STATE OF CHILD WELFARE SERVICES

    HEARING
    BEFORE THE
    SUBCOMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES
    OF THE
    COMMITTEE ON WAYS AND MEANS

    HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
    ONE HUNDRED THIRD CONGRESS
    FIRST EDITION

    JUNE 21, 1993
    CHICAGO, ILLINOIS



    STATEMENT OF DENISE KANE, INSPECTOR GENERAL,
    ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT OF CHILDREN AND FAMILY SERVICES

    Ms. KANE. My name is Denise Kane. I am the newly appointed
    inspector general for the Illinois Department of Children and Fam-
    ily Services. I have worked in the field of child welfare for over 20
    years. I have served as a juvenile court probation officer. I worked
    for 13 years in a settlement house. I was associate director for the
    Citizens Committee on the Juvenile Court, prior to accepting the
    position of inspector general. I was honored to serve my country as
    a VISTA volunteer in my college years. While doing this I lived in
    Baltimore, Md., in the George Murphy housing projects. My service
    was completed 6 months before the riots of 1967.

    Because of my experiences in the projects, I wish to begin my
    testimony by reading a passage from "There Are No Children
    Here." The passage is referring to the mother in the works.

      To LaJoe, the neighborhood had become a black hole. She could
      easily recite what was not there more than what was. There were
      no banks, only currency exchanges, which charged customers up to
      $8 for every welfare check cashed. There were no public libraries,
      movie theaters, skating rinks, libraries or bowling alleys to
      entertain the neighborhood's children. For the infirm, there were
      two neighborhood clinics, the Mary Thompson Hospital and the Miles
      Square health center, both of which teetered on the edge of
      bankruptcy and would close by the end of 1989. Yet the death rate
      of newborn babies exceeded infant mortality rates in a number of
      Third World countries, including Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, and
      Turkey. And there was no rehabilitation center though drug use was
      rampant.

      According to a 1980 profile of the 27th ward -- a political
      configuration drawn, ironically, in the shape of a gun and
      including both Henry Horner and Rockwell Gardens, a smaller but no
      lese forbidding housing complex-- 60,110 people lived here, 88
      percent of them black, 46 percent of them below the poverty level.
      It was an area so impoverished that when Mother Teresa visited it
      in 1982, she assigned nuns from her Missionaries of Charity to
      work at the Henry Horner. They had set up a soup kitchen, a
      shelter for women and children and an afterschool program. Where
      there used to be 13 social service agencies there now were only
      three***.

    How did such impoverished conditions come to be? The structural
    changes in the American economy, resulting in the loss of manufac-
    turing jobs has had a disproportionate effect on the northeast and
    midwest regions of our Nation. The broad shoulders of Chicago
    have slumped from these economic blows. The devastating effects
    from the loss of economic opportunities, the concentration of pov-
    erty and the loss of social capital in the black communities of Chi-
    cago has been analyzed by Julius William Wilson of the University
    of Chicago. The creation of the system of apartheid and housing op-
    portunities for our lower and working class families of color has re-
    cently been documented by William Massey, also of the University
    of Chicago.

    The effects of these phenomena must be taken into consideration
    when we look at families' capabilities to buffer the assaults of his-
    torical discrimination loss of meaningful economic opportunities,
    loss of the support of viable neighborhood social institutions and
    the draining of human capital. High rates of joblessness and con-
    centrated poverty in many of our inner-city neighborhoods are de-
    terrents to the formation of marriage. For the single-parent family,
    the challenges of parenting we exacerbated by the challenges of
    marriage survival.

    Joblessness and poverty create a context of hopelessness, leaving
    the poor particularly susceptible to the inhuman grips of drug
    abuse. The lack of social institutes in the ghetto create a double
    bind for those who become captured by the tantalizing promise of
    escape offered by drugs and alcohol.

