In Cincinnati, Hamilton County Juvenile Court administrators believe that a thorough start leads to a prompt solution.
Each family’s first hearing lasts an hour, as opposed to a few minutes in Chicago, and the aim is to resolve cases quickly while providing services to the parents.
In Chicago, standard procedure-even in less serious cases-is several brief hearings that may stretch over years, virtually guaranteeing that children will languish in a legal limbo while their parents go without treatment.
In Louisville, Jefferson County runs a Family Court pilot project.
Judges hear domestic violence cases and divorce cases on one day and child mistreatment cases on another. The judges often see the same family both days, giving them a more complete picture of the problem.
In both Cincinnati and Louisville, unlike Chicago and most other big cities, abused and neglected children find a system with the time and resources to protect them. As such, Cincinnati and Louisville are considered two of the few urban juvenile courts that experts cite as successful.
That is a far cry from descriptions of Cook County’s Juvenile Court, which a recent report blamed for the hanging death of 3-year-old Joseph Wallace last April. The court, which repeatedly returned Joseph to his mentally ill mother despite evidence that she could never be a fit parent, “surely consigned Joseph to his death,” according to the report.
In Cook County, where early attempts to resolve a case are rare, children find themselves caught in the system for years. Judges, without the time to thoroughly examine most cases, usually simply move each file along to the next hearing without looking for long-term solutions. Meanwhile, the system is suffocating under a growing mountain of almost 23,000 abuse and neglect cases that is approaching 4,000 per judge.
Of course, neither Hamilton County nor Jefferson County mirrors Cook County in terms of urban ills or caseloads at court; Cincinnati, in fact, currently has fewer than 1,500 children involved in open cases. Still, experts said that elements of both systems can work on a larger scale and should be considered in Chicago.
There is no one solution to local problems-and there is disagreement locally over some proposals-but anything that might increase the quality of justice might be worth trying, court watchers said.
While reformers applaud the coming infusion of additional judges, who are clearly necessary in Cook County and set to begin work here sometime next year, they also stress that more personnel should not become an easy substitute for other needed changes. Eventually, court watchers warn, even a bigger system could itself become overloaded.
The court also cannot be examined in a vacuum, they contend, separated from the community problems it is designed to resolve.
“The Juvenile Court has been asked to deal with delinquency or child abuse, and it tends to be the last bastion of addressing the failures of society,” said Howard Davidson, director of the American Bar Association’s Center on Children and the Law.
Some people who work in Chicago’s system, however, don’t think that local politicians have the will to change a bureaucracy serving almost entirely poor minorities. Aside from money, it will require the cooperation of myriad powers-including all three branches of government.
The key to Juvenile Court success, experts said, is using front-end services to prevent or resolve cases at the earliest possible moment-outside the courthouse if possible, or immediately after the first or second court hearing.
“If you want to stop the horror stories of babies getting killed, I think you have to start before you get into court,” said Kathryn McDonald, administrator of New York City’s juvenile court system. “The court is the last face on the totem pole when it comes to saving these families. . . . Prevention is the name of the game.”
Better housing, drug prevention and parenting skills are among the most necessary programs if child mistreatment itself is to be reduced, experts contend.
When the state’s Department of Children and Family Services does receive a report of neglect or abuse, experts said, the agency needs to weed out the less serious cases and then offer to help those families without involving the court system. That, of course, would require more resources for DCFS-and a level of trust in the troubled agency that many people are not yet willing to grant.
In Cincinnati and Louisville, however, that trust exists.
“If the family is cooperative, then we see no reason to drag them through court if they’re willing to do something we want them to do,” said Barbara Seibel, director of the Hamilton County Juvenile Court’s abuse and neglect division. “The cases that are hitting our court are very serious or the parents aren’t willing to cooperate at the front gate.”
Cases that do get to the courthouse, experts said, need to be evaluated and distributed based on their urgency. Abuse cases and serious neglect cases should still be heard by a judge. Less serious neglect cases and uncontested cases could be resolved by mediators, hearing officers or referees.
While tragic cases like Joseph’s receive the most media attention, the great majority are much less urgent.
In Cincinnati, Seibel said, nearly every new case is assigned to one of five “referees,” who gather information and propose solutions. The referees are hired by the court’s top administrators from a pool of lawyers familiar with juvenile court.
The system’s two judges sign the referee’s orders and hear appeals, of which there are few.
Seibel said that many new cases essentially fall out of the system after just one thorough hearing and that few come back. Most involve an agreed-upon set of services, such as drug treatment or physical abuse counseling.
