It’s far too early to know just what happened in this case, but whatever the details, the facts so far are horrendous (New York Times, 3/31/11).
In Brooklyn, four-year-old Marchella Pierce was, over many months bound to a bed by her mother Carlotta Brett-Pierce, beaten with electrical cords, deprived of food and water and force-fed medication. Eventually, her abuse killed her.
Marchella’s maternal grandmother, Loretta Brett, watched the whole thing and did nothing.
The latest allegations by prosecutors claim that a child welfare caseworker, Damon Adams, and his supervisor Chereece Bell failed to make home visits and therefore didn’t know the child was in such grave danger. When the child finally died, they falsified records to reflect home visits and assessments of the child’s health that were never performed. Such at any rate are the allegations of prosecutors.
Both Adams and Bell have resigned from the Administration for Children’s Services.
But that’s not all. Brooklyn prosecutors have charged both Adams and Bell with criminally negligent homicide in the child’s death. Of course they’ve also charged the mother and grandmother with homicide.
Faced with serious criminal charges, Bell points the finger at Adams who points the finger at unnamed managers above Bell in the ACS hierarchy. District Attorney Charles Hynes is inclined to agree.
…Charles J. Hynes, made it clear that he did not believe they were the only ones to blame.
Mr. Hynes said he was convening a special grand jury to investigate “evidence of alleged systemic failures’ at the child welfare agency, the Administration for Children”s Services. The grand jury will seek to determine whether the agency had followed through on its plan for reforms after the 2006 death of Nixzmary Brown, a 7-year-old Brooklyn girl, one of a long series of abuse and neglect deaths that have pockmarked the city”s halting efforts to protect its large numbers of vulnerable children.
Meanwhile, ACS commissioner John Mattingly states the obvious, or at least part of it.
But he warned that charging agency employees with homicide could have a chilling effect on recruiting people to the profession, a task already hampered by low pay and a high rate of burnout.
“They are going into people”s homes all hours of the night and trying to do it in ways that keep them safe as well,’ Mr. Mattingly said. “If people who are interested in those kinds of jobs see this action taken by the district attorney, we have a concern, with social workers all around the country, that this will hurt our ability to recruit and retain talented people.’
From the sound of it, I’m not sure that Adams and Bell exactly fit the definition of “talented people,” but as I said earlier, the facts of this case aren’t all in by any means.
Still, he’s got a point. Child welfare caseworkers, as I’ve said many times before are overworked and underpaid. On top of that, they’ve got a very hard job to do, one that requires them to make decisions as weighty as who cares for a child and whether a child’s health or even life is in danger. That job would be tough with manageable caseloads, but, in all too many instances, caseloads exceed published standards.
So charging these people with homicide won’t exactly encourage others to apply for child welfare jobs. “There but for the grace of God go I” is a concept surely not lost on anyone.
The point Mattingly didn’t make is that criminal charges will unerringly make future caseworkers much more likely to take a child from a home than they are now. It’s one thing to lose your job because you didn’t take a child from an abusive parent; it’s another altogether to find yourself in prison for a long stretch with a felony on your record.
The point being that, as it stood before these indictments, everything militated in favor of taking children out of homes and placing them in foster care or group homes. That’s because doing so shows that the case worker is aware of the problem in the home and is “proactively” addressing it.
CPS workers never see their names in headlines for taking children from homes that turn out to be non-abusive. But woe betide one who leans a little too far in the other direction and the child ends up hurt or dead.
I’m certainly not defending what Adams and Bell did or failed to do. If the facts turn out to be as they now appear, the two were clearly negligent in the performance of their duties and a child was killed whose death they could have prevented.
What’s also true is that they didn’t kill Marchella, her mother did.
The larger picture is that family breakdown results far too often in single-parent homes which is where the great majority of child abuse and neglect occurs. For a long time now we’ve been pretending that intact families aren’t important to children’s health and wellbeing when we know to a certainty that they are.
Daniel Patrick Moynahan warned of the problems back in the 60s. He was called a racist. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead demolished all arguments in favor of non-intact families in her 1993 article in The Atlantic, “Dan Quayle Was Right.” And yet we go on as before.
With the huge upsurge in divorce and out-of-wedlock childbearing, something had to be done to protect kids and that something inevitably was the government. New York’s Administration for Children’s Services is one example of that. The District Attorney’s Office is another. Given all the problems of too little work, pay and training, can we really say that ACS does a better job than parents at caring for and protecting children?
Truth to tell, there will always be adults who aren’t fit to raise children. I’d bet good money that Carlotta Brett-Pierce is one of them. But what’s also true is that child welfare agencies can never do what intact families can do for children. Never.
So here’s a modest proposal. Let’s spend half the money we now spend on CPS and foster care on education about how to be a good parent. Let’s teach children from an early age that they shouldn’t have a child unless they’re ready to be responsible for it. Let’s inculcate the wisdom that being responsible for a child means the two biological parents staying together and raising it if at all possible.
Sadly, family breakdown makes child welfare agencies necessary. Let’s do what we know needs doing to make them less so.
Thanks to Tim for the heads-up.