A Perfect Test Case Shirley Wilder sued New York over its foster care system; the case was settled in her favor, but by then she was dead.
One of President Bush's first official acts was to propose that religiously sponsored organizations should get public money to provide social services. In ways this is an admirable proposal. Religious organizations can count on motivated participants, and those in need of help often trust religious charities more than the agencies of the local government. But there is always the danger that the religious organizations will favor their own, or impose their own moral views on their clients. ''The Lost Children of Wilder'' is a brilliantly researched account of an attempt to make the New York City foster care system fair for all its children. Obviously Nina Bernstein's book was written before George W. Bush took office; but it provides a vivid argument against his plans.
Since the 19th century, New York's foster care system had handled its needy children by contracting with private agencies to care for the children at public expense. Many, perhaps most, of the agencies were Jewish and Roman Catholic charities. The law allowed them to give preference to children of their own faith. In 1972, 90 percent of all foster beds were in the hands of these agencies, which could pick and choose among the children the city tried to place. Black children, of course, were mostly Protestant.
That was the year Shirley Wilder entered the foster care system. She was 13. Her mother had died when she was 4, her grandmother when she was 11; when she turned to her father, whose name she did not bear, he threw her out. Over the next 10 months, every religiously sponsored foster agency the court approached turned her down. But her lawyer really liked her, and didn't want to send her to the Dickensian reformatory at Hudson, N.Y., for children convicted of criminal offenses, then the last resort for children rejected by foster care. The lawyer came back to the court 12 times, as Shirley shuttled among relatives, shelters and jail-like detention centers, to find some alternative. None were available.
When Shirley arrived at Hudson she was raped by one of the girl gangs. She fought back, and the staff punished her for fighting by locking her in solitary confinement. When she was released, she ran away; she was caught, returned and placed in solitary confinement for three days. Then she was transferred to the Behavior Modification Unit, where the toilet paper was doled out one roll a month, the staff hit the kids, and to eat in the dining room you needed the tokens that were given out for good behavior. Shirley became rebellious and difficult. And yet a lawyer who visited her recalled: ''She had the most beautiful smile, a smile that lit up her face. She was pretty and she was funny. She had this great sense of humor.'' She was the perfect test-case plaintiff.
"'Being in foster care shouldn't mean that you grow up to die alone,' Ms. Lowry said, obviously fighting back tears. She told the judge that the new settlement was 'the best chance for making sure that other children don't have the experience Shirley had.'"
-- Nina Bernstein's New York Times article about the Marisol vs. Giuliani decision, Jan. 23, 1999.
The lawyer was Marcia Lowry, a fierce Jewish misfit who for years kept a tattered poster quoting Eugene V. Debs on her office wall: ''While there is a lower class / I am in it / While there is a criminal element / I am of it / and / while there is a soul in prison / I am not free.'' She had been hired by the New York Civil Liberties Union after working within the city's administration on foster-care issues; she was shocked by the fact that over half of the city's many thousands of wards were, like Shirley, black, but in the Catholic and Jewish agencies that received most of the public's dollars, fewer than a quarter were black. Bernstein, who wrote a series about the Wilder case while a reporter for Newsday and is now a reporter for The New York Times, tells us that in Lowry's view ''the city had delegated the public good wholesale to a collection of sectarian agencies with a license to discriminate.'' When Wilder was filed in federal court on July 14, 1973, it named as defendants six state and city officials and 77 voluntary agencies and their directors, and asked the courts to declare unconstitutional the entire statutory basis for the provision of child welfare services to New York City children.
''The Lost Children of Wilder'' describes the 26-year history of the case that was at last settled, more or less in Shirley Wilder's favor, in 1999. Its legal analysis is rich, but as in Jarndyce and Jarndyce the drama is human. People who saw themselves as genuinely committed to these difficult kids suddenly found themselves attacked for racism and in effect asked to turn their services over to the forces who had created hellholes like Hudson. The judge who first heard Shirley Wilder's plea had struggled to make wise choices within limited options for decades, and had been denounced in tabloid headlines: DAUGHTER OF RABBI WISE GIVES CHILD OF CHRIST TO THE BLACK BEARDED PROPHET OF MOHAMMED. She came from an unbroken lineage of rabbis stretching back 19 generations, and when the American Civil Liberties Union was prepared to settle the lawsuit with the city -- the settlement included a ''specially designated'' status for Orthodox Jews -- she fought against it with outrage and elegance. The man who became the city's corporation counsel was an heir to F. A. O. Schwarz, and yet somehow managed an austere authenticity sufficient to persuade opponents who hated each other to come to terms. And around these stories, bureaucracy becomes character, stage setting and plot, as the case drags through postponements, delay, appeal and absurdly irrelevant adjudications.
Above all, ''The Lost Children of Wilder'' tells the story of these abandoned kids. At 14, Shirley Wilder had given birth to a son, Lamont. (She herself would die from AIDS at 39, three weeks before the lawsuit was finally over.) ''It is almost boring to read her case record,'' one of her many caseworkers recalled, ''because you have read it so many times, in so many kids.'' While still in the maternity ward she was talked into signing her baby over to the state: she had no place to live, and she was too young for mother-child placement. She could visit him no more than once a month.
Lamont was lucky at first. He was placed with a Hispanic family in the Bronx for his first five years. The father sexually fondled him, but the mother loved him -- and then they were divorced, around the time that Shirley's parental rights were officially terminated, and, encouraged by caseworkers, his foster mother gave him back to the state. He was placed in a white family in another state, the only black child he knew. He didn't adjust. They gave him up within a year. Another white family took him on, but his behavior was worse. Transferred to a home for disturbed kids, he tried to make friends with various volunteers. They were kind for a while, and then moved on. He was classified as psychotic; he could have been going through normal but frustrated mourning for his losses. He entered the real world in his late teens without a high school diploma and with few skills.
This book makes two things clear. First, it is foolish to separate parents from children with the ease that our current system encourages. Our policies assert that it should be less comfortable to be on welfare than to work, which is sensible. They also assert that a mother who cannot feed and house her child should not raise him, which also is sensible. The consequences are not. Lamont's care cost the city half a million dollars, far more than it would have cost to support his mother, and it repeatedly and traumatically severed him from an enduring human relationship, as crucial to a child's development as food and heat.
Second, the problem is poverty. This is perhaps not a novel insight, but this history makes it sickeningly clear that the state cannot solve the problem of needy children without doing something about the conditions that produce them. There are so many children, so few resources -- in this stunningly prosperous age -- and, repeatedly, solutions born of crisis and good intention create disasters of their own. Children who enter the system tend to exit it as poor and unskilled as the parents who bore them, and the cycle grinds painfully on.
Indeed: on Jan. 22, 1999, the day Wilder finally ended, in the same courthouse a judge was deliberating over a class-action lawsuit brought by the Legal Aid Society, charging that new tough welfare practices endangered needy children. Unbeknown even to the Legal Aid lawyers, the child who stood at the center of the lawsuit was Shirley Wilder's grandson, Lamont's little boy.
As they say, it's better than the movies.
