Testimony of Kenneth Wooden

FOSTER CARE: PROBLEMS AND ISSUES

HEARINGS
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON SELECT EDUCATION
OF THE
COMMITTEE EDUCATION AND LABOR
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
NINETY-FOURTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION

HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
SEPTEMBER 8, 1976

PART 2

STATEMENT OF KENNETH WOODEN, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL
COALITION FOR CHILDREN'S JUSTICE

Mr. WOODEN. I thank you, Congressman Miller, and I thank you for
your continuing interest and I commend you for these hearings. I also
commend the Congressman to your right. Living close to New York
City, it has been a sad pleasure to read what has been taking place in
New York City on foster care, and I commend you, Congressman
Biaggi, for defending children who cannot defend themselves.

I would like to submit my testimony for the record and just make a
few points to reinforce my testimony and then open it up for any ques-
tions that you may have.

[The statement referred to follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF KENNETH WOODEN, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL COALITION FOR CHILDREN'S JUSTICE
My name is Kenneth Wooden. I am Executive Director of the National Coalition for Children's Justice at 66 Witherspoon Street, Princeton, New Jersey.
For the past three years, I have been travelling the country, investigating conditions in residential child care institutions, including county jails and lock-ups, juvenile correctional facilities and institutions for the emotionally disturbed, through whose doors approximately half a million youngsters pass each year. The chronic neglect and, in many cases, the outright physical abuse inflicted on incarcerated children prompted the formation of a National Coalition to focus public attention on their plight and to work with other citizen organizations to monitor and upgrade the treatment of children in public care.
One of the surprises which I encountered in my investigation was the large number of youngsters lacked up and being denied their basic rights even though they had committed no crime. It has been my experience that there is little difference in the background and characteristics of these children regardless of whether they have been labelled "dependent," "neglected," "status offender," "CHINS" (Children in Need of Supervision), or "emotionally disturbed." There is some evidence that the number of youngsters labeled "neglected and dependent" warehoused in large institutions is declining but the numbers can be misleading. It is my impression that a shell game is being played with the labeling process, and that dependent children, relabeled "disturbed" or "hard to place," are being shuttled off to private, often profit-making institutions in ever greater numbers. Instead of orphanages, we now have so-called "treatment centers"--a "growth industry" which feeds on unwanted children just as the nursing home business depends for its existence on large numbers of the unwanted elderly. And, as is the case with the elderly, the systematic neglect and maltreatment of children in these facilities is being subsidized by the federal government.
The vast majority of youngsters in public care are cast-outs of an uncaring society, victims of parental neglect or abuse the effects of which have been compounded by their experiences with other social institutions, such as the schools, the courts, and even the "helping" agencies. A high percentage come from poor, minority families. Because of their early histories of deprivation and brutalization in the home, these children by the time they come to the attention of the courts or welfare, are in desperate need of personalized care and remedial attention. Not surprisingly, many exhibit emotional, physical and mental scars from their previous battles with life which make them poor candidates for placement in a traditional foster home situation. While babies and very young children, even from minority families, have a good chance of finding permanent homes if they can be freed for adoption, older children, especially those with physical or emotional problems, are hard to place. The public agencies often don't want abuse, foster care, etc.--leads inevitably to a bunching up of limited financial and human resources around that issue, and a corresponding lack of attention to other areas of need. Today we are reaping the harvest from a child care system that has been allowed to grow topsy turvy with no underlying philosophy to bring the various pieces together. In order for the federal government to play a role in bringing some coherence to the current child care picture, it will have to first get in hand its own procedures for developing, initiating and overseeing policy affecting children and youth.It is hoped that Congress can make some Progress in this direction in the next session starting with its own committee organization system.
The children are waiting.

Mr. WOODEN. I would like to give a little credit to a young girl who
opened my eyes to the interstate commerce of children. She was labeled
retarded. She was sent from Kansas to the State of Texas to a facility
that about 6 months prior to that was a nursing home and then it be-
came Cinderella Hall for children.

She gave me some poetry that she wrote, and there was one line that
was very moving and very accurate. She said: "From the cities dark
and gray, they send their children far away," and that opened my
eyes to my own former State of New Jersey where they ship 1,400
kids away to 19 different States, to 95 institutions. It opened my eyes
to Idaho shipping kids to Virginia, and Virginia shipping kids to
Idaho -- to around 15,000 kids that are being sent on jets all around
the country and kept in facilities that leave much to be desired, facili-
ties that have certain common characteristics. And I would like to
read from my testimony those characteristics and then I would like
to get into some of the conditions that I have found.

Basically, they are called "youth homes" or "ranches" with fancy
names like Cinderella Hall or Pleasant Valley or Happy Days. They
have fancy brochures with swimming pools and stocked fishing ponds
and tennis courts and the guarantee of the presence of full-time pro-
fessional medical staff. They are not photographs of tennis courts or
swimming pools. They are drawings. And, when you go there, they
do not exist. Or else a stocked fishing pond is a mud pond. The recep-
tion rooms for parents and State officials responsible for assigning
children hold impressive architectural renderings of planned new
facilities, most of which never manage to get constructed, most of
which are faded by the Sun over the years.

Drugs are used commonly to sedate and control large numbers of
their populations. Hard drugs are used to sedate kids that are in
there for smoking marihuana.

The owners, a lot of which I have seen and talked to, almost with-
out exception are smooth-talking businessmen. They make no bones
about it. The usually untrained and inexperienced State evaluators
are effectively beguiled by the structured tour, the tea, the pleasant
conversation, and the entertainment.

