CHRIS POWELL: If governor must testify, so must DCF

CHRIS POWELL: If governor must testify, so must DCF
Published: Sunday, August 29, 2010

Once again Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families has become an easy target. In July Torrington police found five young children living in squalor and excrement at an apartment with their father passed out drunk.

The police telephoned the DCF’s emergency line, were kept on hold for a half hour, took the children to a hospital, and eventually were told by DCF to give the children to their mother. Two days later the parents were arrested on charges of risk of injury and the children were taken away.

The department had already gone to court to seek custody of the children but maybe there were reasons for DCF case workers to think that the mother could handle things for the time being. After all, almost half the children in Connecticut are growing up without fathers in their home, a situation that probably should be the legal definition of child neglect when a single parent cannot support them financially, and public policy is fine with that. Connecticut is full of unmarried, unskilled, hapless women who are presumed able to raise five or more kids.

But the Torrington case was so bad that it seemed to require an explanation, so the General Assembly’s Human Services Committee called a hearing the other day in the name of getting one, only for the committee’s co-chairman, Sen. Paul R. Doyle, D-Wethersfield, to announce that no one would be allowed to ask about the Torrington case particularly, just about general DCF policies and procedures, lest the privacy of the Torrington kids be invaded.

Suddenly it was as if Connecticut was back in the mid-1980s, when newspapers started reporting DCF horror stories with alarming frequency, as kids were killed or maimed and the department denied and covered up in the name of protecting the children’s privacy, when of course the only protection meant and achieved was for the department itself.

Even its critics might acknowledge that DCF has come a long way since then, if in part because it was put under federal court supervision. The department is much more forthcoming about its troubles and mistakes, and measures of its performance are much improved, even if DCF still is the scapegoat for so much of the social disintegration that is caused by federal and state welfare policy over which the department has no control.

But this improvement is not enough, and Sen. Edward Meyer, D-Guilford, was right to denounce the Human Services Committee hearing as a cover-up and to walk out of it. “One reason why DCF remains such a dysfunctional agency,” Meyer fumed, “is that we’re not allowed to get to the bottom of things.”

DCF may not be quite as dysfunctional as Meyer thinks, but if, because of law and policy, even the legislature itself, the representative of the whole people, the maker of the law and the appropriator of funds, cannot determine what happened somewhere in the government, then that part of government is out of control, beyond accountability, and not really part of the government at all.

The privacy rationale offered by Senator Doyle and by DCF itself for foreclosing public inquiry about the Torrington case remains as bogus as it was 25 years ago. For not only are the children in the case too young — under 6 — to understand the proceedings or publicity, but their privacy was lost upon the arrest of their parents, arrests and criminal prosecutions thankfully still being public regardless of the consequences.

So if he is re-elected in November, Meyer should introduce legislation to require everything about DCF to be public in all respects from the start. This may result in disclosure of unfounded allegations or suspicions, as when a child turns up at a hospital emergency room with a gash on his forehead and the hospital has to summon the police or DCF to determine whether he really ran into a pole while chasing a football or whether his father beat him. But neither the news media nor the neighbors are likely to be interested in that stuff until there are arrests or DCF seeks custody.

Otherwise, as the Torrington case shows, the agency will be beyond accountability in the most crucial respects, the only such agency of state government. Six years ago the General Assembly refused to accept any limit to its authority to investigate state government when Gov. John G. Rowland tried to dodge a subpoena from the legislature’s impeachment committee. The legislature took that issue to the state Supreme Court and won. If even a governor must testify about his conduct of office, so must a DCF commissioner or case worker. This is an urgent matter of the most basic democracy.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.

READER COMMENTS
The following are comments from the readers. In no way do they represent the view of middletownpress.com.
Richard Wexler wrote on Aug 28, 2010 4:22 PM:
" Mr. Powell’s call for total transparency is one with which my organization strongly agrees. We also support expanding the current experiment in open court hearings in these cases in Middletown statewide and making it permanent. The reasons why this will benefit all Connecticut children are discussed in our Due Process Agenda on our website here: http://bit.ly/cnDQCe

But the only thing as bad as DCF’s stonewalling is Ed Meyer’s grandstanding.

He says DCF’s secrecy is why the Legislature hasn’t improved the agency – as if they have no control over whether DCF discusses specific cases or not.

But, as Mr. Powell points out, if the legislature really wants DCF to talk about individual cases they can do what lawmakers do – make a law. Several states have laws letting their child welfare agencies comment on individual cases when information already has been made public.

Instead, legislators like Meyer preen and posture – and terrify caseworkers into foster-care panic. You can bet they’re now rushing to tear apart more families needlessly,

One news account says DCF claims to have removed 2,300 children in 2009. If so, that rate of child removal still is above the national average, and far above the rate in systems that are, relatively speaking, models for keeping children safe.

And now it will only get worse, as caseworkers, afraid of being on the front page or in a legislator’s line of fire, rush to tear apart even more families needlessly. The alternative to leaving children with “unmarried, unskilled, hapless women” is consigning them to the vastly worse fate of foster care. Two studies of more than 15,000 typical cases found that, even when there had been actual maltreatment, the children left in their own homes typically fared better even than the comparably-maltreated children placed in foster care. It makes far more sense – and by the way, costs less to taxpayers – to give mothers the help and the skills they need.

Not only do such foster care panics do enormous harm to the children needlessly taken, they also overload caseworkers so they are more likely to miss children in real danger. That’s almost always the real reason for horror stories like the Torrington case. Foster care panics make all children less safe. Too bad that’s less important to Ed Meyer than grabbing himself another headline.

Richard Wexler
Executive Director
National Coalition for Child Protection Reform
http://www.nccpr.org "

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