California Ships Hundreds of Troubled Children Out of State
At 14, Deshaun Becton’s life is a roadmap to California’s faltering efforts to care for its most troubled children.
Over more than a dozen turbulent years, he lived with a half-dozen foster families and in five different group homes. Now he is among the more than 900 children that California sends to out-of-state residential facilities, most of them in Utah, a ProPublica analysis shows.
Each of these children represents a surrender of sorts: a tacit acknowledgement that California — the nation’s biggest and, by some measures, richest state — somehow has no good answer for them.
In the late 1990s, after a 16-year-old boy died from abuse at an Arizona boot camp, California pledged not to export its troubled youth to out-of-state group homes and juvenile detention facilities that didn’t meet certain standards. The number of kids sent away plummeted.
Today, however, the state is grasping for options anew.
California has shuttered most of its secure facilities for youth and done away with almost all beds for children in psychiatric hospitals. It has moved to curtail the use of group homes, partly because, as ProPublica has reported, several have melted down into chaos in recent years. Most recently, the state has adopted reforms meant to keep children in need of acute care as close to home as possible, pumping money into county programs to create new centers and recruit foster families.
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https://www.propublica.org/article/california-ships-hundreds-of-troubled-children-out-of-state
