For the Love of Laura

For the Love of Laura

When the Foster Care System Endangers Children

By Beverly R. Newman

"Only a mother's heart can know the depth of the loss of a child ... even when she is not legally the mother of the child. In G-d's world and under His law, I am Laura Clem's mother ... forever."

I was blessed for fourteen months to raise the most delicate little girl anyone could imagine--a tiny, young foster waif with soft features, a fragile body frame, and an ever-so-frail frame of mind. In November 1992, I had been given the name of a social worker in Maryland who had information on three Jewish children soon to be available for adoption. With vigor, I had pursued every lead to adopt them. The Clem children--Richard, Michael, and Laura--had spent two years in foster care after their mother's murder and their father's incarceration on theft convictions.

Why did my husband, Larry, and I, who lived in Indiana, go out of state to find children to adopt? We are always asked this question. The reason is a bleak indictment of the foster care system in America. As approved preadoptive parents, we were repeatedly told by our social worker from the Children's Bureau of Indianapolis (CBI) that Jews could not get children to adopt. "Why?" we asked. Since no records of their religion are kept (at least in Indiana), foster children are presumed to be non-Jewish, so caseworkers would close our file and refuse to change the children's religion.

In the depths of the foster care jungle, children fight for their survival, and professional "poachers" make huge profits from the plight of babies, teens, and young ones of every age in between. It is a dark, spooky forest full of danger for children and unsuspecting prospective adoptive parents. Children are the chattel and the capital in this forest, forbidden to public view.

Through layers of bureaucracy and blinding confidentiality laws, children like Laura Clem are concealed from prospective parents and controlled by professionals whose conflict of interest against a child's best interest are glaring. Paid "child advocates" and agencies under local and state contracts hold a stacked deck of data on a child's major life events and minor daily activities. They are the gatekeepers of the data, the primary decision makers, and the enforcers of tragic consequences for defenseless child wards. This picture is neither an exaggeration nor a mischaracterization of the status of child protection today.

125 YEARS OF 'CHILD PROTECTION'

The shocking case of Mary Ellen, a severely abused child ward of New York in 1874, spurred the creation of child protection laws in the United States. Seeking to rescue Mary Ellen from her cruel existence, a church caseworker, Etta Wheeler, was informed that neither police nor charitable institutions had the power to intervene. In desperation, Wheeler approached Henry Bergh, founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Since the child was a member of the animal kingdom, perhaps he could help.

Bergh's lawyers filed a petition in the New York courts, invoking a rarely used habeas corpus law. Mary Ellen was removed from her home and placed in Wheeler's custody, eventually living to the age of ninety-two. Moved by his experience in this case, Bergh created the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC) late in 1874. Two years later, the New York legislature passed An Act to Prevent and Punish Wrongs to Children. The NYSPCC was given the power to file complaints in court regarding child abuse, to investigate reports of abuse, and to remove children from their homes whenever it was deemed appropriate.

PERVERSE FINANCIAL INCENTIVES

It has been a long time since Mary Ellen's day, but the plight of America's "protected" children today is tragically similar to Mary Ellen's. The infusion of federal moneys into the realm of child protection spawned the rapid growth of state laws in this arena. In 1912, Congress created the Children's Bureau, which urged states to create child protection agencies. In 1962, federal welfare laws were amended to permit Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) payments to follow the children. If a county removed a child from his home because of allegations of abuse or neglect, the county became the recipient of the federal government check. The change in law also created uncapped funds for foster care costs. Even today, the New York Times has referred to foster care funds as "the last unlimited pool available for poor children." This is "the business of poverty [in which] corporations as large as Lockheed Martin and Electronic Data Systems are bidding to privatize an array of state [child] welfare services." Other corporations, which are successors of psychiatric chains that boomed in the 1980s and then crashed after scandals and lawsuits, are aiming "to take advantage of what [is] called the emerging market in public contracts for 'vulnerable, high cost populations,' like abused, neglected and retarded children."*1

The most significant expansion of the child protection system came in 1974, when Congress passed the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), which made millions of federal dollars available to willing states. Pursuing the money trail, states passed comparable laws to meet federal funding parameters. By 1978, all states had laws regarding child protection services, foster care, and the mandated reporting of child abuse and neglect.

A money-hungry system of "child protection" feeds millions of bureaucrats, caretakers, and service providers. A government report described the system as "service provider driven,"2 relying on contracted services from physicians, psychologists, therapists, attorneys to "represent" children, agencies to supervise visitations, and a horde of other professionals and nonprofessionals. Children are its inventory; but unlike a normal business operation, the accumulation of children accumulates wealth. It is an industry in which poor and minority children provide endless tax dollars for millions of people in huge corporations as well as for foster parents, physicians, and therapists. There are millions and millions of hands in the pie, tasting the sweet profits to be made from broken, dysfunctional children.

What happens to the offspring of poor and minority families in the "child protection" system? ... the opposite of what happened to the children of O.J. Simpson when their mother was murdered and their father put in prison. In this atypical scenario, where Dad was a prominent, wealthy American icon, the children were sheltered by family and friends. They were buffered from ugly realities to the greatest extent possible. In lower-class America, children are buffeted by hideous realities within the foster care jungle. They cannot escape and are intentionally hidden deep in a self-serving system that forsakes its charges to protect itself.

In 1991 little Laura, at one year old, was put into a filthy, dilapidated, isolated farmhouse in rural Worcester County, Maryland. This was her foster "home." Living in squalor, her welfare foster family, the Eubanks, received free breakfast and lunch for those foster children in school and collected about $30,000 per year to house their five foster children. The $30,000 was tax-free and did not include free medical, dental, psychological, and psychiatric services for the children.

COMPLAINTS IGNORED

Strewn with debris inside and out--rusted vehicles, animal excrement, and garbage--Laura's foster home had been reported for years by local residents. Complaints had been filed all the way up to the governor's office, but nothing had ever been done about the situation.

Laura's social worker, Anne Turner, testified in court that she passed the Eubanks' house every day going to and from work. In this tiny community, everyone knew that the house was unfit for habitation, but the tiny inhabitants--wards of the state--had voices unheard by their legal caretakers.

One occupant of the Eubanks' home was an adult biological son who was a habitual violent criminal. When the media finally exposed the filthy and dangerous living conditions under which Laura, her twin brothers, and other child wards had been forced to live for years, the foster house was closed down and mysteriously caught on fire a few days later. Five adults and five special needs children had lived in the two-bedroom house, licensed by the state of Maryland for twelve years.

