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Friday, July 14th, 2023

Kids Awaiting Foster Care Placement Are Being “Housed” in Jails and Offices.

Author:     Eleanor J. Bader
Source:     truthout
Publication Date:     July 12, 2023
 Link: Kids Awaiting Foster Care Placement Are Being “Housed” in Jails and Offices.
Stephan:  

The United States simply is not oriented to making the wellbeing of Americans, particularly children, a first priority, and so we have hundreds of thousands of children in problematic situations. If you were an already traumatized 8-year-old how would you like to be taken to a jail because there was no place else to look after you. Or placed with some evangelical Christian family that beat you with a rod or a paddle when they thought you misbehaved, and tried to convert you. Do you think that might haunt you for the rest of your life?

Fencing and razor wire surround Clark County Juvenile Detention on June 23, 2021, in Las Vegas, Nevada. How would you like to be sent there when you were 8 years old? Think that might be a little traumatic?
Credit: Bonnie Jo Mount / The Washington Post / Getty

By age 17, more than half of youth who are removed from their homes will have an encounter with the legal system through arrest, conviction or detention. Critics describe this process as the foster-care-to-prison-pipeline.

But for many foster children, the pipeline is activated the moment they enter care. This is because child welfare authorities in several states are placing kids in juvenile detention facilities — as well as in hotels, casinos and offices — due to a shortage of foster homes. They literally have not found other places to send them.

According to National Public Radio, more than half of U.S. states have seen a decline in the number of licensed foster homes since 2021. Child welfare advocates blame several factors for the decline: people’s reluctance to take strangers into their homes […]

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1 Comment

  1. Rev. Dean on Saturday, July 15, 2023 at 3:20 pm

    I remember my Step-Father and even some teachers using paddles on me that had holes in them so they could swing them HARDER., and they left sores on my butt which I will never forget.