Why Indiana's child protection system is failing (it's not for lack of money)

 Mary Beth Bonaventura’s letter of resignation as director of the Indiana Department of Child Services had all the subtlety of a ransom note. The message boiled down to: “Give DCS more money or children will die!”

For tax-and-spend liberals – like me – that’s an appealing message. But the facts don’t back it up. 

Yes, DCS is in chaos - but that’s nothing new.  It’s not because of stinginess. Indiana spends on child welfare at a rate well above the national average. And it’s not even because of the opioid crisis. While many places have struggled with that crisis, others have done better than Indiana.

Rather, it’s because decades of failed policy and expensive blunders left Indiana particularly ill-prepared to cope with the opioid crisis.

For many years Indiana has been an extreme outlier when it comes to taking children from their families. Year after year, Indiana tore apart families at rates far above the national average, and vastly above the rates in states that do a far better job of keeping children safe. By 2016, Indiana was consigning children to foster care at the fourth highest rate in America, a rate well over double the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

 The states that lead in keeping children safe know that far more common than horror stories about parents who beat, torture or overdose in front of their kids are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” Nationwide, 30 percent of America’s foster children could be home right now if their parents just had decent housing.  An Indiana University study  found that just raising the minimum wage by $1 an hour reduces “neglect” by 10 percent.

 Other cases fall between the extremes.  That’s why two massive studies involving more than 15,000 typical cases found that, in such cases, children left in their own homes typically fared better even than comparably maltreated children placed in foster care.

As for drug abuse, Indiana failed to learn from the last “drug plague” – crack cocaine. Researchers studied two groups of children born with cocaine in their systems; one group placed in foster care, another left with birth mothers able to care for them.  After six months, the babies were tested using all the usual measures of infant development.  Typically, the children left with their birth mothers did better.  For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

It is extremely difficult to take a swing at so-called “bad mothers” without the blow landing on their children. That doesn’t mean we can simply leave children with hopelessly addicted parents.  But it does mean that in most cases, drug treatment for the mother is a better option than foster care for the child. 

But because Indiana has responded to every family problem with a take-the-child-and-run mentality, it botched the response to opioids in two ways: First it emphasized taking away children while other states, such as Connecticut, bolstered drug treatment.  Second, Indiana failed to take a second look at all the cases that don’t involve drug abuse to see if those children really need to be in foster care.  Two counties in Ohio, the other state often described as the “epicenter” of the opioid epidemic, did just that – and they safely reduced the number of children in foster care.

In contrast, Indiana’s take-the-child-and-run approach does terrible harm to the children needlessly taken – and it leaves workers less time to find children in real danger who really do need to be removed from their homes.

It also does something else: It sends costs through the roof. The great paradox of child welfare is that the worse the option, the more it costs. Safe, proven alternatives to foster homes cost less than foster homes which cost less than group homes, which cost less than institutions.

So in 2014, the most recent year for which comparative data are available, Indiana actually spent on child welfare at a rate 24 percent above the national average.

Yes, Indiana still should spend more. But it also needs to spend smarter.  At a minimum, it needs a discussion of these issues that is more nuanced than a ransom note.

Wexler is executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, www.nccpr.org