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Five years ago, there were about a quarter of a million children in the country's foster-care systems. Today that number has doubled, to between 550,000 and 560,000 children. Often these are held hostage to abuse and neglect, to bureaucratic foul-ups and carelessness, condemned to futures in which dreams cannot come true. President Clinton and Congress boast of new legislation and funding to move children more quickly from foster care to adoption. Indeed, there has been an increase in those numbers. Many foster parents too continue to act selflessly as important way stations for at-risk kids while their biological parents get their lives together. However, neglect and a quagmire of child-swallowing bureaucracies plague the system. And the incidence of neglect, physical and sexual abuse of children in the various foster-care systems is feared to be significantly higher than the incidence in the general population. Nobody bothers to keep an accurate count, but in round numbers, more than 7,500 children are tortured under what is technically government protection. Together with the many more who linger as long as 10 years in protective-custody systems, they are America's generation of lost children, forsaken and forgotten.
The Department of Health and Human Services deemed its own auditing process so flawed that Secretary Donna Shalala did not protest when Congress suspended its ability to collect funds from states that did not meet federal eligibility requirements. State foster-care systems are in such poor shape that case files are still hard copy-bound. Without modern databases, tracking the fate of children remains a maddening paper chase. "These systems should be a national scandal," says Marcia Robinson Lowry, executive director of Children's Rights Inc. "In virtually every state, there is no accountability." Says Don Keenan, an Atlanta lawyer who has sued Georgia posthumously on behalf of children who died in foster care: "This is a meltdown. This is critical."
It costs at least $7 billion a year, or about $13,000 a child, to care for America's foster kids. The problem is not a single black hole but a series--each state affected with its own distinct problems. A yearlong investigation by TIME has found the crisis mounting in at least 20 states as lawyers file class actions asking judges to take control of entire agencies and Governors to appoint task forces to review child-welfare programs. Three states in particular--Georgia, Alabama and California--show the severity of the crisis.
GEORGIA The Boy on the Table
Terrell Peterson was young and black, like 50% of the foster-care population. He was a victim of the crack epidemic that spawned not only a generation of addicts but also a generation of lost children, most of whom have found their way into the foster-care system. His mother was addicted to crack. He had two siblings with different fathers. The state opened eight files on his family in five years, and 21 different caseworkers from five offices were involved in the cases. Social workers, faithful to a policy trend of placing kids with family members, sent Terrell to the home of a woman who was the paternal grandmother of one of his siblings. Technically she was not a blood relative, but she was close enough.