From the Archive (12/4/1985): Editor’s Desk

TUNED IN THE NEWS the other day on radio, but instead of the usual rehash of the day’s disasters, I got five minutes of conversation from one of these glib talk show guys, a social worker and a foster parent. Ordinarily I can’t listen to talk shows because the talk show hosts intrude into the conversation in ways that make the talk unbearable. The talk show hosts, at least the ones I’ve heard coming out of the Bay Area, are well-informed in the ordinary newspaper way, but totally lacking in humor and charm. Their opinions on every issue are conventional and entirely predictable. And they never shut up.

Anyway, the foster parent was talking about how much she got out of being a foster parent. She described how two girls she had shepherded through adolescence had grown up to become managers of savings and loans. The social worker talked about what a great job he was doing putting needy kids into the care of the savings and loan foster program. The talk show host gushed, at inappropriate intervals, “It’s just wonderful what you two are doing.” She must have said that five times over three minutes.

LET ME TELL YOU about a kid named Al, a much more representative example of the public childcare system at work. When Al was three, he and his two-year-old brother were discovered by the police in an abandoned apartment in San Francisco. The officers speculated that the two babies had been in the apartment by themselves for perhaps as long as a full week. One of the officers who entered the apartment to remove the two boys ran out into the street and vomited. That’s how foul the place was.

AL’S FATHER, at the time, was eighteen years old. Al’s mother was fifteen. She turned up years later in Arizona. From what she told a social worker, one winter afternoon her husband stuffed some clothes in a paper bag and walked out. Al’s mother appraised the situation. It looked to her like twenty years at hard labor so she walked out of the place a couple of hours after her husband. She left the two babies to fend for themselves. She figured a neighbor would discover them alone and call all the right people. It took a neighbor days to discover the two boys alone in the apartment.

I’VE MET AL’S PARENTS. I wouldn’t describe them as bad people. I would say they seem to be like more and more Americans at the bottom of the great shopping spree, bewildered but trying. They have both remarried and now lead conventional lives. They have jobs and houses. They don’t like to talk about Al and his brother. If Al’s parents hadn’t been so young when they made Al and his brother, they might have stuck together and Al and his brother might have had lives like everybody else’s.

AS IT WAS, AL and his brother were placed in a series of foster homes. not all foster homes are bad, but a lot of them are. Al and his brother got six or seven bad ones in a row. Al was placed in two before he was five where he was regularly beaten. These homes were run by Christians who believed beating a child made his body a less hospitable dwelling for the devil. Christianity is supposed to encourage magnanimity, but many “Christian” foster homes are temples of violence and meanness.

EVEN AS A LITTLE KID, Al was stubborn. The more he was beaten, the more inured to violence he became. As he grew larger, he learned that he could use violence or threats of violence to get what he wanted from children smaller and weaker than himself. He was difficult to manage at home and beyond the abilities of the schools.

AT AGE TEN, Al had exhausted foster homes. He had also been shuffled through a number of social workers who come and go throughout the typical dependent child’s life, adding one more layer of impermanence to the life of a small person who is shunted from one place to another without many people really caring what happens to him. All the while, a whole bunch of people drew handsome salaries from Al’s dependence.

AL’S BROTHER went to the California Youth Authority at age fifteen. Al went from foster homes to a children’s institution. He had committed no crime, but he was now housed with children who had. He was also housed with psychotic children, retarded children and a few children lost in the system who had been misdiagnosed by one expert or another. In the big institutions, Al got worse. He learned things he wouldn’t have learned had he been place in one stable home when he was little and kept there.

AFTER THE BIG PLACE, Al went to a small, stable place, He was fifteen. Al, not completely without ability, was now completely without the capacity to connect with other people. He’d been emotionally destroyed. By that I mean you could spend hours with Al talking, laughing, going places, drinking cokes and eating Big Macs and the same night he would take your wallet. When you asked him about it he would call you a MFer.

THE TAXPAYERS had about half a million dollars invested in Al. The instant Al turned eighteen, he announced that nobody could tell him what to do anymore. Al declared himself free. Lots of people tried to convince him to at least finish high school. Nope, he said he was leaving. He got as far as Ukiah where he lived in abandoned houses and under bridges for most of a summer. People worried about him, set him up with jobs he never appeared for. Soon Al met a couple of older guys on the street, fellow victims of the social blitz. Al got together with these guys and broke into several Ukiah schools where they removed various items and sold them to solid citizens who knew the stuff was stolen. Where do three scruffy people come up with sixteen computers?

PEOPLE LIKE AL always get caught. People like Al also go to jail. EF Hutton gets caught stealing millions, but no one goes to jail because when EF Hutton talks the Attorney General of the United States listens. Hell, they went to school together, belong to the same clubs, go to the same parties.

SO AL SPENT A FEW MONTHS in the Mendocino County Jail. He was very unhappy in there. He’s the kind of guy who gets taken advantage of easily because he isn’t very smart and he isn’t very tough. But the authorities have become pretty good at determining who belongs in state prison and who doesn’t. The state prisons are already full. There isn’t room for guys like Al unless he gets a lot more vicious than he is now. At the moment, we have a form of judicial triage, with the authorities trying to lock up the truly dangerous while keeping harmless guys like Al out.

SO AL GOT OUT on probation. Al is now a little crazier than when he went in. He says he won’t go back to jail. He pauses a moment after he says that and then says, “But I won’t get caught next time.”