Laura's foster care, adoption, and child protection agency all rolled into one was the Worcester County Department of Social Services (WCDSS), located in the same backwoods where America's most famous slaves--Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass--had been owned as chattel. It was the WCDSS that put Laura with the Eubanks and controlled all her foster care and adoption decisions. The agency's need to hide its indelible trail of child endangerment and mistreatment is self-evident.

The Boston Globe pithily reported the atrocities done to Laura:

"Maryland officials put Laura Clem and her two brothers in foster care after their alcoholic mother was killed. For two years, the children were repeatedly molested in their foster home. Examined at 3 1/2, Laura didn't know her own name, and bruises mantled her body.3"

A PLIGHT WORSE THAN DEATH

During our arduous adoption process, the WCDSS failed to inform us that Laura's brothers were sexually aggressive and violent. They were the victims of sexual crimes in foster care, and the victims had become the victimizers. This is a common consequence of childhood sexual abuse.

Even as a teacher of young children and a college psychology instructor, I had never heard of or read about sibling incest or child sexual predators. There is an unseen, unseemly world beneath the covers that is part and parcel of the foster care jungle. We had walked into the darkest part of this jungle and found a reality more shocking than fantasy.

The secrets here are well kept--by the social service bureaucrats, little cogs, courts, politicians, and media. When billions of dollars are at stake, the jungle keeps silent or, even worse, promotes deliberate dishonesty and well-informed inaccuracy. Deception and denial are largely responsible for the hapless, hopeless fate of millions of America's most vulnerable children. In Laura's case, it took months of internal and external pressures for the media to expose the child abuse within the child protection system. Media self-censorship and taboo topics are among the greatest threats to child safety in this country. Sibling incest and rampant child sexual predation are too taboo to make news in America, but they are an everyday reality in the world of foster care.

For the children of incest, their lifelong sentence as sexual objects is worse than death, for death is final but incest is incessant, especially sibling incest. A tiny two-year-old like Laura was no match for her six-year-old brothers. She was always at risk--a constant sexual object unprotected by adults paid to care for her.

Survivors of incest and childhood sexual abuse are among the most likely to commit suicide, abuse drugs and alcohol, and end up in prison. In California, 69 percent of those in prison are foster care survivors, many of whom have been sexually abused as children and state wards.4 This fact alone is the unspeakable crime of the century in America--that hordes of children used as sexual prey within a governmental system established to protect them from abuse are later incarcerated for crimes of rage resulting from their systematic abuse.

LEARNING TO LOVE LAURA

My husband is an attorney and an educator of children by choice. For years we ran a small, award-winning school in Indiana. It was a labor of love--long hours, low pay, and difficult children to "parent" as well as teach from 8 to 5:30 daily. We had one grown child and longed to share our life and home with more children. Foster children were our first choice because they could most benefit from our combined school and home life.

We were experienced with children who had serious learning and emotional problems, but neither of us knew anything about the true world in which foster children struggle to survive. For Laura, it was a world in which sibling incest was always looming. It was a terrifying world that gradually became more apparent to us as we watched our newly placed preadoptive children interact with each other. Laura screamed, ran away, and banged her head constantly on walls, floors, and wood furniture, while the boys pursued her, caught her, and touched her aggressively and sexually. It was sickening and frightening to confront a sight we never knew existed--little children being preyed upon by older siblings.

We stopped all physical contact between Laura and her brothers quickly after the children came to live with us in March 1993, but we soon learned that sexual aggression can take many forms, even in young boys. There was filthy language, incessant voyeurism, and sexual contact between the boys. We repeatedly explained to them that, although they had learned these behaviors from other people, their bodies were private and special. Our efforts were fruitless, because sex had become habitual for them.

Our dream of many years evaporated as we faced the hardest decision of our lives. We told the WCDSS that Laura's brothers had to be removed from our home and placed in separate homes where each of them could be an only child, to prevent them from continuing to sexually abuse themselves and other children. Our hearts hurtitterly and still do to this day.

All my life I had longed to have sons, and both Larry and I had cherished the ideal of a large, loving family full of children. Tragically, the family we finally gained included the one factor that we could not accept as part of our Jewish home life--incest and sexual aggression.

OUR TRAIL OF TEARS

From March 1993 until March 1994, we regularly made child abuse and neglect reports to the WCDSS and CBI--our adoption agency and local representative of the WCDSS. We documented and detailed the signs of child abuse that had been inflicted on the Clem children while in the Eubanks' foster house. The response of the WCDSS and CBI was first silence and then intimidation and harassment.

Because we were teachers, we were required to report any suspicion or evidence of child abuse, but even more importantly, we knew that the lives of other little children were in danger in the Eubanks' home. After many months of making oral reports, we filed a written report. Within an hour, the WCDSS threatened to remove all the children because we had put our report in writing.

Michael was returned to Maryland, and the WCDSS immediately put him in a mental institution for sexually abused children, where he remained for years. Richard was sent to a foster home in a remote isolated area of Maryland known as Girdletree. I don't know how many times I have grieved, knowing that although our decision was the only one we could have made, it was a bitter end to a beginning fraught with great hopes for the happiness of three suffering children. Yet the worst was still to come.

We were legally and morally bound to continue reporting about the Eubanks, and we insisted that the home be investigated, as mandated under law. The WCDSS and CBI communicated with each other for months on a daily basis via phone calls and faxes to silence our child-abuse reports by aborting our adoption of Laura. Both agencies conspired to remove Laura from our home in a surprise strike on Passover 1994. Social worker Trish Riedl's internal notes, obtained through court discovery, revealed the agencies' anti-Semitic plan. Michael Bishop, counsel for the WCDSS and CBI, advised the agencies not to provide us with advance notice of their intent to take Laura from us, so that we wouldn't be able to get adequate legal help to prevent her removal.

Through an ex parte court order--without any hearing--in Worcester County Circuit Court, Judge Theodore Eschenburg directed that Laura be removed from our home, the only stable home she had ever known. Laura had spent fourteen months with us, and we were the only parents she knew. As our daughter, she had had a loving older sister, family pets, darling preschool classmates, and a large extended family. She had a Jewish home life and two congregations that adored her. Now she was to return to foster care in Maryland--to officials who endanger her and to an extended biological family who refused to raise and protect her. How could such horrors happen to this innocent, fragile child in America? And the horrors were just beginning, for Laura and for us.

CONSPIRACY IN ACTION

My brother and I were one of two sets of Jewish siblings in our public school. We had always gotten along well with classmates, officials, neighbors, and the public throughout our lives. We had virtually never encountered any kind of overt anti-Semitism. Not until my interactions with the CBI and WCDSS did I comprehend the extent to which some will go to achieve their vindictive ends. There had been numerous anti-Semitic comments and actions by these two agencies over the years, none of which we had protested. Since Laura was also a Jew, the CBI and WCDSS showed no compunctions about ripping her out of our arms in the middle of the night; but because they were concerned about lingering "Baby Jessica" images on television and in print, they devised a foolproof plan to take Laura away through trickery and lies.

