Product Description

The public guardian of Cook County, Illinois, charges that the child welfare bureaucracy, designed to help children, is instead helping to destroy them. Murphy explains the facts and failures of the child welfare system--and offers solutions--better than any expert I've ever read on the subject....A first-rate read--poignant and instructive. --Edward I. Koch

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #808829 in Books
• Published on: 1997-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 191 pages

From Library Journal
Murphy writes on a topic he knows thoroughly. After 30 years in various capacities as an advocate for abused and neglected children (he is currently the public guardian of Cook County, Illinois), he has seen it all. None of it is very pretty. Murphy has no illusions about our present welfare and children's services systems, offering an earthy inside view of why these systems aren't working and providing anecdotal proof of the failures. He feels our efforts are being misdirected in preserving families. Some families can't and shouldn't be preserved. Murphy states, "In the present system, the parent's victim status becomes more important than the child's neglect." He offers solutions, but will they be enough? For all social science collections. [For another view on family preservation, see Marianne Berry's The Family at Risk: Issues and Trends in Family Preservation Services, LJ 8/97.?Ed.]?Sandra Isaacson, U.S. EPA Region VII Lib., Kansas City, Kan.
-?Sandra Isaacson, U.S. EPA Region VII Lib., Kansas City, Kan.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Blunt and authoritative, another indictment of a child welfare system that jumps abused children from home to foster care to mental institution to jail like pieces in a manic game of checkers. Murphy (Our Kindly Parent, the State, 1974) is the public guardian of Cook County, Ill., a unique office from which he represents both troubled children and the elderly. He has seen generations of children move through the child welfare system, bouncing from foster parents to birth parents until the children too are old enough to have children and mistreat them. Murphy very carefully differentiates between families who are merely poor, struggling but with a future, and the families of the ``underclass . . . a dysfunctional fourth world culture that strangles its young.'' Using the first several chapters of the book to outline his own experience as prosecutor, Peace Corps volunteer, and Legal Aid lawyer--years of confrontation with the many aspects of poverty--Murphy goes on to disdain both the traditional liberal view of the poor as victims and the conservative message to let the poor ``rot at home.'' He has some serious questions about the family preservation policies that still drive most social service agencies. Some parents are irredeemably irresponsible, and children should never be returned to their care, says the author. Some modest proposals are offered that would in essence reduce the power of the courts in determining the fate of abused and neglected children and return those decisions to a reorganized child welfare system, modify confidentiality laws so that they no longer protect an incompetent welfare bureaucracy, and expand and bolster ``residential care'' facilities (orphanages, if you will). Short and pungent, designed to be controversial, here's a blow at the child protection system from a knight who's been in the fray a long time and knows the enemy. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
A powerful indictment of the child welfare system...its message deserves hearing among those who care about our society’s children. -- Elizabeth Bartholet, professor of law, Harvard Law School

A splendid book. -- Msgr. John Egan, DePaul University

Honest and self-reflective...written with wit and great knowledge. -- Boris M. Astrachan, M.D., chairman, Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago

Insightful and passionate...a book about responsibility and of how shirking it leads to social catastrophe. -- Ellis Cose, author of Color-Blind and The Rage of a Privileged Class

Wasted is a first-rate read—poignant and instructive. -- Edward I. Koch, former mayor, New York City

Customer Reviews

Raw, Honest, and Powerful
As someone who went through an international adoption I am all too aware of the cries of family preservationists. The blind and often deified "biological family ideal" and persistent efforts toward reunification DESPITE abuse and neglect are killing children in foster care. Murphy narrates the brutalities of the wasted - the children of the underclass that he coins a "fourth-world" whose conditions and prospects in life pale in comparison to any of the so-called third world countries he spent time in. He unapologetically offers a scathing indictment against the present "system" which fails the abused and neglected child while rewarding the predatory parents with family preservation programs that "...include intensive social work, parenting classes, a homemaker in the home for up to five days a week, deposits and even rent payments for new apartments, a psychiatrist, chauffeuring services, bus fare, babysitting, and cash money" (p.62).

