all that information to adequately assess
what this kid’s going to need. We dig into child abuse and neglect reports,
family history, the kid’s history, any mental health issues they could have
going on. We want to have an accurate view of what that kid needs because
we’re going to go in and meet those needs. (Madison, 2010)

Residents of the Fulton Treatment Center described a range of therapy techniques
utilized in group sessions, individual sessions and visits with family members at the
facilities. A boy in Fulton described a “genogram” exercise in which residents draw
charts, like family trees, that connect past experiences to the delinquent acts which
resulted in their commitment to DYS (Anonymous 2). The teen also described a
technique he referred to as “drawing an iceberg,” in which one condition — his was
“anger” — rests at the top of a triangular chart, above a “surface” line, with triggers
for that condition noted in the bulk of the triangle below the surface. “People come
in with anger problems and they think they’ve just got anger problems, but it finds
out what’s beneath the anger: Why are you really angry all the time?” he explained
(Anonymous 2).

The 40-bed Montgomery City Youth Center, the most secure of the three facilities
toured, appeared to utilize similar techniques. During the tour, one teenage resident
also explained handmade “house” posters drawn by residents that he said described
the facility’s therapeutic methods (Anonymous 3). The posters each consisted of a
44
one-dimensional sketch of a rectangular house with a triangular roof, similar to what
a very young child might draw, but with boxy rooms and walls that each contain a
word relevant to the therapeutic process. The triangular roof represents an arrow
pointing upward toward desired self-improvement, labeled with the word
“CHANGE.” Vertical rectangular walls, holding up the roof on either side, are both
labeled “the group process.” The rooms of the house are labeled “self-discovery,”
“self-expression,” “self-disclosure,” “empathy,” “accomplishment,” “healing,”
“conscious choice” and “connectedness.” Listed on the foundation of the house,
finally, are: “safety,” “basic expectations,” “beliefs” and “philosophies.”

Youth often find the group therapy process more challenging than individual
punishment answering only to adult authorities, writes Mendel (2010), who
described group therapy as the most important element of the so-called Missouri
model. “Each young person spends virtually every minute, night or day, with his or
her treatment team,” he writes.
Youth remain under the watchful eyes of not only staff, but also their peers,
and they are held accountable by the group for any disruptive, disrespectful
or destructive behavior. Rather than facing isolation or punishment when they
act out, youth are called upon to explain their feelings, explore how the
current misbehavior relates to the lawbreaking that resulted in their
incarceration and reflect on how their behavior impacts others. (Mendel,
2010).

Two elements of group therapy present at each facility deal with alternative conflict
resolution. “Checking in” involves a twice-daily sharing of residents’ current state of
45
mind as a way to identify potential conflict and talk out solutions before tensions can
boil over, according to one DYS social worker at Montgomery City Youth Center
(Anonymous 4) who agreed to speak on background. When tensions between two or
more residents boil over, any resident is authorized to “call a circle.” In that process,
all members of a cottage must stop what they are doing to address the immediate or
impending conflict by encircling those involved and engaging in verbal dispute
resolution (Anonymous 3). Residents are also able to intervene in cases where
violence erupts. Youth are trained to restrain the threatening party by holding their
arms, legs and torso, avoiding joints and pressure points, until he calms down and
can rejoin and resume the conversation “circle” (Anonymous 4). Unlike use of
restraints and pepper spray by staff at juvenile halls, the responsibility for
maintaining group safety of residents is shared within the group. Youth establish
“safety through relationships and supervision, not correctional coercion,” writes
Mendel (2010). No resident has ever been injured during a group restraint, according
to Strecker (2010).

Missouri’s adoption of progressive juvenile justice reforms came after decades of
dismal conditions for youth in the state’s former Training School for Boys in rural
Boonville, Mo., a penitentiary facility established in 1889 and closed in 1983
(Missouri Division of Youth Services, 2008). Mendel (2010) writes that boys were
routinely beat up or beat up each other, with several deaths occurring in the facility,
46
before a federal investigation in 1969 condemned the facility’s “quasi-penal-military
atmosphere.”

Strecker (2010) began his career with DYS at the Training School for Boys in
November 1978, as the system was moving toward its current network of smaller
facilities:
The training school for boys historically had been just a very bad,
treacherous, dangerous place to be. There had been a number of reform
efforts over the course of about 80 years, none of them being that successful.
Folks knew what was happening wasn’t right, wasn’t good for kids, but just
plain didn’t know what else to do. (Strecker, 2010)

In 1974, Missouri’s Omnibus Reorganization Act created the Division of Youth
Services within the Department of Social Services, restructuring funding,
administration and objectives of the state’s juvenile justice system under a social
work framework. Without that structural reform, “it’s unlikely we’d be anywhere
near where we are now,” said Strecker (2010).
We wouldn’t have been looking at the rehabilitative process and recognizing
that these are young people who haven’t developed into maturity and have
vast potential to change. You really don’t recognize that under a correctional
system that is focused on punishment and compliance.

