E-mail a friendMiriam Krinsky
airdate May 26, 2005
Attorney Miriam Krinsky heads the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles, a nonprofit organization that provides counsel for children in the foster care system. When she was a prosecutor, Krinsky was influenced by a pattern of young people being taken into federal custody because the foster system failed to address smaller problems. She previously served as president of the L.A. City Ethics Commission and the County Bar Association. Krinsky has lectured nationwide on criminal law and child welfare.
Miriam Krinsky
Tavis: We continue our "Road to Health" series tonight with a look at the crisis of foster care in this country. As I mentioned at the outset, May is National Foster Care month, and late last week, a comprehensive new study about the long-term affects of foster care was released by the University of Chicago. The new study addressed the many problems facing foster care kids who are turned out of the system at age 18.Many of you may have seen the documentary on what is known as "aging out" earlier tonight here on PBS. Here to talk about the crisis of foster care is Miriam Krinsky. She is the executive director of the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles. Miriam, nice to have you on the program.
Miriam Krinsky: Well, thank you, and thanks for the interest.
Tavis: Glad to have you here. Let me start--for those who may not have seen the piece on PBS called ageing out. What's that term mean?
Krinsky: Well--and actually, there are other terms, and it's interesting some of the labels that we use. When a youth, who all of us in our community have agreed when we take them away from their home to raise them in a foster care system, reaches a certain age, generally age 18, sometimes a little older than that, they leave our foster care system. And other labels that are used are actually called "emancipation," which is telling that we look at it as freeing the kids from foster care when they actually leave our charge. And we know, as the piece that you mentioned indicated, that they face tremendous challenges, that the path we put them on, you and I and everyone else in our nation, our community, as their parents, the path we put them on is anything but the sort of path that we'd like to see our own children follow.
Tavis: Let me ask you a question which might not matter to anybody else, forgive me, but it matters to me. I'm just curious what the politics are behind word choices. I believe that words have meaning. When one uses the phrase "ageing out of the system" versus being "emancipated from the system," I don't understand this. Explain what the politics of terminology is with regard to those phrases.
Krinsky: Well--and I think you're right. Often there is tremendous significance to the words that we use, I think they're reflective of the fact that, you know, when my child or children leave the home, or when your children or other children leave the home, I don't think we look at it as they're "ageing out" of our household or being freed from our household. I think we look at a continued commitment and connection to look at their young adult years.
Tavis: I'm not sure if my mom said "hallelujah" when we left the house. I think that's a different story, but go ahead.
Krinsky: It may depend on the child.
Tavis: Ha ha ha!
Krinsky: But you know, I think it's reflective, frankly, both terms, to the fact that we as a community don't necessarily make a continued connection and commitment to these children. Instead there's almost a view that "we've raised you up until now, and you're on your own." And what we don't do is really provide for them. We don't provide for their housing. We don't give them the educational grounding. We don't give them the health and mental health services and support that every child needs to be able to have a stable and successful adult future. And instead what we see for these youth is that many of them leave foster care to the streets, to unemployment, or as many as 1 in 5 within their first 2 years after leaving all of our charge will end up in jail within their first year or two after they leave our foster care system.
Tavis: Help me understand something. Why then--what are the reasons behind some person, some youth, any youth, being forced out, being emancipated, being forced to age out of the system, if they're not ready to go? What are the reasons behind that? Why?
Krinsky: Well, you know I think at bottom, often, there are financial reasons that drive any family--
Tavis: On the part of the family or part of the system?
Krinsky: I think on part of the system. I mean, I don't look at those as indistinguishable. The system, all of us, are their family. When you and I and everyone else in our community agree to raise a child in our foster care system, we stand in the shoes of their family. And just as a family continues to support a child when they leave the home, continues to help them with higher education, with housing, with all of their needs, with their needs if they become a parent in their own right, we don't, as a community, make an adequate commitment to the youth who leave our foster care system. And it's not surprising, by virtue of that, that we see the sort of adult futures that are relatively dismal when we look at what happens to these children.
Tavis: Let me ask you a question that might be unfair. I don't mean to be at all hostile here. I think I understand where you're gonna go with the answer before I even ask the question. That said, let me ask it anyway. If I left--speaking of my mother, who I referenced earlier, who shouted hallelujah when I and my 9 brothers and sisters left the house, if we had left the house and began to, in my mother's words, act the fool, if we had left the house and started to misbehave, and to start drinking, and smoking, and found ourselves in jail, et cetera, et cetera. If we had left her house after all the training that she had done, all that she'd put in us, and didn't know how to behave, that would not be an indictment on the system, on her system, it wouldn't be an indictment on my mama or my father, it'd be an indictment on us, that we knew better, we were taught better. We got out and misbehaved. So tell me, then, why it is that when these young persons who come out of the system, out of the foster care system end up in trouble months, a year or two later, that we blame the system for having done something wrong?