    Unlike the wealthy families of the Northshore, who are able to
    combat their substance abuse with the support of social capital, the
    families of the inner city are left without the needed support of
    interventions. This distinction was demonstrated by Dr. Ira
    Chasnoff while at Northwestern University, in a 10-year longitu-
    dinal study, when he studied the effects of cocaine abuse on our in-
    fants.

    The majority of families that come before the Juvenile Court of
    Cook County are poor families of color. In 1989, the Legal Assist-
    ance Foundation of Chicago filed a lawsuit on behalf of these fami-
    lies. One of the main planners, James Norman was among many
    of the Chicagoans who was stripped of his livelihood with the clos-
    ing of the steel mills. Before the lawsuit, his family had only been
    offered housing in the projects. This was a man who put his chil-
    dren in maintenance schools and the 4th and 5th grader read at
    the 10th grade reading level, yet his children are removed from
    him and were not returned to him. He was given the projects as
    an option -- projects which have proven to be the shame of our Na-
    tion. It is pointless to consider the mission of a child welfare sys-
    tem without considering the economic and social realities in which
    these children and their families exist. We must know these reali-
    ties, recognize their impact on the lives of our children and par-
    ents, and provide leadership to address the problems associated
    with them.

    We cannot protect the welfare of our children without early inter-
    ventions and without shoring up the social capital of families dev-
    astated by distresses of poverty. We need day care and after-school
    programs; maternal and child health services, including home visit-
    ingprograms for new parents. We need paternal involvement
    projects, antiviolence programs, and drug rehabilitation programs
    with the foundation of sustaining jobs and affordable housing.

    The majority of parents who come before our court love their
    children. Their children look to them with love and seek the atten-
    tion and nurturing of their parents. In 1987 when I came to the
    Public Guidance Office, I was asked to identify some of the critical
    issues in the field. I recall an experience and a scene that I had
    experienced far too often in my settlement house work. Because of
    the lack of appropriate services, it was necessary to move children
    from their families. At times, the practice of removing children
    would undermine the integrity of the family's own system of caring
    for its members. I would have to take an infant from the arms of
    an older sister or brother. The children were separated from one
    another because there were few foster homes willing to take teen-
    agers and infants together. These children experienced the grief
    and mourning process of the death of their family.

    While at the Public Guidance Office, an older teen would call the
    hotline on her mother because her mother was a drug addict, and
    told me, if she had foreseen what would have happened to her and
    her baby brother while in the system, she would have never have
    called. She thought her family would have been given assistance,
    not torn apart. She had originally been placed with her brother at
    a shelter. While the teenager was away at school one day, she re-
    turned to find her brother gone. The baby had been placed in a spe-
    cialized foster home because he was scheduled for a minor hernia
    operation. No one had bothered to tell the sister. His sister was fu-
    rious, asking how her baby brother would feel when he woke up
    from the surgery and not have the arms of his sister around him?
    She sobbed that even her mother in addiction knew the importance
    of her brother's need for comfort. She clearly articulated that her
    best interest was intimately tied up to her family's best interest.
    If this family had lived in Wilmette and not in the Altgeld Gar-
    dens, her family would have had more opportunities, the necessary
    resources to support a family broken by drugs.

    I realize my time is done, so I will just go to my closing.

    We must be evenhanded in justice, even with the case of Joseph
    Wallace, and the anger and rage that we feel in our hearts because
    of Joseph's death. But, we have to realize that if the children of
    Mia Farrow and Woody Allen had been born in the Henry Horner
    projects or in the community of Lawndale, they would have been
    removed from their homes. These families cannot afford Fifth Ave-
    nue psychiatrists. Their hearings last only minutes. They will be
    the ones hurt if there is a witch hunt over the Joseph Wallace case.

    It is because of these realities that I join the National Commu-
    nity on the Prevention of Child Abuse in their support of the pro-
    posed Family Preservation and Support Act. I hope that the anger
    that is in all of our hearts because of the death of Joseph Wallace,
    does not deter us from mission of this act.

    Thank you.
    Home | Index