Santa Clara County’s Kumli said the social work aspects of Juvenile Detention
Alternatives Initiative diversion programs call into question whether social services
should play a larger role in the administration of juvenile justice for youth with child
47
welfare system backgrounds. “The 500-pound gorilla in the room is the relationship
between social services and probation [departments],” said Kumli (2010). “I’ve
never been comfortable that a delinquent act should change who a child is in the eyes
of the system.”

Continued pursuit of delinquency system reform is important to upholding a social
contract with all youth who come under its care, regardless of dependency status.
The first two goals of any successful delinquency system are to provide for
public safety and, even before you get to the rehabilitation of youth, to do no
harm to the children in the system. We would make such strides as a system
if we just insured what we did with kids didn’t make them worse than when
they first come to our attention. (Kumli, 2010)
48
CHAPTER 9
THE RECESSION’S IMPLICATIONS FOR CHILD WELFARE

The economic downturn that began with the collapse of the subprime mortgage
industry in 2007 has been measured in terms of increasing unemployment, shrinking
wages, rampant home foreclosures and severe reductions in funding for education,
health care and social-services safety nets for the poor.

The number of Americans in poverty, those living on less than $22,314 for a family
of four, climbed to 46.2 million in 2010 — the most in 50 years, according to a 2011
report by the U.S. Census Bureau (Lee, et al.). In California, 654,335 more people
joined the poverty roll between 2009 and 2010, bringing the total to 5,783,043
(Bishaw, 2011).

More and more families are poor, but less easily quantified is the recession’s impact
on the quality of individual lives — especially among children, who have little
agency to improve their circumstances.

The long-term impacts of the recession and commensurate cutbacks in government
services weigh heavy on the minds of child advocates who believe poverty is an
engine that drives the foster care and juvenile justice systems.
49
“You look at who is in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, and it is almost
exclusively poor children,” said attorney Carole Shauffer (2012), who for 18 years
was executive director of the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center.

One reason that experts believe poverty increases a child’s risk of needing social
services or criminal justice interventions is that parents who are poor have limited
resources in caring for their children.

A large number of child welfare investigations conducted by the Los Angeles
County Department of Children and Family Services are for allegations of neglect,
not abuse. In December 2011, 3,537 referrals to the agency — 29.4% of the 12,019
new cases that month — related to claims of “general neglect,” compared to 2,499
claims of “physical abuse” (20.8%) or 1,453 allegations of “emotional abuse”
(12.1%), according to department reports (DCFS, December 2011).

Unlike situations of abuse or severe neglect, “general neglect” suggests that a parent
is more likely unable than unwilling to provide proper care, said Miriam Krinsky,
former director of the Children’s Law Center of Los Angeles, which provides legal
representation for thousands of children in foster care.

“Neglect doesn’t always mean parents aren’t trying to be responsible. Instead it often
means that they don’t have the ability to provide for their kids in the ways those with
50
greater financial wherewithal do,” said Krinsky (2012), a past president of the Los
Angeles County Bar Association. “They could be homeless, or work nights, or have
to leave to go to work at the drop of a hat. Many are living in conditions that no one
would choose to live in.”

Another harmful result of economic pressure is stress.

Krinsky and Shauffer said stress is likely to increase the risk that parents abuse
alcohol or drugs, lash out at their children and become less able to provide strong
emotional and developmental supports. In struggling families, stress is often handed
down from parent to child: either directly, in the form of parental abuse and neglect;
or indirectly, such as a child witnessing violence or not having enough food to eat.

Intense and prolonged levels of stress are a poison pill that can have deep and
potentially lifelong impacts on children, the American Academy of Pediatrics
warned in a January 2012 policy statement (Garner & Shonkoff, 2012). The authors
argue that traumatic and chaotic living conditions can trigger a type of “toxic stress”
in young children that chemically alters brain function and disrupts natural brain
development, predisposing children to behavioral issues and health problems as
teenagers and adults.

51
“Poverty, food scarcity, parental depression, abuse, neglect — stress becomes a
mechanism by which all those early childhood experiences can affect brain
architecture, health and productivity down the line,” said statement coauthor Dr.
Andrew S. Garner, a Cleveland-based pediatrician and neuroscience researcher
(2012).

Garner identifies three basic types of stress responses. The evolutionary, or “fight or
flight” response, is a brief, instinctual reaction to momentary adversity that can be
intrinsic to self preservation. Tolerable stress is a more prolonged experience of
anxiety that eventually subsides due to other social and emotional supports. Toxic
stress differs from tolerable stress in that it “never gets turned off,” said Garner
(2012). “The brain is just bathing in stress hormones.”

Toxic stress is not a medical diagnosis, but a concept to illustrate the impact of
extended trauma on the developing brain. The underlying concept is that
environment impacts biology by causing inherited traits to develop or express
themselves in different ways.

