Child Services Oversight

Tim Evans, writing for the Indianapolis Star, reports that Representatives David Frizzell and Charlie Brown will be calling for oversight of the Department of Child Services “because they believe confidentiality laws have made it impossible to fully investigate the powerful agency when children die in its care or when it faces complaints.” They want an ombudsman to oversee the agency.

Unlike police, an ombudsman would focus on whether DCS did everything it should have to help and protect a child in the state’s care. DCS annually investigates about 20,000 families and removes about 7,000 children from their parents.

An ombudsman also would review complaints from families and children involved with the agency.

My suspicion is that the underlying problem is that there are too many abusive parents out there and not enough money in the system to take care of the children in those families. From what I’ve seen of these ugly domestic situations is that it takes a ton of resources just to make the situation less horrible — almost nothing would serve to make the situations “good.” And we probably don’t have the political will to allocate those resources. If we did, I’m not positive it would be the best thing to do. That probably sounds cold, but consider a hyperbolic example: What if we could save one child’s life if we raised taxes to the breaking point and then spent every dime on social services for that kid and his family? Would that be the right thing to do? I don’t think so. At some point, the resources allocated outweigh the benefit — even a really important benefit like saving the life of a child. Obviously that doesn’t answer the question of whether we are anywhere near that tipping point with our current allocation of resources. I have no idea.

The ombudsman? Probably won’t hurt too much, but it probably won’t make a huge dent in the overall problem. My guess is that with an ombudsman, ground level social service workers will, if in doubt, cover their asses by recommending a child be removed from a home.