To the End of June : The Intimate Life of American Foster Care (9780547999531) (20 page)

And sometimes, when a caseworker doesn't know where to send a child, she'll put him in one of the city's “diagnostic centers,” which kids unequivocally hate. Mandated to sequester kids for a maximum of ninety days (usually after some sort of upset at another placement), diagnostic centers are generally serious, lockdown places designed for both restraint and observation. They're also designed to be temporary, but they're not always; even nonaggressive kids have been known to stay in punitive diagnostic centers for months and months.

The first institutional rung after a foster family is the group home. A group home is basically a modern term for an orphanage. Clusters of ten or twenty or sometimes more kids live together in group homes, with adults paid in eight-hour shifts to watch them. There are low-restriction group homes, and high-restriction group homes, group homes for gay kids, young kids, teenagers, kids who have been accused of sexual assault and so on.

But kids push and test their way out of the group homes too, and from there they go in one of two directions. If their behavior seems psychologically rooted (and sometimes if they've just broken curfew or run away), they may land in a hospital.
If the kids are rule breakers, or aggressive, or if they've timed out their stay in the psych ward, they'll be sent to a residential treatment center. This is the last stop on the foster care train. RTCs are locked, highly regimented facilities, often with their own schools. In New York they're outside the city, on large plots of land upstate, and they're the places where foster kids learn criminal behavior, because juvenile delinquents live there too.

Nationally, the RTCs themselves lack a set definition, but generally, they're places for kids who have behavior, psychiatric, or substance problems but don't merit psychiatric hospitals or correctional facilities. This is a pretty broad description, but it's all we've got: the General Accounting Office has claimed it's difficult to get an “overall picture” of the facilities because there's no standardized definition to differentiate them. Somewhere around 15 percent of kids in out-of-home care live in RTCs.

You've got kids who need families, kids who need criminal rehabilitation, and kids who need psychological treatment, all living together in upstate farmland, rubbing off on one another. One study that looked at 221 kids in New York RTCs in 2001 found that 41 percent came from a criminal conviction, 31 percent came from child welfare, and 28 percent had a history of psychiatric hospitalization.

A major problem is trying to meet such divergent needs all under one roof. Services can range widely: some RTCs may have group therapy; others may simply chart rules for behavior on the wall.
Despite one study that showed 83 percent of the kids in RTCs having serious emotional disturbances,
psychological treatment isn't regulated or necessarily overseen. In fact, there are currently no performance measures that the state of New York uses to ensure that the RTCs are providing a certain, regulated standard of care or supervision—in
any
category, psychological or otherwise.

Jonathan Cruz was raised by the city and state of New York. Remanded into care when he was five years old, separated from three of his siblings when he was nine and from his only remaining brother shortly after that, Jonathan was sent to a residential treatment facility at twelve. He skipped the group home phase completely; he never committed a crime but was placed in one of the toughest facilities for young delinquents—in an institution so violent and poorly managed it was later closed by the state. When this happened, Jonathan was sent to another RTC, where he was kept for five years until he became an adult.

I met Jonathan when he was twenty-two; he was slim and mild-mannered, if a little shy. He didn't know his heritage because he never saw his parents again after ACS removed him; he remembered his father being “short and bald-headed—yellow, really light,” and his mother was dead. Jonathan had golden skin and even more golden eyes; they glinted with flecks of rich brown and amber. His black hair was shorn close to the scalp and across his forehead in a sharp, even line.

Although he doesn't remember much about what his parents looked like, he remembers the fighting, and his first memories are of being “kept captive” in the two-bedroom apartment he shared with his parents and two younger siblings. (Two more babies were yet to come.)

“The first people I really remember coming into the house are the police,” he said of his early childhood—mostly, he figures now, to break up domestic violence disputes, though he also witnessed his parents using various drugs. He remembers that once, his mother threw him a birthday party, and his father burst through the door, furious for a reason he never understood. “He started getting violent, and throwing things, and people were running to get out of there. My moms and pops were going at each other with scissors.”

