Description
Book SynopsisThis is a book about how a system designed to help children is instead helping to destroy them. For almost thirty years Patrick Murphy has represented abused and neglected children in court cases at every level of the state and federal judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court. He has labored in the trenches of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. In Wasted, Mr. Murphy charges that the child welfare bureaucracy is stuck in hundred-year-old realities and the politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The concern of state agencies and the courts for family preservation, he argues, has now gone too far. Keeping families together by lavishing public resources on abusive parents who can’t and won’t change their behavior is harming their children. Too many of them are suffering continued abuse, degradation, neglect, injury, even death. The system is sending all the wrong messages, Mr. Murphy insists: struggling poor parents are ignored by the government while abusers get help; confidentiality protects state agencies that make mistakes; a resistance to trans-racial placement and adoption ensures that many African-American children will never find a permanent home. Meanwhile America’s underclass continues to grow and ossify because we refuse to grapple with its racial implications. Wasted pulls no punches in describing the mess, but Mr. Murphy also offers a prescription for fixing what’s broke.
Trade ReviewA splendid book. -- Msgr. John Egan, DePaul University
Honest and self-reflective...written with wit and great knowledge. -- Boris M. Astrachan, M.D., Chairman Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago
Wasted is a first-rate read—poignant and instructive. -- Edward I. Koch, Former Mayor, New York City
Insightful and passionate...a book about responsibility and of how shirking it leads to social catastrophe. -- Ellis Cose, Author of Color-Blind and The Rage of a Privileged Class
A powerful indictment of the child welfare system...its message deserves a broad hearing among those who care about our society's children. -- Elizabeth Bartholet, "professor of law, Harvard Law School
Table of ContentsPart 1 Acknowledgements 7 Part 2 Foreword 13 Part 3 A Third World Initiation 27 Part 4 Learning the System 37 Part 5 Preserving Families, Killing Children 58 Part 6 The Underclass 85 Part 7 The Confidentiality Game 113 Part 8 New Realities 129 Part 9 Wrong Race, Wrong Place 147 Part 10 Orphans in a Strom 162 Part 11 Ideology and Reality 174 Part 12 Index 185