“There’s an ongoing dance between nature and nurture with your DNA. Ecology
literally becomes biology, because it changes the way genes are read and the way the
brain develops,” said Garner (2012). “It’s like the difference between Chopin and
52
Billy Joel — it’s not the keys but the timing between them, what’s getting turned on
when.”

Toxic stress appears to inhibit the development of the prefrontal cortex, the seat of
abstract and long-term thought, by inflaming or over-stimulating the amygdala,
linked to threat response and pleasure impulses. Garner and Shonkoff write that
without relationships and other conditions that allow for healthy responses to stress,
the brain is left with “a biological memory” that predisposes children to unhealthy
lifestyles. Effects range from poor eating and exercise habits to substance abuse, or
from trouble paying attention in school to outbursts of violent and disruptive
behaviors:
Kids have too much amygdala to start with, and by having a traumatic event
— and by all means poverty is a traumatic event — that tips the scales. In a
child that witnesses violence or has food insecurity, that amygdala is on
hyper-drive. As it gets stronger and stronger, it’s really hard to turn off. A lot
of the things we think of as unhealthy lifestyles are probably coping
mechanisms that are effective in the short term but not in the long term as
ways for turning off the amygdala. (Garner, 2012)

Garner and Shonkoff make a biological argument that early intervention can mitigate
lifelong consequences for children who suffer abuse, neglect or severe poverty.

Unlike foreclosures, unemployment or decreased incomes, stress cannot be easily
quantified as a symptom of economic downturn. But Shauffer and Krinsky, who had
not read the report by Garner and Shonkoff, already feared that increased poverty
53
and reduced social safety nets will increase the number of youth who come into the
foster care system and the juvenile or adult criminal courts:
We find ourselves in a situation where more and more kids are more likely to
be observing these [adverse] circumstances, and by virtue of that become
more likely to engage in behavior that’s going to lead them into the justice
system. (Krinsky, 2012)

Krinsky, a lecturer at UCLA and Loyola Law School, is convinced that supports for
struggling families and early intervention in the lives of troubled children are not just
biological imperatives, but also societal ones:
All these social services cuts that state and local governments have been
making are the pennywise but pound-foolish approach, because we’re paying
for these kids and families eventually. As we cut away the safety net, our
response comes when they’re deeply involved in the system, rather than
upfront. The years of economic downturn and stress on families —
government cuts on top of that are devastating. We have yet to see the full
impact. (Krinsky, 2012).

Shauffer said the correlation between poverty and involvement in the juvenile justice
system has written itself into society’s DNA, resulting in limited or negative
expectations for impoverished youth:
When a kid [in juvenile court] is middle-class, people ask how this could
have happened — it’s a tragedy. When it’s a poor kid, they think if he didn’t
do this he probably did something else. We have such lowered expectations
that something we consider a tragedy for a middle-class kid is, for a poorer
kid, considered a way of life. (Shauffer, 2012)
54
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract In Los Angeles County, Calif., two agencies are responsible for raising children who become wards of the court. The Department of Children and Family Services intervenes to protect victims of child abuse and neglect, in some cases placing victims in the care of foster parents and group homes. The Probation Department is tasked with the discipline of children who commit criminal acts, utilizing facilities that include juvenile halls, group homes and probation camps. Many children who enter the delinquency system first came to the court’s attention through child welfare cases. A large number experience their first arrests in foster care, making an almost instantaneous leap from protective care to punitive custody. ❧ This paper examines the causes and consequences of overlap between the child welfare and juvenile justice systems and explores possibilities for reform. Research identifies child welfare group homes as catalysts for juvenile arrests, which especially impacts African-American youth, who are disproportionally housed in group homes. Foster children are also at a disadvantage in the delinquency system, often winding up in more restrictive settings because they are without permanent homes. ❧ L.A. County juvenile courts recently implemented reforms that allow some foster youth to retain child welfare status and access to its unique services despite involvement with the delinquency system. A number of other programs suggest greater reform is possible, such as remodeling juvenile probation facilities to prioritize delivery of social services.

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Mental health service use by children and youth in the child welfare system: a focus on need and predisposing factors and caregiver type

Asset Metadata

Creator Piasecki, Joe (author)

Core Title One-two punch: when foster care fails, victims of child abuse and neglect are raised by the criminal justice system

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism

Publication Date 07/26/2012

Defense Date 07/02/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag AB 129,African-American over-representation,Boys Republic,Child welfare,crossover youth,Department of Children and Family Services,detention alternatives,foster care,foster children,group homes,juvenile arrests,juvenile court,juvenile crime,juvenile hall,juvenile justice,juvenile probation,Los Angeles,Missouri Department of Youth Services,OAI-PMH Harvest,placement crime,social services,suitable placement

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Celis, William (committee chair), Fertig, Ralph (committee member), Parks, Michael (committee member)

Creator Email piasecki@usc.edu,piaseckijoe@hotmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-67160

Unique identifier UC11288302

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Legacy Identifier etd-PiaseckiJo-1013.pdf

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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