When the system fails, the children suffer

There is something wrong with a system that allows -- no, encourages -- a couple to adopt six or seven children when there is clear evidence that first of the adopted children aren't thriving.
There is something wrong when caseworker after caseworker looks at a boy in his late teens who weighs less than the average 8-year-old and sounds no alarms.
The case of the Jackson family of Collingswood, N.J., is a complicated one and will be played out in the courts for months, possibly years. Generally, the parents of this family of nine children, natural and adopted, have been vilified in press reports. At the same time, the Jacksons have some strong supporters close to home, especially their pastor.
Raymond and Vanessa Jackson have been charged with starving the four sons they adopted through New Jersey's foster-care system. The boys, now aged 8 to 19, were removed from their home Oct. 10 after police were called when the oldest boy was spotted eating from a trash can. None of the boys weighed as much as 50 pounds. Two adopted daughters and a foster daughter also in the home showed no signs of neglect. The couple's biological children are young adults.
Adoption incentive
The Jackson family grew by leaps and bounds -- at least in numbers -- after the federal and state governments began offering financial incentives to foster parents to adopt the children in their care.
On the face of it, this seems like sound public policy. An adopted child has a stronger sense of family than a foster child, there is a permanence to the placement that is absent in a foster home and, a reasonable stipend helps the adoptive family with its expenses while saving the state money in the long run.
It seems like a win-win.
But in practice, it appears, the adoption incentive plan has not attracted large numbers of new adoptive parents. It has primarily drawn the adoptive parents from the existing pool of foster parents.
And obviously in some cases, it has given too many children too quickly to some families.
The Jacksons were drawing as much as $30,000 a year in adoption subsidies and foster child payments from the state. That is not a princely sum, and certainly not enough to get most people to adopt or house seven children -- all of whom came from one troubled background or another and some of whom had serious medical and psychological problems.
The road to hell
But even if the Jacksons started out with the best of intentions, at some point this adoption scheme went terribly wrong for some -- if not all -- of the children in their care And at some point, it would seem, the Jacksons became responsible for the failure of their children to thrive.
At least as culpable -- possibly more so -- are the caseworkers who failed to step in at any point to save these starving children. For whatever reason, these caseworkers continued to place more children in a home where it would not have taken a trained observer to see that something was terribly wrong.
Some caseworkers have already been fired. The Jacksons have been released on bond. The civil and criminal courts will be addressing their cases.
But the state of New Jersey -- and most other states for that matter -- must go beyond a few firings and a couple of prosecutions to find a better way of providing for the care and welfare of society's lost and abandoned children.