The police visits yielded calls to child welfare, and Jonathan and his siblings were removed. Jonathan was the oldest; the youngest three were adopted, and Jonathan and his brother went into foster care. By nine years old, Jonathan had earned a reputation as a troublemaker, mostly for sneaking outside to play with other kids. By twelve, he said, “all I wanted to do was play baseball, stay out late. Families didn't want me no more, and they ran out of options for me.” So Jonathan was ordered into a residential facility for juvenile delinquents. Except he didn't know it.

“They lied to me. I was with two social workers, who told me I was going into another home,” Jonathan said, anger edging into his normally neutral tone of voice. “We drove for like three hours and the next thing you know I'm in the woods, on this weird-looking campus, like an army training base. I see these big dudes, but also these teenagers running around like crazy.”

The “weird-looking campus” was the Holy Cross Campus of Pius XII, a 120-acre facility for boys ages thirteen to eighteen, in Rhinecliff, New York, named after the controversial pope who reigned during the Holocaust. “I remember crying for a couple of nights because it was so scary. These kids weren't my size. I was twelve and still growing—and in my eyes, the other guys were like grown men,” he said. “Here I was, going from thinking about cartoons, to suddenly being in prison.”

His description wasn't far off. In Jonathan's first two years at Holy Cross,
state police responded to three hundred calls and formally investigated ninety-seven criminal incidents, some of which led to arrests. There were cases of staff-to-resident violence, cases of assault, escape, and robbery, drug cases, and four sexual assaults by staff members.

“There was a lot of gang retaliation, stuff like that,” Jonathan explained. For him, the other residents were far more dangerous than the staff. Still, he knew he couldn't complain, “or I'd have a drill sergeant up my ass. I felt like I was sent to Iraq. Or hell.”

An official audit from the state comptroller's office reveals that staff members at Holy Cross didn't necessarily have the training to be sergeants—or group home employees. The nineteen-page document, detailing “unsanitary physical plant conditions, insufficient staffing levels, un-implemented recreation programs . . . and high levels of vandalism,”
also described a sampling of twenty personnel files. Fifteen failed to include a high school diploma—required for employment at Pius—and none indicated that references had been checked.

In 1996, Pius XII had contracted with the state agency, the Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), as opposed to ACS in New York City, to operate two campuses for delinquent boys: Holy Cross and another called Chester, in nearby Orange County. When the state caught wind of the allegations against Holy Cross in June of 1999, it conducted site visits at both facilities.
By August, the state required Holy Cross to come up with a “corrective action plan” to improve safety.

Despite all this, resident allegations of abuse and neglect surged during Holy Cross's corrective period—perhaps because residents sensed that finally they'd get some response.
Also, while under official scrutiny, Holy Cross fired a staff member for bringing a gun to work, and authorities arrested another for marijuana possession. And one more counselor was convicted of sexual abuse. In March of 2000, the Office of Children and Family Services gave Holy Cross sixty days to improve conditions. They didn't make it. Holy Cross closed its doors in May of 2000. By June, Pius XII shuttered the Chester facility of its own accord.

Jonathan was delivered from his “hell” when Holy Cross closed—and was sent to another residential treatment center. “I did five years there,” he said of his transfer to Graham Windham at Hastings-on-Hudson, as though it were a prison. A lot of foster kids talk about their placements as “doing time.” But Graham Windham was, for Jonathan, comparatively tranquil. “I saw pools, I saw trees, I saw girls, and there were these college-looking houses. And the staff people said, ‘Welcome.'”

Because I could no longer visit Holy Cross, I took a trip to Graham Windham. I tried to imagine being a thirteen-year-old kid like Jonathan, arriving for the first time—with no family or adult allies on the outside (his social worker, after all, had been the one who drove him to Holy Cross). About an hour outside of New York, Graham Windham sits on a forty-acre bluff, overlooking the Hudson River. Two schools, high school and elementary, are nestled at the bottom of a large hill, along with a gym. Little brick cottages with columns and names like Percy, Rogers, and Morris face a paved path that dips and circles around a grassy knoll, some boulders, and a scrappy basketball court. The numerous garbage cans scattered about are painted with the slogan “Show Your Tiger Pride!” for the school team. Jonathan was right; the place was pretty, and it did feel a bit collegiate.