The staff turnover is high, usually around 50 percent annually.

The young kids are commonly referred to as "hard to place" or "not
the Sunday school kids".

Lastly, while profits and real estate expansion mushroom, the owner
is rarely accountable to anyone. Public audits are nonexistent. New
Jersey, the one State that now requires audits, will accept self-audits.
New Jersey is now getting into a monthly auditing report, and it is
because of that type of monthly auditing report that they have de-

47

tected one owner in New Jersey buying two very expensive automo-
biles which had little, if anything, to do with the treatment of children.

At this point, Mr. Chairman, I request the remainder of my writ-
ten statement be included in the hearing record. I would like to take
a few minutes of my allotted time to talk about some of the children
I met during my investigation and to describe the conditions in which
I found them.

I would like to use one facility which I went into about 3 years ago
and a facility that I went into about 3 months ago, and sadly illus-
trate that little, if anything, has changed in the case of these children
that we are paying a lot of money for.

In one place, in Tyler, Tex., there was a young girl from New
Orleans. She was in a bunk bed in a very large room, a room that
housed roughly 12 to 16 girls. And there were no windows in that
room and there was a lock on the door. She looked at me when I went
in and she said: "What am I doing here?" And I could not answer
that question, and that question is constantly being asked by kids say-
ing: "What am I doing here?" Kids who are supposed to be mentally
disturbed, but, for some reason, are not that mentally disturbed that
they can take care of the profoundly and severely retarded children
for 52 cents a month or maybe a high of $10 a month.

The girl from New Orleans had blankets over her and she was cold
and the temperature was 92 degrees. And I went, back to New Orleans
and I wanted to know why they were sending children there, and hope-
fully Cary W. v. Louisiana will answer that.

There was a boy in the same facility in another wing of the build-
ing, from Illinois, and he was in a bunk bed. At the foot of his bed
was a large can with n dead catfish in the can. And the owner of the
facility, who a year prior was a Federal drug expert and putting out
a drug magazine in Tyler, Tex., and receiving Federal moneys for
drug abuse, and who now is a child care expert, said to me: "That
is a very strange boy. He goes fishing and he only catches one fish and
he brings it back and he tries to keep it alive as long as possible."

They are lonely. They are neglected. They are abused by heavy
drugs, and, like in Michigan and Pennsylvania and in almost every
facility I visited, solitary confinement is a common practice. Not
sending them to their rooms for an hour or two if they act up, but
placing them in the closets and the solitary confinement halls, placing
them in there for days and even weeks at a time for minor infractions.

There was one place in Pennsylvania, a place I visited recently,
called the George Junior Republic, where in each cottage the boys
would be sent down to the cellar for prolonged periods of time with
nothing to do, absolutely nothing, 8, 10, 12 hours.

And in one of those cellars, there was a room, a small closet, and
inside the closet were the dates and the names of kids who spent
solitary confinement time there. And the young boys wrote on the out-
side of the door, quite appropriately, "The Charlie Manson Room."

I found that in the facilities, especially in Texas, there is just utter
contempt for families or what is left of a family. There was one case
of a child dying and the parent was notified 3 weeks later after the
death and after the burial.

In my opinion, aside from the physical horror that they endure
and the psychological horror, the horror that horrified me was the

48

overkill of Government and the lack of Government accountability.

A recent example was in California where, because of economy,
political economy, the Department of Health was cut back to such an
extent that, until very recently, the owners of the private facilities
could go to California, could certify themselves by mail and say that
they have read the licensing procedures and they comply with them.

I submit to you, Mr. Chairman, not sarcastically, but I submit to
you that is like putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank.

The Federal Government is not providing accountability and audit-
ing of Federal programs, and those that are dishonest and those that
are shady will take advantage of it.

I find it incredible that, when I was working in Virginia, Virginia
was holding hearings on title XX on what to do with their $6 to $7
million, and people flew in, the owners of private facilities, and they
attended that meeting. They knew when the States held their meet-
ings, and they are very interested in certain States like Virginia, be-
cause in Virginia, when I was there a few months ago, you could
purchase a facility and not be accountable to anyone. No audits are
required.

There are certain characteristics of certain owners of child care
facilities where no audits are required, and those characteristics go
like this:

You have a young staff that is paid less--about $5,000 a year each.
You have food that is inferior and starchy. You have facilities that
are not that great and not that clean. But yon have incredible real
estate investments and a few people are growing very wealthy at the
expense of the taxpayer, at the expense of the child they are supposed
to help, and at the expense of young people, college graduates that go
into those facilities with idealism and a desire to help and thinking
they can help and then burning out and moving on to other jobs.

I make a very passionate plea that you require audits of these
private child care facilities, because someone like myself or the good
reporters and the media---they can look at an audit and they can make
a determination as to how much is going for treatment and how much
is going for profit. An audit can tell us much.Without that kind of
information, we are left in the clark, like the children that they are
supposed to help.

Before I forget, I would like to read into the record a quote. It is
a quote that was made many years ago. I think it is very appropriate
for children in this country. It was a quote by Chief Joseph and it is
n quote that I would like to leave for the record for the Congress of
the United States:

Good words do not give me back my children. Good words will not give my people good health and stop them from dying. Good words will not give my people homes where they can live in peace and take care of themselves. I am tired of talk that comes to nothing. It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises.