CHILDREN'S WATCHDOG FOR STATE SPEAKS OUT: says foster care and juvenilejustice shouldn't be a revolving door.

CHILDREN'S WATCHDOG FOR STATE SPEAKS OUT
Lawyer and former family advocate Gladys Carrion, now the commissioner
of the state Office of Children and Family Services, says foster care
and juvenile justice shouldn't be a revolving door. By Kendra Hurley
and Andrew White

http://www.citylimits.org/content/ar...med ia_type=3

The new issue of Child Welfare Watch, "Pressures and Possibilities:
Supporting Families and Children at Home," centers around New York City
trends, particularly how the city's major new emphasis on preventive
services – those that can keep a child out of foster care and a family
intact – affects more traditional child protection functions. It's a
complex interrelationship. OCFS Commissioner Gladys Carrión addressed
this and much more in an interview with CWW's editors.

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An attorney, Bronx native, and former member of the Child Welfare Watch
advisory board, Gladys Carrión has a reputation as a straight-talking
advocate and an expert on community-based services for children and
young parents. She has been executive director for Inwood House, which
runs a foster care program for pregnant and parenting teens, and Family
Dynamics, Inc., a Brooklyn-based family support agency. In 2005 she
became senior vice president for community development at the United Way
of New York City. Early this year, newly elected Governor Eliot Spitzer
appointed Carrión commissioner of the New York State Office of Children
and Family Services (OCFS). The department is responsible for state
oversight of local agencies that provide child welfare and child care
services, as well as protective services for children and adults. It
also manages the state’s large network of detention centers for juvenile
offenders. Commissioner Carrión spoke with Kendra Hurley and Andrew
White about her plans for the agency.

How much of your time is taken up with the juvenile justice side of the
agency?

A tremendous amount of time, because I have decided that’s going to be
my number one priority. What I found is that the juvenile justice system
in many ways is broken. And I’m committed to doing an entire reform
effort, really creating some systemic changes in how we work with these
young people in our system. It moved too much to a correctional mindset
and it’s all about order and safety. We put a lot of focus on having
these very nice facilities and making sure that we have structure and
control and safety. But how do we go beyond that? What kinds of skills
are we providing this young person? What is it that we are helping him
or her build to move toward adulthood and be successful, or succeed in
school?

I feel there are too many young people going into detention that
shouldn’t be in detention. Those that are there, we are not doing as
well by them as we should. We are getting a lot of misdemeanors and
non-violent young people going into detention. Maybe that’s not the best
approach. Clearly there are some young people that have done some pretty
egregious things. But at the end of the day, we need to provide the
appropriate supports they need to make sure they come back into the
community safely. They are coming back.

And I think that there are a lot of lessons that we learned in child
welfare that we haven’t transferred or learned on our juvenile justice
side. For instance, bringing kids closer to home, having more
community-based services, wrapping services around families. We need to
have supports in the communities, and we need to engage families and
prepare families so that they have the wherewithal to be able to support
their young people coming back home. We’re doing some interesting
re-entry pilots, but we need to bring them up to scale and have that cut
across all of our work.

Do you see a lot of overlap of the kids from foster care and those in
the juvenile justice system?

They are the same kids. I say this – and I probably should stop saying
this because I’m commissioner now – but I don’t want to be the pipeline
to prison. And it seems that that’s what I am, that I’m preparing them
for prison. That’s exactly what I don’t want to be. And we have a
recidivism rate of close to probably 75 percent to 80 percent. So
obviously something is wrong.

On the child welfare side, we’re seeing significant changes, especially
in the role of the preventive family support system. About 65 percent of
all cases handled by the nonprofit preventive services agencies under
contract with the city are now referred by the Administration for
Children’s Services (ACS) child protection field offices, far more than
in the past. Is this transforming the nature of preventive services?

You have to make sure that you address what the needs of the families
are. But it's not at the expense of safety. I don't think they are
mutually exclusive. All families need support. And so I want to make
sure that we're able to have services at a community level for families
to come in and be able to access the kinds of supports that they need.We
have to make sure that the staff has the skill set and access to
programs and services in the communities. I think that's the struggle,
to make sure that there are enough services in a community.

If the majority of preventive slots are taken up by referrals from child
protective services, does it become necessary for people to go through
an investigation before they can get support services?

I think it's a challenge. It's almost equivalent to the housing
situation where you need to go into a shelter to get an apartment. You
don't want to be in that same situation. You want to be able to have a
safety net at the community that really is there to provide help to
anybody when they come in.

How do we get there?