Murphy does not advocate the abandonment of services and assistance for families in need, however, he states that "under family preservation, irresponsible behavior is rewarded; responsible behavior is thus denigrated" (p.81).

Another important discussion that Murphy calls for is the current practice of segregating black children from white foster parents. Even though MEPA mandates that race cannot be used as a factor for consideration of a foster family - it also leaves enough space for social workers to declare searching for a same-race foster family as being in the best interests of a child. This is an absurdity I will never understand in an era vehemently opposed to segregation of any kind based on race, class, or sex. I agree 100% with Randall Kennedy's assessment quoted in Wasted: "What parentless children need most are not 'white" parents or 'black' parents or 'yellow' parents but loving parents able to raise children in a nurturing environment (p.161).

The only reason I gave the book 4 stars and not 5 is that I thought the reader could do without some of the autobiographical information about Murphy's life. The chapter titled "A Third World Initiation" was not necessary and his credentials could have been highlighted without it.

The Plight of America's Unwanted
This book, written by a 30-year court guardian of the Chicago-area in Illinois, argues for the reformation of our child social services departments. Too many resources are being funneled into programs to keep families together, treating parents as victims and ultimately costing children their health (mental and physical), their childhoods (spent in prisons and psychiatric facilities), and sometimes their lives. Told in the form of anecdotes, case studies, and laced with statistics, Murphy presents his case forcefully that there should be more termination of parental rights and placements in adoptive homes and residential care facilities for abused children and less money in welfare agencies spent repairing parents and families that are beyond, well, repair. He makes a careful distinction between those who truly are down-trod by circumstances of poverty and livelihood and those who refuse ample opportunities to change themselves and their behavior, staying mired in their own world of misery which Murphy dubs "the underclass".

Tracing his own roots as a DA lawyer to his stint in Somalia as a peace corps worker and then back to legal services, Murphy shows how cultural changes have influenced the child welfare system both in terms of policy and how the children have ended up their in the first place. He is honest enough to admit his own mistake in initially arguing for the build-up family preservation services, but one cannot help but admire his courage and tenacity of conviction even if he is not, by his own admission, a team-player. I was intrigued by his take on the influence of politics on the child welfare system, and his belief that neither side is "correct": the conservatives neglect the poor to their own devices, while the liberals constantly defend the behavior of those viewed as "victims", ultimately steeping them further into a culture of dependency. He skillfully takes on the complex issues of class and race and the roadblocks they produce in terms of figuring out a child's best interest, without ever seeming racist or insensitive to the plight of the poor.

While I agree with the point of another viewer that abused children are not always poor and that there are perhaps fewer programs instituted to help middle-class children (whose parents may, in fact, have the money and means to dodge "the legal system"), I think Murphy's point was to define a certain subgroup of abusers, "the underclass" and expose how these people are often excused of their behavior due to their poverty, reduced prospects, and racial issues. Whereas abuse cases in middle-class families are viewed as isolated incidents, among poorer people, they are blamed on circumstance, which is, as Murphy points out, truly an insult to the majority of impoverished people who work very hard to raise their children despite limited means.

This is a short, crisp, to-the-point read. It is also a heart-breaking one. Indeed, perhaps the most persuasive part of the book is not any of the reality-based factual arguments about making welfare more self-sufficient, that schools can only help kids who are motivated by parents to learn, setting up a parens patriae court, or de-racializing foster homes, but Murphy himself, whose sarcastic comments about the system around him go beyond humor and becomes raw and bitterly, abrasive, reflecting the years he has spent dealing with innocents beyond hope who have no hope. One gets the impression he believes he is the only person who cares about these children, and perhaps he is.

Must read if you are in the field
I stumbled upon this book while looking for something related to foster care. I am a director of a small therapeutic foster care program and have been in the “child welfare” field for some time. This is the best text I have read on the subject. It probably makes much more sense if you are in the field. I not, you will not have a very good understanding of the topics discussed. My immediate thought was to share this book with coworkers. It is amazing how the sequence of events in Illinois in the mid 1990’s almost exactly mirror the last few years here in Connecticut. If you are in the field buy this book.