Finally, after we had lost our battles in the courts to keep Laura, Indianapolis Sheriff's attorney Chris Seigel knocked on our door at about 10:00 p.m. on Friday, May 27, 1994. Seigel insisted that he was at our home without any papers to take Laura away and that he just wanted to talk to us. It was a setup.

For nearly an hour we sat with Seigel in our home and documented Laura's imminent endangerment if she were to be returned to the care of the WCDSS. Seigel adroitly offered to call the Indianapolis judge hearing Laura's case, Charles Deiter, to get an emergency best-interests hearing to prevent Laura's removal. Wasn't it convenient that Deiter just happened to be in his court in downtown Indianapolis at 11:00 p.m. on the Friday night of Memorial Day weekend? We were too naive and distraught to then see the red flags.

After Seigel convinced us to leave Laura at home with a friend and Judge Deiter promised our attorney on the phone that he would not remove Laura--if he should choose to do so--until we had had a chance to return home and say good-bye, we left for the court. When we arrived, the court was crawling with sheriff's deputies. Deiter never entered his courtroom but took us straight to his office. He never wore a robe, never advised the opposing parties of the meeting, never had a court reporter record the meeting, and quite simply was just biding time until the media might leave our home and the City-County Building where they were stationed, waiting for a heart-wrenching story to unfold live before their cameras. This was another "Baby Jessica" story-in-the-making, and the media had been positioned outside our home since noon.

The media actually stayed with the case until 2:00 a.m. and stopped the presses at the Indianapolis Star to put Laura's late-night abduction by sheriffs and social workers on the front page of the morning paper, read by hundreds of thousands of Indianapolis residents and tourists in town for the huge Indy 500 race. Laura's tragic story upstaged the Indy 500, as great grief for this little waif filled the hearts of people from all walks of life. To this day, over five years later, we are regularly stopped by strangers and acquaintances concerned about Laura's fate in foster care. The image of a dark, overgrown jungle where children go in and never come out is appropriate for Laura's plight and for so many little children.

HOLDING HOSTAGES DOWNTOWN

About 12:30 a.m., Deiter proclaimed, "I will not relent!" This was the end of a child's hopes for stability and security. Deiter ordered his armed deputies to detain us in his office while Laura was taken out from our home. Deiter's previous disparaging comments about traditional Jewish observances were a key to the actions he was about to take.

As Larry and I stood there shaken by the extreme measures Deiter was taking against a tiny child and her prospective adoptive parents, it became increasingly clear that he delighted in his power to control the situation. Using a hand-held police radio, he commandeered the entire operation of Laura's abduction. For the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, the painless visage of a big-city judge personally directing the late-night seizure of a Jewish child on the Jewish Sabbath was a grievous flashback into my father's and my people's recent past.

Hours later, my father lamented, "These people are doing the same things that the Nazis did. It is no different than what we went through."

Our attorney, Larry, and I were heavily guarded--as if we could possibly have rescued Laura from a small army of officers twenty minutes away. We didn't even have a car to drive! Sobbing in pain, I could only keep crying out, "Something is wrong here." Again and again I repeated the words until I felt G-d's message. It was all so clear now. As I cried for mercy for Laura, Deiter laughed and joked with his staff. He relished his power.

G-d filled me with a sense of clarity, and immediately I began to demand to call the media. The female deputy responded caustically, unlawfully denying my requests. I continued to demand our release and regularly announced the passing of time. Although there were never any charges against Larry and me, we (and our attorney) were held for hours as political hostages by Deiter and his deputies. Meanwhile, little Laura was taken from a deep sleep at around 1:10 a.m. by sheriffs and social workers. Our baby had no belongings and no good-byes.

It had taken Laura fourteen months to begin to trust any adults besides us, and now her official adult caretakers were tearing her life apart. All her clothes, toys, possessions, and mementos were left behind. A room full of stuffed animal friends and a home filled with love became only memories for a child whose happy times were finally beginning to overshadow all the painful moments. Now ten years old, Laura has spent most of her young life lost in foster care, locked in the jungle like an animal.

THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH

For years Larry and I believed that child protection agencies and paid child advocates were champions of destitute children, that they were professionals filled with fervor for sheltering hurting souls. While this is an accurate image of some, the field is rife with those who love money more than children, status more than justice, and power more than almost anything. I hold a doctorate in education and child psychology and have coined a name for the condition that affects many professionals paid to protect children--"authoritarian control disorder." It works like this: The children's services jobs attract people with controlling personalities and tire people with altruistic motives. The field is full of people who enjoy control over others' lives and lacking in those who want to serve the L-rd and His vulnerable children.

A child like Laura is a gold mine to the child welfare system. As an unadopted, highly dysfunctional child ward, she can bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from age one to twenty-one or beyond. Here's how the New York Times described the child welfare situation on August 2, 1994:

"There is a perverse financial incentive [to keep children in foster care]. ... agencies ... are paid on a daily basis for each child that they are responsible for in foster care. The money goes to the foster families and to the agencies that manage the cases. ... Thus, the longer a child stays in foster care, the more money these agencies receive, giving them no incentive to move the children into adoption or back to their families."

FINANCIAL AND SEXUAL PERVERSIONS

The perverse financial incentives inherent in the foster careystem prod workers to put children into foster care and to keep them there as long as possible to get maximum funding. Monetary incentives encourage social service agencies to remove children from their homes, even with no real signs of abuse or neglect, because children are the inventory of the foster care system.

At twenty-three months old, Casey B. was gorgeous, healthy, and happy. Her pictures show a beaming baby. Two years later she looked like a rail--gaunt and pale. She had been in about a dozen different placements and had two dozen service providers, including physicians, foster parents, court-appointed attorneys, therapists, psychiatrists, and caseworkers. Casey's mental and physical health had declined from optimal to fragile while living in foster care limbo. Although neither of her parents had a substantiated child neglect or abuse charge against them, Casey's psychiatrist was prejudiced against parents with multiple sclerosis and strongly recommended against the right of Casey's mother, a victim of MS, to raise her. Casey spent four and a half long, lonely years "protected" by paid child advocates from the mother who loved her and kept her healthy the first two years of her life.