Krinsky: Well--and I think the key, Tavis, is how you phrase that, which is you were taught better, your mama provided you with everything to--
Tavis: But we expect the foster care system to do that, do we not?
Krinsky: We do, but we don't. I mean, instead, what we see is that we don't provide these children that we've agreed to raise with the sort of tools that your mama provided you with. Half of them leave our system without a high school education. More than half of them end up getting separated from siblings and the only anchor. You had 9 brothers and sisters. They may start into the foster care system with sibling ties, but we end up rupturing those sibling ties over time. We move them from placement to placement; we bounce them from school to school. Their most basic health and mental health needs aren't met. So whereas your parents may well have said, "You know what? We've done everything we can for Tavis and his brothers and sisters, and now what happens, happens." With youth in our foster care system, we can't say that as a community. And part of the problem is how we start with our funding of foster care to begin with. We start with a way of funding foster care that says we're only gonna help children and family in need. If we take these children out of the home when a parent is struggling, when a family is struggling, we're not willing to give them the financial support to keep that family unit intact. So our starting point is we're already unsettling the anchor in the family ties that this youth has, and bringing them into a system that, too often, doesn't do right by these youths.
Tavis: I'm glad you said that 'cause my assumption a moment ago, and still is for that matter, is that there must be something wrong with the system. Earlier you said you didn't wanna distinguish families from the system because the system is the family. Let me, though, offer that distinction because it seems to me that if I have offered to be a foster care family, obviously, I must love kids. I must care about kids to offer myself up. You ain't doing it just for the money.
Krinsky: I would hope that's your starting point.
Tavis: So let's assume, then, that these people who our offering themselves as foster families care about young people and want to be there for these young people. So that if the system isn't providing the resources, and the family is doing all they can do, it ain't the people. It's not that immediate family, it is the system. So how do we fix this problem over here?
Krinsky: Well, I think we fix it by even rolling back the clock before the moment in time you've put us in. I think we fix it to begin with by not presuming that when a parent is struggling, when there's an abusive or a neglectful household, that we have to take that child out of the home as a starting point. I think we fix it, initially, by saying, how do we do more to fund prevention? How do we do more to de-link our largest share of federal money, what are called title 4-E monies, from the presumption that we're only gonna help that child and parent if we take that child out of the home. I think we fix the system by trying to support kin. We know that relatives can provide a very stable place for foster youth, and that they're gonna be able to keep youth connected to their family. So I think we start to really need to look at how do we ensure that more grandmothers, more uncles, more aunts are able to provide that anchor for kids before we even get to the point where we need to start looking at what does a foster parent need? What might an adoptive parent need?
Tavis: Let me close our conversation with this, because you said something that just made me think. This is the umpteenth conversation I've had, I suspect, over my career talking about any number of issues, any myriad of issues where this word "prevention" keeps coming up. I don't care if we're talking about recidivism, if we're talking about crime, if we're...I mean, I could run the list on whether we're talking about educational performance or the lack thereof. I always find myself back in this conversation of why it is that we don't wanna spend money on the front end, but it costs us on the back end. What is it about foster care, or more broadly, about the way we do business in this place called America, where we don't get the prevention thing?
Krinsky: Well, you know, I think unfortunately funding and priorities tend to be reactive rather than proactive. I mean, prevention is really scrolling back and saying "what do we need to do before the small problem becomes a burning brush fire?" And I think we're too used to policy being driven by the fire that's burning brightest at the moment. We know that children who come into our foster care system will receive our investment down the road if they end up in our prisons. We know that we're gonna spend money on these youth if they end up in our psychiatric institutions or on unemployment or on the streets. We need to now turn back the clock and say how do we invest in these youth when they're at an earlier stage in life, when the fire may not be burning brightest, but when we could do that much more with an investment up front to turn those lives around and put them on a better path.
Tavis: Miriam, nice to have you on to talk about this during Foster Care month. Glad to have you.
Krinsky: Thank you.
Tavis: Up next on this program, hip-hop star Nelly. Number one and number 2 on the charts. Stay with us.
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