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.
Patrick T. Murphy is Public Guardian of Cook County, Illinois, an office unique in the United States. He has also written Our Kindly Parent—the State and among many honors has received the Juvenile Justice Award of the American Bar Association and Criminal Justice Award of the governor of Illinois.
Table of Contents
Part 1 Acknowledgements 7 Part 2 Foreword 13 Part 3 A Third World Initiation 27 Part 4 Learning the System 37 Part 5 Preserving Families, Killing Children 58 Part 6 The Underclass 85 Part 7 The Confidentiality Game 113 Part 8 New Realities 129 Part 9 Wrong Race, Wrong Place 147 Part 10 Orphans in a Strom 162 Part 11 Ideology and Reality 174 Part 12 Index 185
What People are Saying About This
Msgr. John Egan
A splendid book. DePaul University
Elizabeth Bartholet
A powerful indictment of the child welfare system...its message deserves a broad hearing among those who care about our society's children. professor of law, Harvard Law School
Boris M. Astrachan M.D.
Honest and self-reflective...written with wit and great knowledge. Chairman Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago
Ellis Cose
Insightful and passionate...a book about responsibility and of how shirking it leads to social catastrophe. author of Color-Blind and The Rage of a Privileged Class
Edward I. Koch
Wasted is a first-rate read-poignant and instructive. former mayor, New York City