While in foster care, little Casey was sexually molested by a teenage boy. When she exhibited the classic signs of child molestation, the state of Indiana had her put into a hospital mental ward at age four. Her caseworker later signed her up to take a course in human reproduction. No action was ever taken against the teenage predator who attacked Casey in her foster home. This is the norm for sexual predation occurring in foster care. Toddlers and young children are typically unprotected from predators using them as sexual objects, and predators are commonly protected from legal consequences. In a Los Angeles court, county attorneys paid with tax moneys defended foster parents convicted of child molestation against lawsuits filed by the victims. A veteran foster parent said "the county policy appears to protect this insidious pattern of [sexual] abuse [in foster care] by a pervasive code of silence which includes all levels of county government," including the Department of Children's Services.5 The crimes committed by just one of the licensed foster parents included rape, sodomy, and assault and battery against toddlers as young as two years old, but not a single elected official, clergyman, or civil rights leader uttered a word of protest against the county's defense of the child molesters. Almost all the victims were black.

UNORTHODOX AND ILLEGAL THERAPIES

Because of their victimization in and by the system, foster children often receive drug regimens, psychiatric treatments, and foster placements that are substandard, untested, unsafe, and even illegal. One psychiatric treatment used on foster children is known as holding therapy, hugging therapy, or therapeutic hold, an approach that is controversial among professionals and the public. There are many varieties of this therapy, one of which calls for children to be restrained through physical force against their will. The idea behind the hold here is to scare the child into submission.

One foster parent seeking help for a toddler, who had been molested by her biological family, watched the therapist perform "holding therapy" on the little girl. He wrapped his long legs around her struggling body as she screamed and begged to be let go. The foster mom stood there crying while the therapist gloated: "Next time she doesn't obey you, just tell her you're going to give her holding therapy." To justify being paid for such violent treatment of the child, he diagnosed her as having "a possible mood disorder." With this diagnosis, he could make hundreds of dollars per week administering a legalized torture procedure.

In a scathing exposÄ of the mental health industry, especially Charter Hospitals, CBS News aired an hour-long hidden-camera documentary showing the brutal treatment administered to children by professionals and nonprofessionals in licensed facilities. It was a horrific inside view of mental hospitals, where legalized torture occurs on a continual basis. Children are taken into the hospital without being told where they are going or what is going to happen to them. When the scared children become hysterical, they are held down by as many as four or more adults, locked in leather cuffs, strapped to beds, restrained violently, and kept in isolation. These therapeutic holds or restraints have resulted in death from asphyxiation. Young Tristan Sovern died at Charter Hospital in Greensboro, North Carolina, when his therapeutic restraint became lethal.6

To watch the violent, abusive treatment of children in mental facilities is a sickening sight. They are needlessly traumatized by untrained or callous workers. The immediate and final results can be injurious or fatal. Tristan was the third patient to die in four months during therapeutic restraints in Charter Hospitals.

Hidden cameras starkly revealed the operative motive behind treatment protocols--money. One nurse, filmed falsifying hospital records, stated that she had to put down something negative about patients for the hospital to get its funding. She said, "It's a business thing. It's not like I'm lying. But I'll always, like, pull the negative out."7 In other words, a patient who is making good progress in his mental health can be a liability to a facility, because the money trail relies on poor prognosis and slow progress. Another Charter employee for over a decade said that she was taught during in-service training to focus on the negative about a patient "so that it would look like the person still needed to be in the hospital."8

"Charter is the giant of the nation's mental health business, admitting about 120,000 patients a year," 35,000 of whom are children and teenagers.9 Charter's nearly 100 facilities in 34 states took in over $300 million of taxpayer money from federal programs last year. This constitutes about half its income. Since Medicaid pays for the institutionalization of foster children as well as their prescription drugs and psychiatric treatment, it is safe to say that income from child wards can mean hundreds of millions of dollars each year to major mental health corporations. The daily cost of institutionalization can easily exceed $1,000. With the costs for care and drugs at such exorbitant levels, it is not difficult to discern how Laura Clem and Casey B. were human gold mines in the child welfare network.

The profit motive of mental health facilities is shared by foster care agencies. These agencies receiving a per-diem payment for each day each child is in the system are hardly motivated to move children into healthy, optimal placements as early as possible. A steady and growing stable of children is needed to ensure increased income, continuing employment, and job expansion for agency workers, administrators, and associated professionals who make their livelihoods servicing foster care children. Of all the services used on foster children, one of the most controversial is

known as therapeutic foster care, which is worth many millions of dollars to thousands of people in just Indiana alone.

A government report issued in 1996 noted that "two children requiring intensive institutional treatment may increase a county welfare budget by as much as $438,500 per year."10 This astronomical amount does not even include any state or federal tax expenditures. The numerous lobbyists backing therapeutic foster care look like they have dollar signs in their eyes. The popular prototype of this program is national in scope, permitting agencies to make exorbitant middleman profits on the backs of children doomed to spend years as income streams in therapeutic foster care placements.

The advent of therapeutic foster care in Indiana illustrates the out-of-control financial incentives deliberately built into the foster care industry. Without any legislative authorization whatsoever, therapeutic foster care was created in the early 1980s by the Indiana mental health services and continues operating to this day.

At a greatly increased cost compared with regular foster care, therapeutic foster care theoretically serves children with severe mental or physical problems. What exactly is the cost differential? Would you believe $231 versus $17 per day? Of the $231 per diem for one child for one particular agency, 84 percent goes to that agency, which is the gatekeeper/record keeper but not the caretaker. The foster family that (ideally) feeds, clothes, and watches the child twenty-four hours a day receives $37.

Can anyone imagine that an agency making nearly $200 per day for gatekeeping and record keeping for a child would be working diligently to stabilize the child and remove him from foster care? If there are such altruistic agencies, they must be buried deep in the foster care jungle.

In Indiana, therapeutic foster care essentially duplicates special needs foster care, serving the same populations of children with severe problems. Special needs foster care is billed according to a published rate schedule, ranging from $25 to $40 per day--a fraction of the cost of therapeutic foster care, which has no published or standardized rate system. In addition, there are no monetary restrictions or caps on therapeutic foster care, and no fiscal oversight by the state. Since 1995, the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) has refused to provide expenditure and revenue data concerning therapeutic foster care, even to Indiana legislators.

If money breeds corruption, then unlimited, unmonitored money means unbridled potential for corruption. In this case, the corruption is borne on the backs of poor and minority babies and children--America's children in chains.

APPALLING PERFORMANCE

In 1998, Indiana had its worst year ever for child fatalities due to abuse and neglect, with over one child dying per week. For its abysmal performance, the FSSA received a staggering amount of extra taxpayer dollars. The budget for its major abuse-prevention program was nearly tripled.

