Wasted: The Plight of America's Unwanted Children

by Patrick T. Murphy

Overview

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

ISBN-13:	9781566631631
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/01/1997
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

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

Editorial Reviews

A splendid book.

Msgr. John Egan

Honest and self-reflective...written with wit and great knowledge.

Boris M. Astrachan

Wasted is a first-rate read—poignant and instructive.

Edward I. Koch

A powerful indictment of the child welfare system...its message deserves a broad hearing among those who care about our society's children.

Elizabeth Bartholet

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.

Kirkus Reviews

Insightful and passionate...a book about responsibility and of how shirking it leads to social catastrophe.

Ellis Cose