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

by Beam, Cris

  This time, Tonya knew the reason: the foster mom hadn’t been taking the kids to therapy and got docked for noncompliance. Back to the van—and to a home in Mount Vernon—a city just north of the Bronx that Tonya said felt like the country, with “mad houses, and a room that was banging, with a canopy and shit.” It was so foreign, and so isolating, Tonya said, that she and her brother used to tear up the place just to see if they could.

  They could, and they stayed—for four years. Until Tonya’s mom found a new boyfriend and was pregnant again—and thus appeared stable enough for the authorities to return her children home. Tonya was in seventh grade and fistfighting on a regular basis, because she liked it, because she was good at it, because it helped her articulate aggression indirectly and in ways that wouldn’t really matter, at least for a while.

  Tonya’s six-year foster care “drift” began the year Clinton’s ASFA was passed, with its supposed fifteen-month cutoff for kids like her. So why didn’t she get adopted or go back home earlier? Tonya doesn’t know, and the case managers who do are notoriously tight-lipped regarding client privacy. Likely, her mother showed continued signs of improvement, and the drift slowed to a drag, with both the hope that the mom would get better and the fear that nobody would adopt a preteen with a record of violence.

  As Tonya and I got closer, she confessed that she had an escape valve from the tight restrictions in the Green household that the other kids didn’t. The escape was through her mom, who lived in the Bronx and still had visitation rights.

  “I live a double life, basically,” Tonya said casually to me one afternoon when we were alone in the living room. She was watching TV again—this time, the Disney remake of The Parent Trap, a movie about rich girls duping their parents and masterminding an idealized family for themselves. Tonya viewed her mom less as a parental figure and more as a respite; when she went for weekend visits, she could party as much as she wanted to. Her mom was often not even home at all. “My mom allows me to do whatever I want—it’s like going on a crazy road trip. And then I come back to reality, listen to rules.”

  Freedom was something Tonya had a lot of in the four years before she came to the Greens, when she was living with her biological mom. “At first my mom was really strict, but then she started drinking and she got looser.” Tonya didn’t mind the liberty that came with alcohol, but her mom got meaner too. “She used to call me all types of bitches for no reason. And she’d say, ‘You know what? I’m getting tired of seeing you all. Go outside or something.’ So I did. It would be like eleven o’clock at night.”

  ACS removed Tonya again and sent her to the Greens. Now, Tonya said, she was just using her mom’s apartment as a crash pad—an easy place to party on the weekends. The Friday before we talked, in fact, her mom had entered another inpatient detox program, so that coming weekend Tonya would have the place entirely to herself. Because she was technically allowed these weekend parental visits, the Greens would never know about it.

  Did she think her mom would actually get sober? “No,” Tonya said, laughing. “She just complies with the program because she’s so damn smart she can fool all these people into believing she’s doing what she’s got to do. That’s why we’re allowed these weekend visits.”

  Tonya was two months shy of eighteen when we talked, so if she wanted to, she could drop out of foster care on her birthday and live at her mother’s place full-time. But, she said, she wouldn’t do it—mainly because her mother can’t give her what she needs or wants, which is money. That she can get directly from the agency. New York City extends foster care until twenty-one, and Tonya planned to go the distance.

  “You get $80 a month allowance, plus $20 more once you hit sixteen, and $5 more for every year after that. So I get $105 a month. Plus I’m a team mentor, which means I talk to kids at night if they need to talk,” she said, and that pays too. What if nobody calls? “I just say they did and put it on my time sheet. The hours add up—no questions asked.”

  Tonya used people—the Greens, her mother, her teachers and shrinks—in a careful game of cover-up and self-advancement. As a metaphor for her survival instincts, she turned again to money. “It’s me before you,” she said, poking carefully with a Q-tip at an infection in her ear that she refused to get checked out. Tonya hated going to doctors. “Like if I have a dollar and you ask me for ninety cents, I’m going to say no. You can have a dime and go ask a fool for ninety cents, because they’re a fool. You give a person the majority of you, and what do you have left?”

  Tonya was going to work the system, and everybody in it, to her advantage. Tonya wasn’t like Chanel or Fatimah, who wanted to get adopted; she was smarter than all that. Besides, she told me, she heard you got a laptop computer from the agency if you were still a foster kid on your eighteenth birthday.

  Tonya’s tumble through multiple foster homes was typical, as was her attempt to control her environment by working as many angles as she could. Foster parents like Bruce Wright in Georgia may complain that system kids act crazy and tear up his plasma TVs, and kids like Tonya may in fact steal things, get in fights, and trash their nice new rooms with the canopy beds. But the reason behind this behavior isn’t crazy at all: it’s a predictable response to their unpredictable past.