While the number of children in foster care continues to increase, the number of foster parents has declined. Between 1997 and '98, the number of foster children in Indiana jumped 13 percent--from 13,290 to 14,964--while the number of licensed foster homes dropped 20 percent--from 3,676 to 2,886. Nationally, licensed foster homes have decreased by 10 percent over the past ten years, while during the same period there has been a 90 percent increase in the number of children in foster care, according to the Child Welfare League.11 Despite the shortage of foster homes, the agencies retain their funding, and the children become the losers in the system. The critical shortage of foster families has led to dangerously deficient licensing standards in many instances.

SUBSTANDARD LICENSING SPELLS DANGER

In 1998, the WCDSS was brought into the Worcester County Circuit Court under grand jury investigation concerning the death of Shamir Hudson, a child placed by the WCDSS in a dangerous foster home that it had licensed. The case was eerily akin to Laura's:

1. Catherine Marie Hudson--a single African-American woman in her fifties who had little education and lived in an old trailer--was licensed as a foster parent by the WCDSS in 1991.12

2. On May 23, 1995, the WCDSS put three young African-American children--Shamir, Sharnea, and Shamale Goslee--into Hudson's foster care,13 and for this she was paid about $2,000, tax free, per month. (Maryland foster parents are paid the highest monthly amounts in the nation.14)

3. Buckingham Elementary School made its first child-abuse report concerning the Goslee children on April 18, 1996. Four months later, Hudson's adoption of the Goslee children was finalized. The adoption was subsidized, providing Hudson with thousands of dollars, tax free, per month for the care of the children.

4. From April 18, 1996, through November 13, 1997, eleven different witnesses filed twenty-six child-abuse reports in writing to the WCDSS and to the state's attorney in Worcester County concerning the Hudson children. Reports were filed by schoolteachers, the school nurse, the school therapist, the vice principal, several teacher's aides, and a few summer program workers.15

Reports cited signs of continuing severe physical abuse, including a busted lip, burn marks on legs, a bleeding gash on top of the head, a wounded shoulder, a bruise on the head, a knot on the head, a healing cut, a badly bruised back, welts, and a black eye.16 Once, Shamir reported that his adoptive mother hit him with a bottle. All reports were unsubstantiated except two, which "alleged that the previous foster parent and her son were responsible for injuries to the children"17 (even though the children had already been living with Hudson for two years).

5. In December 1996, WCDSS child protection staff met with the school staff "regarding the numerous reports of suspected abuse already filed with [the WCDSS] from the Buckingham Elementary School."18 The school principal later stated, "We made it clear to them, in no uncertain terms, that we feared for these children's lives. ... It was our strong conviction and our grave concern that these children's lives were in danger--not their health, well-being ... their lives. No one would listen."19 WCDSS officials told the school staff that they "were overreacting and that [the WCDSS] had seen worse."20 The staff was intimidated by orders from the WCDSS not to send children to the nurse or counselor unless treatment was needed, "not to do extensive questioning or investigating," "not to question caseworkers as to when they are coming to the school," and "not to make follow-up calls to workers."21 The WCDSS called the Board of Education, complaining that the school staff was harassing them. The school was "told that burns, cuts, bruises, and open wounds were not enough" to substantiate child abuse.22

6. In January 1998, the WCDSS closed the case. On March 24, 1998, Shamir died "in the Hudson household, a sanctuary arranged, approved and supervised by the state, a place that produced no fewer than two dozen reports of suspected abuse in the past two years."23 Police Chief Prentice Lyons of Berlin, Maryland, testified that "during my career in law enforcement, more than twenty years ... I have never seen a case more brutal than this. I have never seen such gross incompetence in an agency responsible for the welfare of children."24

Shamir's body was found in his bedroom, which was cold and virtually unheated. Nearby, Hudson's bedroom was well heated. Shamir's wounds penetrated to the bone, and some were years old.25

Shortly after Shamir's death, the WCDSS called a press conference to, in Police Chief Lyons' words, "announce that they had been cleared of any wrongdoing in Shamir's death by an internal investigation which did not include talking with anyone except themselves. During the grand jury investigation, WCDSS staff requested immunity from prosecution for their testimony regarding the case."26 In June 1998, the state's attorney granted immunity to the WCDSS.27 The state's attorney--who had been given copies of the twenty-six written child-abuse reports concerning the Hudson children when they were first filed--conducted the grand jury investigation, gave blanket immunity to the WCDSS, did not seek a single indictment against the WCDSS, and then sealed the testimonies and the entirety of the grand jury proceedings.

The Maryland Department of Human Resources (DHR) completely absolved the WCDSS of any wrongdoing in Shamir's case, declaring, "The department was found to be in full compliance of Maryland laws."28 Nearly a full year after Shamir's death, the secretary of DHR and the Worcester County state's attorney both testified to the General Assembly that there had been no wrongdoing by the WCDSS in Shamir's case. It was just a case of "bad judgment," and "bad judgment is not a crime," said the state's attorney.29 He constantly asked, "Where's the crime?" and rhetorically answered that "bad judgment is not a crime." He repeatedly claimed "confidentiality" when asked pointed questions about the grand jury proceedings.

Not coincidentally, the officials directly responsible for Shamir's tragic fate were precisely the same players in Laura's case. Had the state's attorney prosecuted the WCDSS staff for their crimes in 1994 in Laura's case--intimidation of mandatory child-abuse reporters, harassment, failure to investigate child-abuse reports, child endangerment, obstruction of justice by concealing crimes against foster children, and criminal conspiracy--Shamir's life might have been spared.

WHITEWASHING CRIMES AGAINST CHILD WARDS

The death of Shamir and Laura's ongoing tortured existence reflect the perceived worth of child wards by many officials who run and ruin children's lives. The mentality best described as "children as chattel" permeates courtrooms, police stations, and prosecutors' offices nationwide. These children are hapless, defenseless, voiceless, "fatherless," the Bible calls them.

"[The wicked] lieth in wait to catch the poor; ...And the helpless fall into his mighty claws. (Ps. 10:9--10 )"

Although these children are worthless in the minds of some, a child like Laura Clem is immeasurably financially valuable to the agencies, especially those with small caseloads. "[T]o the state, an unadopted 'special needs' child is valuable: the designation triggers a federal subsidy."30

With no living blood relatives to look out for her, Laura lives entirely at the mercy of the bureaucracy. Her bureaucracy is bigger than most foster children's because her case has tugged at the hearts of the public and pressured the highest officials in Maryland and Washington, D.C., to rectify the immense wrongdoings against this little girl. Any crimes committed against Laura can easily be concealed from the public, due to "child protection" confidentiality laws, which permit only child welfare insiders to be the gatekeepers of information concerning individual children. Laura has no family to follow her fate and protest her grotesque mistreatment--no family but us--and we have no access to her records or to her.