But it was also an RTC—this one, an uneasy alliance of roughly 150 kids with very mixed backgrounds. About 35 percent were regular foster kids, 60 percent were kids who had committed crimes but were sent to Graham Windham as an alternative to juvenile hall, and the remaining 5 percent were a mix of special-ed kids and kids whose parents just sent them there for the restrictive environment. All of the residents attended the schools at the bottom of the hill, joined by another 135 day students who were bused in—all for special ed.

This educational model isn't unique to Graham Windham. Many RTCs have to tailor their schools to the lowest common denominator, or special education. And because kids generally can't leave the campus, special ed is all they get.
If they stay for years, the way Jonathan did, they're in no way prepared for college.

Jonathan arrived at Graham Windham not knowing a soul, and I imagined him trying to make friends. As I sat on a boulder in the center of campus, four girls with West Indian accents walked by carrying volleyball netting and shouting, inexplicably, “Lisa, Lisa, Lisa!” Five minutes later, they were back, still carrying the net, still calling for Lisa. They were circling the cottages. Some boys appeared and played a halfhearted game of basketball. One of the girls paused to single one out.

“What's your name, boy?”

The boy, tall and gangly, jogged up to her. “RudeBoy.”

The girl turned up her nose and went back to her friends. The boys, around sixteen or so, chatted as they took turns shooting the ball.

“I saw your girl; she went down on my nut.”

Shoot, dribble, shoot.

“Like some bitch-ass nigger!”

Shoot, basket. Shoot again.

I went up to talk to RudeBoy; he seemed approachable. Turned out, he'd been at Graham Windham only five days, which was why the Lisa girl asked for his name. When I asked him how he liked it, he shrugged.

“It's a facility, you know,” he said, his expression purposefully weary, as though he'd been asked the question a thousand times before, and he was tired of the paparazzi. “It's better than LaSalle School, because it's less restrictive, but you still gotta get a pass if you want to leave your house.”

The two other boys, who had wandered up to join our conversation, had also bounced around between facilities and agreed that Graham Windham wasn't as bad as some of the places they'd stayed. That didn't mean it was
good
, they stressed; it just wasn't as violent as other RTCs they'd known.

I spoke with one of the directors at Graham Windham, who said the campus didn't have any riots (unlike, say, the Randolph Children's Home, about fifty miles from Buffalo, where a dozen kids staged a riot in 2009
). The director also said that if a staff member was even accused of hitting a child at Graham Windham, he'd be removed right away.

The biggest complaint RudeBoy's companions had about Graham Windham was that it was isolating. “It's kind of lonely,” one of the kids, a light-skinned boy with pimples, admitted. “Especially because sometimes you get your own room. I guess the worst thing is, you've gotta stay here.”

“I've been here six months, and there's nothing really bad about it,” said his friend, a short Latino kid with disturbingly yellow teeth. “Except if you get modified [for bad behavior]. This means you get sent back before another judge and sent to another facility.”

Jonathan was never modified, and he grew to adulthood in the little brick cottages at Graham Windham. He told me he experienced the full range of emotions on the campus—“happy, sad, mad”—but at the end of five years, he didn't feel as if he had any truly close bonds with any of the counselors or staff—and he certainly didn't consider them family. His final assessment of Graham Windham was that it was “just a place to rest your head.”

What Jonathan didn't know was the cost of his headrest: in 2009, each child in an institutionalized placement facility cost taxpayers an estimated $210,000 per year.
This was about $156,000 more than a year of room, board, and tuition at Columbia University—the place where I teach, and one of the most expensive schools in the country. And after his five-year tenure at Graham Windham, Jonathan hadn't even graduated from high school. If Jonathan had been placed with a therapeutic foster parent, one who had been trained to work with psychiatrically troubled children, the cost to the state would have been half of what was paid out to Graham Windham.