{"product_id":"wasted-the-plight-of-americas-unwanted-children-9781566633338","title":"Wasted: The Plight of America's Unwanted Children","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA splendid book. -- Msgr. John Egan, DePaul University\u003cbr\u003eHonest and self-reflective...written with wit and great knowledge. -- Boris M. Astrachan, M.D., Chairman Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago\u003cbr\u003eWasted is a first-rate read—poignant and instructive. -- Edward I. Koch, Former Mayor, New York City\u003cbr\u003eInsightful 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\u003cbr\u003eA 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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePart 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","brand":"Ivan R Dee, Inc","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50515919667543,"sku":"9781566633338","price":13.49,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/wasted-the-plight-of-americas-unwanted-children-9781566633338","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}