On a recent Friday morning at Cook County’s Juvenile Court, the customary crowd of children and parents filled the waiting rooms like patients at a pediatrician’s office in flu season.
Meanwhile, only minutes before court began, attorneys raced to skim through piles of thick manila folders and to question social workers, children, mothers, fathers and other lawyers. They were trying to learn-or remember-the barest facts of some 40-odd cases that each judge would hear that day.
In one courtroom, an attorney quickly reviewed the file of a drug-addled mother who badly burned her year-old son on a radiator. It happened in February 1992, after which the woman’s three children were placed in their grandmother’s care. Five months later, the mother finally entered a drug treatment program.
But when a judge called the case and lawyers began to question the mother, it became clear that she never completed her counseling. Testimony also revealed that she had tested positive for cocaine in April.
After a hearing that lasted barely 10 minutes, Judge Stephen Brodhay put the children on track for adoption and scheduled a progress report for Sept. 9, 1994, 2 1/2 years after the original incident.
“I would think counseling should have been offered immediately,” Brodhay told the attorneys, his frustration clear.
Then the judge and the lawyers shuffled their files and turned to another one of the court’s almost 23,000 abuse and neglect cases this year.
Cook County’s Juvenile Court, like most other parts of the local children’s welfare system, is too overloaded, under-equipped and ill-conceived to fulfill its contemporary mission, experts say.
While Juvenile Court has been the subject of study for years, occasionally changing in small ways, the conclusions of a task force that investigated the death of 3-year-old Joseph Wallace have triggered a rare opportunity for massive overhaul-even though the boy’s case highlights only a handful of the court’s myriad problems.
Joseph was hanged in April, allegedly by his mentally ill mother, into whose custody he was repeatedly returned. In October, the special task force faulted the entire system for Joseph’s death.
The most recent highly publicized child-welfare case-that involving a 5-year-old Chicago boy brought to the hospital on Thanksgiving Day weighing only 18 pounds-never entered the Juvenile Court system.
But some observers, including Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy, charge that the failure of Illinois Department of Children and Family Services workers to rescue the starving boy somehow results from a message discouraging workers from putting more children into a court system that is already grossly overburdened. DCFS adamantly denies the suggestion.
Critics say the court has failed to adjust to new urban blights, such as the surge in drug abuse, and to advancing knowledge about child mistreatment. In the process, it has become a backwash of often ineffective, assembly-line justice for poor children.
“It’s one of the most under-resourced and disappointing juvenile courts in the country,” said Leonard Edwards, a widely respected juvenile court judge in San Jose, Calif.
On average, each of Cook County’s six abuse and neglect judges is now responsible for 3,800 cases.
Those massive dockets are one reason thousands of children drift from foster home to foster home, often for years, even though federal law requires a swift and permanent placement. Some children are pushed into dangerous situations, abused or neglected in the substitute care that is supposed to protect them. Others are merely ripped from any normal sense of family or home.
The real damage is not measured in a few murdered children, but in the countless others who get hurt every extra day that they are without permanent parents.
“Once in a while, we’ll have a great success story where we’ll get somebody off drugs or something,” said Kim King, who supervises the public guardian’s juvenile division, which represents children at court. “When that happens, everybody wants to cry. It’s like one in a million.”
Rather than tinkering-the Wallace report calls Juvenile Court “a huge, unworkable failure”-most experts suggest solutions that go to the core of the system’s framework and philosophy, including more judges, streamlining the county’s judicial structure, redirecting the normal flow of cases and placing a premium on family preservation.
Experts recognize that the court needs to spend more of its resources at the beginning of a case, to avert prolonged problems. They also said the crisis cannot be resolved unless larger issues, such as drug abuse, family breakdown and homelessness, are addressed as well.
Ironically, Cook County’s Juvenile Court was this country’s first and for years was considered the world’s model. Opened in 1899 by Hull House staffers, it was designed to separate delinquents and mistreated youths from hardened adult criminals and to act “like a kind and just parent ought to treat his children,” according to the court’s first annual report.
The low-rise black building at 1100 S. Hamilton Ave., Chicago, houses a delinquency division, for youths accused of committing crimes, and an abuse and neglect division. In all, Juvenile Court cost Cook County taxpayers some $34.8 million this year.
The current problems have been emerging over a few decades.
In 1978, two judges were responsible for about 1,400 abuse and neglect cases. Then a series of changes-cultural, legislative and judicial-opened the court to a flood of new families.
Drug abuse took off, leading to potentially dangerous parents and a new generation of cocaine babies. Now, observers estimate, 80 percent of the cases involve narcotics.
Society also began to recognize the extent and impact of child abuse. In 1980, the Illinois General Assembly set up an abuse hot line (1-800-25-ABUSE) and mandated that certain professionals report a wide range of suspected mistreatment.