To date, all the crimes done to Laura of which we are aware have been whitewashed and the criminals protected; but G-d is great, and He will have His victory for the fatherless children. This divine promise is our sustenance day and night, throughout the hardest times. We have perfect faith in the Perfect One. His timetable will turn the tables when the time is right. My dear mother taught me that our actions have outcomes that can turn a situation around at any time. And indeed, the predators of the children shall become the prey of G-d Almighty.

"And the prey of the terrible shall be delivered; And I will contend with him that contendeth with thee, And I will save thy children. (Is. 49:25)"

THE PERFECT VEHICLE FOR CONCEALING CRIMES

There could be no better disguise for protecting perpetrators and predators than the popularized notion that confidentiality laws are necessary to protect the dignity and identity of children. It sounds so noble, but it belies the truth. Confidentiality laws in the child welfare system have become self-serving vehicles for professionals within the system and no longer serve to protect innocent children. In fact, child wards have become the human shields behind which adults stand, protected by the laws and rules that they author and enforce themselves, to their own advantage.

From the vantage point of a ward in the child welfare jungle, closed juvenile and family courtrooms account for the bulk of the potential and actual damages done to a child's life, because everyone inside the courtroom is typically employed or contracted by the state. There are no outside voices when you follow the money trail. Nationwide, closed courtrooms are the norm in child protection cases, and they are rarely ever opened. These cases are considered confidential proceedings, closed not only to the public and the media but also to many relatives, friends, clergy, and other parties significant in a child's life. They are shut up and locked out of the courts, while the little children are locked into the system for life.

In Marion County, Indiana, an electronic locking system and tight human-security presence keep all people in a huge waiting room outside the courtroom area until their case is called. No one can pass through the locked doors without authorization. On the other side of the doors is a secretive "society" where judges, social service workers, and state's attorneys associate and interact with each other all day long. They are the "regulars" in the closed juvenile courtrooms. Public scrutiny, the important guarantor of citizen rights and human rights in court, is starkly absent in juvenile and family court settings, often described as the courts of the Inquisition.

Like the Inquisition courts, adults are accused of crimes against children, but they have no right to public hearings, and children are separated and isolated from their families without due process. These are quasi-criminal courts, which can cost adults their children and cost children their lives, through judges' orders that frequently put children into known danger. It is a political system, and the children are literally political pawns. A judge who plays golf, dines, socializes with, or dates the professionals involved in a child's case can restrict all evidence presented in his court and preclude all witnesses with positions counter to those of the state. This poses an explosive potential for child wards everywhere in America. There are countless incentives to play ball with the state--financial, professional, and social.

In today's closed courtrooms, judges spend minutes making decisions--often based solely upon information provided entirely by the social services--that determine life, death, mental illness, or institutionalization, for a child. There is absolutely no system of checks and balances in place in the typical juvenile or family courtroom today, where child wards have become anonymous, voiceless, and vulnerable commodities. Hundreds of cases are heard each week in courtrooms in every state. Without the public's presence, the only decision makers in court are employed by or under contract with the state. This internal closed loop presents constant opportunities for ill-advised decisions and dangerous courses of action.

Children are revenue. Thousands of children mean millions of dollars directly and indirectly to increase the number of judges, augment court staff, enlarge facilities, modernize courtrooms and offices, raise salaries, and otherwise financially reward the hordes of players in the child welfare bureaucracy. Judges who play ball with the state and do not challenge state decisions are likely to receive promotions or higher appointments in the bureaucracy. The system substantially rewards the players who keep the ball going in the current direction of "children as chattel."

A "coffee and flowers" fund for the unmonitored, unregulated use of family court judges in Los Angeles contains a whopping $110,000, it was recently revealed.

"Emotionally distraught litigants are questioning whether a cozy financial connection between judges, attorneys and some court-appointed professionals [paid child advocates] in the City of Angels is affecting the outcome of their cases. Friends of the court are concerned that, at the very least, there is a strong appearance of impropriety."

"Private bank accounts that benefit judges are at the heart of this brewing scandal--one that state and local agencies resolutely have failed to investigate, adding further suspicion. Bank accounts funded in part by fees from local lawyers and others involved in the

family-court system are troubling litigants. Many feel it is impossible to know whether they're facing a judge who has benefitted financially from an attorney appearing before the court.31"

To make matters worse, the judges paid no taxes on the money, and child advocates had to pay into the fund to be placed on the exclusive list the judges use when making assignments for court monitors for children. The monitors are paid up to $240 a day!

Financial incentives that jeopardize the health and safety of children in the child welfare system can go straight to the top of state government. In Arkansas, ten political leaders and lawyers were indicted on corruption charges by a federal grand jury in 1999.32 The most powerful of the state's legislators faces up to ninety years in prison for four separate kickback schemes involving $5 million in state money for children's programs diverted to him and others.

INCENTIVES THAT MAKE NO SENSE

"Cockeyed incentives permeate the system. ... The longer kids remain unadopted, the more lucrative they become. ... [Foster children] are reduced to mere income streams. States typically claim that "special needs" render children unadoptable. To [adoption advocates] this is the ultimate heresy. ... Sick children. Minority children. Older children.33"

The foster system is thoroughly racist--warehousing minority children in massive numbers, grossly disproportionate to their ratios in the general populace. Even more blatantly racist is the stigma of the "special needs" label for minority children at the age of two versus majority children at age six. While paid child advocates argue that the additional funding for a family adopting a special needs child enhances the child's chance to be adopted, the opposite outcome is much more likely; prospective parents can easily be frightened by a negative label attached to a child, except for very compassionate families or for families seeking to adopt children with the most money attached to them. The latter are mercenaries, families for hire, concerned more with monetary benefits than with the human misery of little children. It is an appalling system that rewards mercenaries and punishes its own wards.

A black child two years old is automatically and permanently labeled "special needs" solely because of his race and age. A white child doesn't have this stigma attached to his name until four years later. Here we have legalized racism, rationalized in the name of helping children. State agencies are able to use special needs children in particular as long-term revenue sources via federal funding rules that increase per diems as children grow older in the system and as they become more dysfunctional. This sorrowful fate was the lot of millions of minority children and others over the last decades.

Laura was worth far more money in foster care subsidies at age six than at age one, especially because she had developed severe psychiatric problems from traumas suffered while in state custody. An additional financial boon to the state comes from Laura's Social Security money, received as a benefit from her mother's death--it is kept entirely by the state. Laura's money has not been put in a trust fund or in savings for her but has been expropriated by the state.