In fact, Seibel attributes the Cincinnati court’s relatively small volume-about one-third the per capita load of Cook County-to the system’s combination of successful social services and prompt resolution of cases.
In Chicago, however, there simply aren’t enough services to go around fast enough and judges don’t have enough time to concentrate on individual cases.
Different jurisdictions around the country employ different mixes of judges and non-judicial officers, but each tries to make sure that judges and the “adversarial process” are used only when necessary. In Louisville, pre-hearing conferences that involve the lawyers and parents often save months later on.
Cook County Chief Judge Harry Comerford has said that he will ask the Illinois General Assembly to authorize and fund a staff of hearing officers, to help judges gather information and make decisions on permanent placements.
Judges in Cincinnati and Louisville, unlike those in Chicago, also bring most cases to a swift conclusion-sometimes within a few months and usually within one year.
“I need something in stone,” Louisville’s Judge Richard FitzGerald told one mother and grandmother who could not seem to agree on where a set of children should live. “I don’t want these kids to look at a calendar and wonder where they’ll be. I want some permanence.”
As often as possible, judges, referees and social service agencies in Cincinnati and Louisville try to reunite families so that children don’t suffer unwarranted and lengthy damage from separation. Many experts believe that Cook County judges and attorneys are too quick to remove children, largely as a result of Joseph’s death.
“If you’ve got a tree that starts to wither, I don’t pull it up at the roots to see what’s wrong with it,” FitzGerald said. “I’m pretty comfortable that we’re not taking kids into custody for poverty.”
But if a family can’t be reunified within a certain time period-and there are many like that, FitzGerald concedes-experts said the court should not hesitate to terminate parental rights and achieve a quick adoption. That “fish or cut bait” option also would ensure that a few cases don’t linger and drain too many resources.
Joel Bellows, one of the Wallace report’s authors, estimated that Joseph’s three-year case cost taxpayers between $300,000 and $500,000. According to the report, it dragged on because lawyers, caseworkers and judges focused on what Joseph’s mother had to accomplish before she could win custody, rather than recognizing that her case was hopeless from the start.
Other court watchers recommend drastic changes in the court’s structure, perhaps by unifying certain divisions.
The idea behind Family Court, officially endorsed by the American Bar Association’s “Children at Risk” report last summer, is to merge all of the relevant cases into one department. Proponents said that related problems, such as domestic violence, child abuse, custody, adoption and divorce, should be dealt with on an overall basis rather than piecemeal.
“What Family Court leads to is a connectedness between a judge and a family,” said FitzGerald, the main force behind Jefferson County’s 2-year-old experiment and a leader in Juvenile Court reform. “It’s one-stop shopping.”
Often, for example, a neglect case will involve a mother who also is trying to obtain a restraining order against an abusive husband. Later, she might file for divorce. At a Family Court, the same judge would hear each case.
Family Court also facilitates the transfer of information and prevents the replication of services, FitzGerald said. With a streamlined administration, proponents add, the structure might even save money.
And it probably would spotlight the problems at Juvenile Court.
“Rich people who are getting divorced should go to the same court as poor people and then I can assure you that there will be better resources in that court,” Davidson said. “The courts are broken enough so that you and I wouldn’t want to experience them in terms of our own children and families.”
He suggested that people might understand how poorly the system works if the battle between Mia Farrow and Woody Allen for custody of their children had played out in that sort of court.
Along the same lines, a Family Court would likely increase the Cook County system’s low prestige. Rather than the “kiddie court” or “judicial Siberia” that many now consider the worst possible assignment, judges and attorneys would be working with a variety of important subjects. That also might decrease the burnout and high turnover rates associated with Juvenile Court.
“You say families are important to a community, and you put the court at the highest level,” FitzGerald said.
A handful of states currently use a bona fide Family Court system, including New Jersey, Rhode Island, Virginia and Hawaii.
The Wallace report suggests a merger of Juvenile Court and Domestic Violence Court, but nothing more. Some critics of the idea say that a Family Court would be unworkable in Chicago because, like the current Juvenile
Near the end of the Wallace report, the authors offered their recommendations under the title of a “wish list.” Other critics are equally apprehensive about the prospects for long-term improvement, what with all the social problems fighting for attention and resources.
Leonard Edwards, a respected juvenile court judge in San Jose, Calif., looks at the problem as a front-end proposition of its own. Fix Juvenile Court, he said, and you’ll avert problems later on.
“If I was running the world, I’d have this at the top of my list,” Edwards said. “. . . But I don’t think Chicago’s urban fathers have the wherewithal to do it.”
