originally written in 2013
No one disputes that humankind has evolved or that the first premise of evolution is survival. Typically, we think of survival on an individual basis, but few people are wholly isolated or individually apart any longer. Instead, we live in vastly institutionalized societies. Barnard (1938) compared organizations to living, breathing organisms and he extended his analogy to view an organization’s attributes as human in nature. After all, since human organizations are made by humans, they are innately human.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Service’s Welfare programs inclusive of Food Stamps, Aid to Domestic Children, Section Eight, and most others, were begun with the best of intentions: an unequivocal desire to help the needy, the unfortunate and the unprotected in our society. But these intentions and desires have been usurped by survival. Staying alive, the simple rule of existence, has trumped and replaced original human concern and altruism. Along the continuum, the prime directive of these institutions has become survival, pure and simple, and just as the original main objectives of these institutions have been altered, so have their directions and, most important, so have their current effects on the very people they were created to serve. By far, these programs are now harmful to their clientele and detrimental to our society and the taxpayers who ultimately fund them.
Child Protective Services (CPS), although it has many names nationwide, under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), demonstrates a similar evolution. Formally begun in the early 1900s with the purest intention of helping children in need, CPS is now a vast, fifty-state bureaucracy that has deleterious effects upon the children and families it is supposed to help. The National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR) asserts that CPS has an 80% failure rate and that 75% of comparably maltreated children not removed from their homes fare better than those children placed in foster care. However, since a major part of Federal, State and local economies in the United States are financially dependent upon CPS subsistence, little is done to reorient it toward its original missives.
No matter what the acronym, CPS has a department or division in each of the fifty states. They all suckle on federal funding through HHS, Title IX and Social Security, and while this might not sound too bad at first, cost wise this is just the tip. Attached to this are all affiliate services, service organizations and all the connected State Agencies which are needed to enable CPS to operate. Below is a bare-bones, simplified chart to offer an idea of how CPS sits atop a mega child-industry, the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing, supporting a wide-spread array of privately contracted agencies and other state agencies.
Prevent Child Abuse America (http://www.preventchildabuse.org/index.php) estimated that direct expenditure on child abuse and neglect for 2012 would be approximately $33,333,619,510. Indirect expenditure, it estimated, would be $46,926,791,578. The total cost of child maltreatment, according to Prevent Child Abuse America, was estimated at $80,260,411,087. (http://www.preventchildabuse.org/images/research/pcaa_cost_report_2012_gelles_perlman.pdf).
In sum, the total cost of child maltreatment in America is slightly less than 25% of the total United States budget, and HHS and CPS as the distributors of this fortune in tax dollars fails 80% of the time.
References
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