WAREHOUSING CHILDREN

In a service provider driven system, the lure of ill-gotten gain is intense. There are certainly children who need services to function in a healthy manner, and there are children who need to be removed from their families in order to be safe; but the child welfare system is overwhelmingly bloated, overrunning with little wards who must be warehoused somehow anywhere, whether safe, dangerous, clean, filthy, briefly, or permanently. It is sucking in and devouring families and children who have no reason to be in the system.

National studies have concluded that 50--70 percent or more of children who have been removed from their homes to enter foster care never should have been taken away from their parents. For a child dragged into the system without proper cause, the emotional damage is incalculable. Trite welfare-worker phrases, like "When in doubt, take them out," and "Err on the side of the child," do not in any way account for the damage done to a child taken suddenly out of his home and isolated from his family, friends, school, religious institution, and neighborhood when there was no real danger to the child. It does not take a doctorate in child psychology to discern that there are compelling reasons not to remove a single child needlessly from his home and not to put a single child unnecessarily into foster care.

Since, indeed, most of the children in foster care should never have been put in the system, and a very sizable number of wards become irreparably damaged by the system, consider the vast improvements to the foster care system by removing the profit motive. If financial incentives were removed, the system would shrink to the size that reality, not profitability, dictates. It would serve only the 30--50 percent of children who should truly be there. In therapeutic foster care, in particular, the loss of any child can mean hundreds of thousands of dollars less in income. Since 1995, my husband and I have vigorously and vociferously opposed therapeutic foster care, in which children are commodities for profiteering. We have testified against the current foster care system as child racketeering. Indeed, it is a grotesque racket built on the backs of poor and minority children. Without enormous middleman and service-provider profits, the incentive to keep children languishing in foster care and locked in "therapeutic" programs would be eliminated.

QUESTIONS OF CONFIDENTIALITY

In case after case, state agencies do not admit to "any improprieties" or wrongful actions by their agents, regardless of the results to children, even if fatal. The pattern is the same--internal investigations, steadfast denials of systemic problems, and complete absolution of responsibility for permanent or lethal damage to state wards. Maryland is a model for the entire nation--a sterling example of the worst of child welfare practices.

The sorrowful secrets of Maryland's wards are concealed or revealed at will by workers and administrators. At one stage in the child welfare system, children are hidden from loving relatives, friends, and clergy via confidentiality laws; then at a later stage these same children are openly marketed as commodities for adoption on the Internet, with their most private medical and psychological conditions available for duplication and dissemination in any public forum. The children's ability to yield adoption subsidies, transportation payments, and other types of monetary rewards are posted worldwide.

In their present applications, confidentiality laws are schizophrenic. Like other states, Maryland posts the photographs of children available for adoption and the intimate, embarrassing details of their lives--mental and physical disorders, medication requirements, family history, and behavioral problems--with 24-hour-a-day Internet access for millions of people around the world.

Thirteen-year-old Johnny is one of Maryland's "confidential" wards, but anyone can learn Johnny's "confidential" data and use the information to ridicule him at school or in the neighborhood. Johnny's treatments are all listed: therapeutic nursery services, special-education placement, day treatment, psychiatric hospitalization, therapeutic group home care, family and individual therapy, and medication. How embarrassing for this teenage boy! His diagnoses are abuse and neglect of child, ADHD, reactive attachment disorder, disinhibited type, reading disorder, and arithmetic disorder. Johnny receives Level V special-education services. Areas of concern are noncompliance, inability to stay on task, and using attention-seeking behaviors.

Not only would this thorough description of the details of Johnny's life discourage virtually 100 percent of potential adoptive parents from inquiring about him but it strips him of all dignity and privacy among his classmates and neighbors. Dissemination of the intimate information about Johnny could cost him immeasurable psychological damage and lead him to adopt other destructive behaviors or even commit suicide. Johnny's caseworker is confidential; his foster parents are confidential; and his judge is confidential; but Johnny is completely identifiable and exposed to the world. Johnny is a marketable adoption commodity, a full-color picture for pedophiles and prospective families alike.

Maryland's laws do not allow adults of any age access to their own adoption or foster care records. Isn't it a bitter irony that the same state that globally exposes a child's private history also denies adult survivors of foster care the right to see their own records? Surely these antagonistic perspectives and policies cannot reasonably be necessary to protect innocent children. One former child ward of Maryland wrote: "This agency protected my perpetrators 30 years ago just as they are trying to do today by trying to keep my case records out of my possession, using various forms of deceit hoping I'll go away."34

Before long, Laura may be looking to Maryland for the pieces of her life-puzzle, in a scene just like a longtime foster parent once described. She personally "saw a young man who had grown up in foster care knocking at door after door ... in a hallway of Florida's sprawling child welfare bureaucracy. ... At each office, he'd ask caseworkers: 'Does anybody here know me?' "35

Who has ever answered Laura's question, asked as she saw the only parents she had ever trusted being escorted away from home by the sheriff's attorney the dreadful night of her abduction: "My mother's crying, crying and crying. Why is Mom sad?"36 In the deepest parts of the jungle, a child's whispered question resounds from the darkness straight to G-d's ears, for He hears His beloved fatherless wherever they are hidden or lost.

LITTLE GIRL LOST

On Sunday afternoon October 9, 1994, we got a phone tip that Laura had just been spotted in Pocomoke City, Maryland. Hours later, led solely by G-d, we were in a remote area of the state, just a short distance from the Virginia border.

I asked G-d how in the world we could find our tiny child in such an obscure part of the country. Then we were given a guide, by the hand of G-d, who knew Laura and exactly where she lived. He led us for miles deep into the backwoods.

I don't know if my heart was beating or skipping or dying. We were right outside a house where my baby had been hidden from me and the rest of the world for the past four and a half months, but I didn't know for sure that this was really where Laura was being forced to live.

It was nearly dark, and I asked G-d if I was going to go to bed one more night without seeing my baby girl. We were ready to leave when we saw two jackets come out of the house--one blue and the other pink. My heart leapt. It had to be Laura and Richard. My feet ran across the road, jumped over the ditches in the field, and raced across yards of plant and animal wildlife. Immediately I recognized Richard, although his hair had been dyed platinum blonde. The little girl next to him I finally recognized as Laura. I was thankful that Larry was too far away taking telescopic lens pictures from the car to see his little girl up close. It was too sad.