Reports of abuse and neglect exploded, according to DCFS statistics, from 9,183 in 1977 to 167,610 in 1985 to 322,748 last year.
Also in 1980, recognizing the damage done to children in directionless foster care, Congress broadened the role of juvenile courts. Judges were to focus not only on a child’s immediate safety, but also on providing a permanent placement in a timely manner.
The issues that courts were expected to unravel became more numerous and complex. They also took more time to resolve and involved more lawyers, which meant that each case cost more.
“I think the way we came to this point is society decided it wanted to help children,” said Sophia Hall, the presiding judge at Juvenile Court. “I imagine they didn’t realize to some extent what was going on.”
New funds, in other words, did not keep pace with the desire to help children.
“Now Juvenile Court is given about the resources of a public aid office,” said Diane Redleaf of the Legal Assistance Foundation of Chicago.
Today, six judges handle nearly 23,000 abuse and neglect cases-or more than five times the average caseload in 1978. Work out the math a little further, officials there said, and you realize that each child now gets about 5 minutes per year.
The new cases continue to arrive faster than the old ones leave, though the gap has begun to narrow. In the year prior to Dec. 1, 6,379 petitions were filed, compared with 1,783 in 1973 and 3,544 in 1983.
“You obviously can’t have judges make intelligent decisions if they’ve got three and four thousand cases,” said Bernardine Dohrn, director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University’s Law School.
The court’s other players, including attorneys and caseworkers, find themselves struggling under similar loads. Often, the sheer volume makes each case look like a scripted play in which the actors know little more than their appropriate lines.
“There’s lots of people just going through the motions without really doing anything and nobody really responsible for it,” said Betsy Densmore, executive director of the Chicago Bar Foundation. “They’re paid to play their role, not to solve the problem.”
While most law deals with money or adult crime, Juvenile Court is expected to resolve the uniquely complex and sometimes horrific issues that surround young lives.
One new file, for example, involves a home that is littered with human feces. There were seven children, each of whom was born addicted to drugs and now display a slew of physical injuries. The report reads, “(Natural mother) is also foster parent. Private agency worker arrived to check on ward and found 2 yr. and 1 yr. bound by the feet with rope. Tied to a couch. . . . Mother was not in hse and there was no food.”
But there are also thousands of less serious neglect cases, involving problems that range from dirty homes to drug-addicted parents and babies to domestic violence. And while extreme cases like Joseph’s receive the bulk of media attention, the great majority are far less clear-cut. Many, experts say, could be resolved quickly if social services were available for parents who aren’t directly harming their children but who don’t have the means to care for them properly.
Heinous or not, few cases are easily resolved.
Generally, the process begins when a neighbor, relative or doctor calls DCFS to report a suspicion of abuse. Agency workers investigate the charge and, if they believe it is founded, file a case at Juvenile Court.
Four major hearings follow to determine whether the allegation is true and, if so, where to place the child. The 1980 federal law mandates that states must choose a goal for each child within 18 months, if they use federal money to help pay for the foster care. A new Illinois statute is even more stringent, requiring the same progress within 16 months and permanent placement within 18.
Generally, the available goals include a return home, adoption or long-term foster care. Even when a judge decides that adoption is the best route, however, terminating parental rights and finding a suitable new family can take years.
Congress set the 18-month deadline because developmental experts found that children should not remain in flux any longer. Specifically, researchers said, children without normal family ties generally suffer emotional, behavioral and academic disabilities.
The federal law, however, has generally been ignored in Cook County, even though DCFS still bills Washington hundreds of millions of dollars annually for foster care costs. Thousands of local children stagger through the system for three or four years, some of them shuttled from foster home to foster home every few months. A few children, usually adolescents, have had as many as 50 different placements.
Many state wards are even coming to court as the parents now, 10 or 15 years after they first entered the system themselves.
In addition, some court critics contend, Juvenile Court judges and attorneys are too quick to remove children from their biological parents. That reflects two realities: a desire to avoid risk in the wake of Joseph’s death and a lack of resources with which to rehabilitate parents.
Since 1988, the number of Cook County children in some kind of substitute care has increased from 9,881 to 26,196.
And while the 1980 federal law also requires that judges determine if DCFS has made “reasonable efforts” to prevent substitute placement, that part of the legislation is also widely ignored here.
Part of the problem lies outside Juvenile Court. While judges would like to help families immediately, they often are impeded by local service agencies already swamped by clients of their own.
And so the cases drag on, even as the chance of success decreases with the passing months.
“Children are becoming bonded to the people that DCFS gives them to,” King said. “In the meantime, the decisions of whether they should go home are being put off and off and off.
“Do you remember what summer vacation was like as a kid? It was forever. That’s what this is like for a kid.”
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Next: How juvenile court practices in other cities could be applied here.