  When a child has been screamed at, or hit, or sexually molested, she processes the trauma as a sequence of cause and effect; she’ll look for ways to modify her behavior so the adult won’t do it again. But because abuse is random, chaotic, and out of the child’s control, kids can also learn to provoke the adults around them in an effort to direct outcomes. If you’re going to be abused anyway, the maltreated brain reasons, you might as well decide when.

  A kid in a foster home may be accustomed to chaos or anger or screaming, and the trauma of relocation can make him especially desperate for familiarity. So he’ll push to make the “nice” home familiar, to make the new parents mad and to get the hitting or the screaming out of the way, and to place himself, the child, back in control.

  Mary Keane, the foster and adoptive mom to all the Rosario teenagers, told me the story of an eight-year-old boy at her agency who was famous for getting thrown out of foster families. Wherever he went, he looked for the one issue that would make his new parents crazy; he’d find their particular hot button and then press. Hard.

  “He was always looking for the limit. If he figured out one foster mom hated cursing, he’d start cursing. If another one said, ‘You can do anything, but don’t steal,’ then he’d steal,” Mary said.

  This makes sense to me, even for kids who haven’t experienced foster care or any real trauma. My two-year-old niece can sense that my laptop computer is off-limits, so this is the toy she most wants to bang against the radiator. Teenagers from conservative families flaunt new tattoos; rich kids wear rags; the preacher’s son sells dope behind the 7-Eleven. We’ve all pushed and poked and tested at some time to say, “Will you love me anyway?”

  Foster kids usually believe they caused their biological family to tumble from orbit, so of course they could dislodge a foster family too. Foster kids have found the weak spot in a universal law about parents and children; they’ll keep pushing for that weak spot again and again until someone stands up and says, “I will love you anyway. Stay.”

  The problem with child welfare, Mary says, is this: “It’s a tradition in foster care—that whenever you’re bad, you have to go.” Even when you land with parents like Bruce and Allyson Green who want to keep you.

  One afternoon, when I was sitting in the car with Bruce and his son Jaleel, I witnessed a particularly heartbreaking scene. We were parked in the shade of a leafy tree, waiting for Dominique to come out of some appointment or another, when a chubby, shy-looking kid ambled up to the front passenger window. Bruce rolled it down.

  “Hi, Dad,” the boy said. He looked about fifteen, though Bruce said he was younger, and he had swirls shaved into his closely shorn hair.

  “Hey, Clarence,” Bruce chirped, a huge smil
e on his face. “How are you?”

  Clarence muttered one-word answers to all of Bruce’s questions: school was “bad”; the new foster home was “fine”; but when Bruce asked if he missed the family, Clarence’s eyes filled. He looked down at the van’s open window and picked at the glass in the frame.

  “Clarence was with us for three and a half months,” Bruce said to me. “But he was a runner. He took his bike on the subway and ran away. Right, Clarence?”

  “No. Four,” Clarence answered.

  “What?” Bruce asked. Jaleel watched intently from the back seat.

  “I was with you for four months. From November seventeenth to March sixteenth.”

  “Well. And you’ll always be my son,” Bruce said, shaking his head. “And I love you.”

  Clarence, openly crying and half punching at his eyes, walked around to the driver’s side to hug Bruce. “We’ll see you Sunday?” Bruce asked. Clarence still showed up at the Greens’ for the free biweekly haircuts, donated by a barber friend of theirs.

  “Yeah, Dad, I love you,” Clarence mumbled, into Bruce’s shoulder. And he opened up the back door to sock Jaleel in the stomach. Jaleel laughed as Clarence loped away.

  Clarence was more than a runner. He had been in five foster homes before the Greens’, as well as a psychiatric hospital. He used to tear up classrooms in his junior high school, arriving early to rip bulletin boards off the walls and destroy furniture. When he ran away, he left a note threatening to kill the family, so by law Bruce had to act. Because Clarence threatened violence, he had to be placed with a different agency, in a “therapeutic home”—with parents who had had more hours of psychiatric training. Still, Bruce said, “You don’t stop being a dad just because the kid’s not in your house,” and he welcomed Clarence back for visits anytime.

  The law requires foster children to be housed in the least restrictive home possible, which means ideally, kids begin their tenure in a foster family like the Greens’. When they act out, and test, the parents can send them back to the agency and the case manager will decide: Does the child need more supervision in a therapeutic home? Sometimes, if a child has already filtered through a lot of homes (therapeutic or otherwise) or if he has exhibited aggression or psychiatric problems, families won’t take him, and then it’s time for an institution. Sometimes, a case manager will just decide it’s time for an institution right away.

  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.