On Misers and Fiscal Responsibility
In full transparency, that was one of my edits to Scarlet’s piece, and I stand by it completely. The “dear reader” was her, that’s her style.
What it is NOT saying is that DFCS is made of a bunch of tight-asses that want kids to go to jail. What it IS saying is that more than one member of the legislature and the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget fit the description.
DFCS’ primary mission is family reunification. This is often done by providing support to the family, such as education on appropriate parenting practices or referrals to address underlying mental health diagnoses or substance use disorders. A foster kid isn’t supposed to be entering into care so they can be adopted. They are entering care so their family can get the help they need to get better so the child can go home and the family can thrive. Foster children have better outcomes if they are with birth parents. If they can’t be with a birth parent, then the next best thing is kin or fictive kin (you know, that auntie that isn’t actually your mother’s sibling, but you call her auntie anyway). Or, in the case of Indigenous children, their tribe (an important note: this is a political identity, not a racial identity. The Tribes are the third sovereign.). Then, after all of that is exhausted, the child goes to the randos that the state has approved as foster parents. I.E., Me and Scarlet.
The first thing the modern fiscal conservative wants to do is cut “welfare,” which means social programs. This is usually to address the free rider problem or, in contemporary campaign language, to “cut waste, fraud, and abuse.” But at some point, like Governor Brownback, you start hitting bone. And my friends, we hit bone while ago when it comes to DFCS.
We already don’t have enough caseworkers, and we pay them worse than teachers and expect even bigger miracles. A Social Services Specialist 1 will start at about $47k, and a first-year APS teacher will start at $61k.
Additionally, this modern fiscal conservative often, though far from always, has an out-of-date tough-on-crime mentality. Slight infraction, overly harsh punishment because apparently retribution is better than rehabilitation. Because why rehabilitate someone to fully reenter society as a tax-paying and contributing member when you can burn tax dollars by keeping nonviolent offenders incarcerated?
Georgia is not a pro-life state. It is only a pro-birth state. We still have the death penalty, and we don’t appropriately fund social safety nets that disproportionately support women and children. Are you pregnant and need neonatal care, but you’re poor? Sorry, we don’t really fund Medicaid, Pathways is a joke, and half the counties in the state don’t have an OB/GYN.
How are these issues connected? To borrow a phrase from Ben Franklin, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Or one Scot’s brother-in-law (you really should follow Peach Pundit the Podcast) can tell you, ounces in the morning are pounds at night.
The failure to get this right at the front end of the issue, i.e., first contact between DFCS and a family, can yield a disproportionate effect later. There is a foster care to prison pipeline. Almost a full fifth of the state and federal prison population were in foster care. And the best way to prevent this excess number of people going to jail, and then beginning the recidivism cycle because we don’t focus on rehabilitation, is to fund early interventions so we don’t have to build more prisons later that will just keep sucking money out of the budget.
I can’t really say it better, so here’s a couple quotes from the Juvenile Law Center:
“The foster care-to-prison pipeline is the latest iteration in a decades-long national trend which criminalizes adolescence and worsens existing disparities and discrimination.”
Or this one
“Another study found that by age 17, over half of youth in foster care experienced an arrest, conviction, or overnight stay in a correctional facility.”
So yes, if you aren’t willing to put a little money towards supports now that will save buckets of money a decade down the road, don’t call yourself a fiscal conservative. You are just a tight-ass that wants kids to go to jail when they become adults.