Laura was vacant, slow, and severely dissociative--a serious psychiatric condition in which the victim detaches herself from reality. Her cheeks were bloated like a chipmunk's, a known side effect of at least one psychoactive drug commonly administered to child wards, the antidepressant Tofranil. The most efficient legal way to break children is to drug them. This is a premiere skill practiced wantonly in foster care. Her eyes stayed glassy for the fifteen minutes we had together. Her smile was fixed. She obviously was heavily medicated and remote from reality. Laura's hair, like Richard's, had been dyed blonde, and whereas once it was down to her waist, now it was chopped up to her ears. Months before, a child psychologist had warned the court that Laura's hold on reality was tenuous at best because of her severe early traumas in life. He stated in his report to the court that taking Laura away from us would cause incalculable damage, "which no amount of therapy could reverse or correct."37 Now his commonsense prediction was right before me in the flesh--a shell of a child who before her return to foster care had sparkled with enthusiasm and bubbled with laughter. Laura had been left a human shell in a pitiful place on earth.

Shell or no shell, drugged or healthy and alert, Laura was still my baby, and I promised her what I had always promised her, "Mommy loves Baby forever. Amen."

I spent a little while with my beloved child before her angry, hostile foster mother accosted me for talking to the children. She began screaming, threatening, and dragging poor Laura away, like a dog that had strayed too far from its master.

Who could even begin to imagine what lives inside Laura's heart and mind? Can anyone know her sense of confusion, betrayal, rejection, anguish, anger, abject fear, insecurity, and hopelessness? The thought of Laura's undeserved suffering constantly compels us to follow any avenue that may help to rescue her soul from an eternity of misery. For over five years we have contacted thousands of people--famous and ordinary--to notify them of Laura's unimaginable fate.

How could Laura ever know that we never abandoned or rejected her? A child whose emotional luggage stores the bitterest of fears of being unloved and unwanted will never feel whole, but this is the wholly untrue image that Laura's mind surely must hold. Poor Laura has never been allowed to see us or talk to us since I found her unsupervised and alone with her brother near the woods on that cold October evening.

I live to give Laura her childhood back--and to help all the little suffering children languishing as human chattel for profit and prey. It is unconscionable that a single American could not feel the frightening fate of the lost children within our midst and their staggering, lingering pain. Laura and her soul mates are broken babies--America's indelible blight and imminent curse upon the country.

CRIMES AND CONSEQUENCES

In April 1999, the Maryland General Assembly unanimously passed "Laura's Law," coined by legislators for the sake of Laura. It sets up citizen review panels for child welfare cases and child fatality review teams. In February, Larry and I had been called to testify on Laura's case before the Maryland State Senate. The legislators were shocked and appalled at the details of Laura's abuse in foster care. An amendment, introduced to effect Laura's long-overdue adoption by us, was killed by the combined efforts of the governor of Maryland, the attorney general, and the DHR; but the truth of Laura's continuing tragedy shall not die.

On June 25, 1999, the Indiana Court of Appeals formally chastised a small-town judge in traffic court who briefly and possibly illegally detained an affluent woman appearing before the court on a speeding violation.38 To the contrary, a few weeks earlier, the Indiana higher courts once again upheld Judge Deiter's unlawful detention of us in downtown Indianapolis. Some crimes have no immediate or apparent consequences, but crimes against children and families are written in G-d's history book. And G-d writes the history of the world from beginning to end.

Sometimes it seems like there is no justice in the law of the jungle, but there is divine justice in G-d's law and in His rule throughout eternity. We will continue our struggle to free Laura from the jungle.

Beverly R. Newman and her husband, Larry, have made legal history as the only couple to petition the U.S. Supreme Court three times in behalf of adopting a foster child from Maryland, Laura Rachael Clem. Newman holds a doctorate in education and child psychology and counsels survivors of foster care and childhood sexual abuse. The Newmans run a national volunteer organization that provides free services for children, the elderly, homelss, immigrants, inmates, and other needy persons. Newman works as the legal assistant for her husband, an attorney who represents families trying to adopt foster children or regain custody of their own children from the state.

Notes

1.Nina Bernstein, "Deletion of Word in Welfare Bill Opens Foster Care to Big Business," New York Times, 4 May 1997, A1, 26.

2.Tracy Williams, Indiana Child Welfare: The State of Our Children (Indianapolis: Indiana Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1996), 13.

3.Jeff Jacoby, "A Catastrophe in Foster Care," Boston Globe, 18 July 1995.

4.Brenda Scott, Out of Control: Who's Watching Our Child Protection Agencies? (Lafayette, La.: Huntington House publishers, 1994), 101.

5.Dennis Schatzman, "L.A. County Will Defend Foster Parent-Child Molestation Cases," Los Angeles Sentinel, 4 Mar. 1992, A1.

6."Unsafe Haven," 60 Minutes II, 16 June 1999.

7."Unsafe."

8."Unsafe."

9."Unsafe."

10.Williams, Indiana Child Welfare, 22.

11.Kathleen Schuckel, "Foster Care Crisis: 'Nobody Wants Me,' " Indianapolis Star, 25 Apr. 1999, A1.

12."How Did Shamir Die?" Daily Times, 12 Apr. 1998, A6.

13."Final Report for Shamir Hudson," testimony before the Maryland General Assembly, House Judiciary Committee, 3 Mar. 1999.

14.Deborah Sharp, "In Florida, a Challenge to Foster Care," USA Today, 14 Feb. 1995.

15.Melissa Midgett, "A Boy's Death Foretold," Daily Times, 21 Mar. 1999, B5.

16."Final Report."

17."Final Report."

18."Final Report."

19.Midgett, "A Boy's Death," A1, B5.

20.Midgett, "A Boy's Death," B5.

21.Testimony of Deneen Jones before the Maryland General Assembly, House Judiciary Committee, 3 Mar. 1999.

22.Jones testimony.

23."How Did Shamir Die?"

24.Testimony of Prentice Lyons before the Maryland General Assembly, House Judiciary Committee, 3 Mar. 1999.

25.Lyons testimony.

26.Lyons testimony.

27.Melissa Midgett, "Social Workers Get Immunity in Hudson Case," Daily Times, 13 June 1998, A1.

28.Melissa Midgett, "State Says County Not Negligent in Death," Daily Times, June 1998, A1.

29.Testimonies of Joel Todd before the Maryland General Assembly, Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee, 24 Feb. 1999, and House Judiciary Committee, 3 Mar. 1999.

30.Jacoby, "A Catastrophe." awmakers Indicted in Vast Corruption Case," New York Times, 28 Apr. 1999, A14.

33.Jacoby, "A Catastrophe."

34.Letter from Deborah, June 1995.

35.Sharp, "In Florida."

36.Andrea Neal and James Gillaspy, "Officials Take Girl From Home of Couple," Indianapolis Star, 28 May 1994, A2.

37.Bonding assessment by Jerome Smith, given as expert opinion to the Marion County (Indiana) Superior Court, 21 May 1994, 2.

38.Diane Frederick, "Judge Scolded for Image, Attitude," Indianapolis Star, 25 June 1999, B1.