Realizing that this is not just OCFS or ACS. This involves many other
systems. It's just not government either.We need to look at the
faith-based community. We need to look at schools and the roles they
play and how to use their resources in a way to help create a safety net
for families.We need to look at the philanthropic sector. How are they
allocating their resources and their monies?

I think there is a realization that we have to make sure there are
resources at a community level that are not tied to child protective
services, foster care or kids coming into the system. And we have to
make sure this is fueled from a positive, strength-based perspective.
Families don't have to give up custody of their child to get mental
health services. In order to be able to get counseling, they don't have
to be a victim of domestic violence.

There's a bill in the state legislature to strengthen training for
professionals who are mandated reporters of abuse and neglect. Is this
something you have pushed forward?

Yes. We are developing an entire curriculum that's category-specific,
including one for teachers, so that mandated reporters really have a
better grounding on what they are looking for, to help them identify the
factors and the instances where they
really should be reporting.

Almost every day now, I am receiving a report of a child fatality. And
so I know some of the horrific things that are happening to children out
there. But we want to be able to intervene in those situations and only
in those situations. And where possible, we can provide for other
supports for families where children can be home safely. That's where we
want to be and we want to make sure that mandated reporters understand that.

Reporting a family, removing a child from a home or being part of an
investigation is a very traumatic event, not only for the family, but
certainly for the child. So I think that to the extent possible you
really should have as much information and knowledge as you can have to
be able to discern where it is that it's important for you to intervene.
For instance, if a child is coming into school and you see the child
eating all of the snacks in the room, that's an indication they are
hungry. So maybe the first step is not to call child protective
services. Maybe the first step is to be able to call that parent in and
talk to the parent, make a referral to a community-based organization.
Or if that child is in the after school program, you have to talk to
that after school program and see what they are seeing.

Another big problem is Connections, the state’s child welfare
case-tracking data system. Caseworkers complain about it relentlessly.

We are exploring ways to get out of the straitjacket we are in and
really move to a different platform. It is a huge, huge system. It can't
take many more users without some really long delays.

We have lots of problems with Connections. I have to say there are
pieces of it that work really well. But it's clear that we have lots of
problems with Connections. One of them is that we have to be in
compliance with federal requirements. We have to fit into what they want
us to do. They want one uniform statewide system. Schenectady is not the
same as New York City. Maybe we can afford to give that up. In return,
we will have the freedom to create a system that really is more
user-friendly, that addresses our needs to have information and case
records at our fingertips that we need to be able to do our work—but at
the same time allows workers, caseworkers, to really work with families.
That's what we want. So we are actually exploring, actively, formally,
with the federal government to really get out of their system.

Some time ago, ACS and OCFS were trying to get the Bush administration
to agree to a waiver that would allow federal foster care funds to be
used for preventive family support services. Will it happen?

We're still working on that. We have a Democratic majority, right? We
are working with the governor’s legislative staff to make sure it’s on
his agenda as he goes and meets with our federal legislators. It's very
important for us. We're hopeful that with the Democratic majority, the
city will do better. Certainly, child welfare is at the top of the agenda.

Child Welfare Watch is co-published by the Center for an Urban Future,
which is City Limits' sister policy institute.






CURRENTLY CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES VIOLATES MORE CIVIL RIGHTS ON A
DAILY BASIS THEN ALL OTHER AGENCIES COMBINED INCLUDING THE NSA / CIA
WIRETAPPING PROGRAM....

CPS Does not protect children...
It is sickening how many children are subject to abuse, neglect and even
killed at the hands of Child Protective Services.

every parent should read this .pdf from
connecticut dcf watch...

http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com/8x11.pdf

http://www.connecticutdcfwatch.com

Number of Cases per 100,000 children in the US
These numbers come from The National Center on
Child Abuse and Neglect in Washington. (NCCAN)
Recent numbers have increased significantly for CPS

*Perpetrators of Maltreatment*

Physical Abuse CPS 160, Parents 59
Sexual Abuse CPS 112, Parents 13
Neglect CPS 410, Parents 241
Medical Neglect CPS 14 Parents 12
Fatalities CPS 6.4, Parents 1.5

CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES, HAPPILY DESTROYING HUNDREDS OF INNOCENT
FAMILIES YEARLY NATIONWIDE AND COMING TO YOU'RE HOME SOON...


BE SURE TO FIND OUT WHERE YOUR CANDIDATES STANDS ON THE ISSUE OF
REFORMING OR ABOLISHING CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES ("MAKE YOUR CANDIDATES
TAKE A STAND ON THIS ISSUE.") THEN REMEMBER TO VOTE ACCORDINGLY IF THEY
ARE "FAMILY UNFRIENDLY" IN THE NEXT ELECTION...