Michigan: Websites and Lock-ups

Michigan’s multi-agency approach to finding missing foster children, launched soon after revelations in August that the total was 302, includes putting the names and pictures of missing foster children on a website and locking some teen runaways in secure detention.

The initiatives came about after embarrassing reports in the news media that the state Family Independence Agency (FIA) had sent a 12-year-old boy to live in Atlanta with his mother, even though the mother’s parental rights had been terminated because of her chronic drug abuse. The boy, his mother and younger sister soon disappeared.

The boy and his sister were found in Dallas, panhandling to support their mother’s crack habit.

Michigan Gov. John Engler (R) subsequently ordered the FIA to do more to find missing foster youths. “I’m very irritated,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “I’d like to move much faster. But it’s a big bureaucracy. They’re not exactly swift when it comes to moving.”

The website (www.michigan.gov/ fia.) went up in September with about 200 names and as many pictures as the FIA could gather. The agency did not seek judicial approval to post names and pictures of foster children, judging that the concerns for the kids’ safety outweighed their right to privacy.

The agency also ordered all private foster care agencies it contracts with to produce photographs of all foster children in their care and to update those pictures yearly. Social workers scrambled to conduct face-to-face visits with each foster child.

As of Jan. 16, the site reported 21,596 hits and 169 calls to the FIA child locator tip line. Five missing foster children were found as a result of the tips, while more than 100 of the original 302 youths were found through other means. Most of the success was due to actions by the Michigan Supreme Court and a Detroit police unit assigned to help find the missing foster children.

Caseworkers Called Before Judges

In October, the Supreme Court ordered the state’s largest family court in Detroit and Wayne County to form a special docket with one judge to monitor efforts to locate the foster children reported as missing. The Supreme Court later extended the order to 23 other circuit courts that the FIA said had missing foster children.

Wayne County Circuit Court Judge Michael Hathaway conducted a series of extraordinary hearings in which child protective services and foster care workers were questioned by the judge and an assistant attorney general about missing kids on their caseloads. Many of the workers were new to the cases and had not even reviewed all the files on the youths. Some youths hadn’t been seen by a social worker for several years.

In some cases, Hathaway ordered the agency workers to seek writs of apprehension for the children, giving police legal authority to take them into protective custody. He urged them to work closely with the Department of Community Justice’s Child Rescue Task Force, saying that it had better tools to find people, even those who had fled to another state. The task force, a unit of the Wayne County Warrant Enforcement Bureau, is composed of police officers.

The court later began a series of hearings in which relatives, neighbors and even an 11-year-old neighborhood boy not under court jurisdiction were summoned to tell the judge what they knew about particular foster children.

Beginning with a list of more than 100 missing foster kids from Wayne County, Hathaway first addressed the nine cases of missing foster children who were under age 13.

Collaboration among the FIA, the state Attorney General’s Office, the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office and the Child Rescue Task Force helped to locate all nine children within a few weeks. One family of four boys, kidnapped by their parents from a home in suburban Detroit, was found in Alabama. The kids were flown back to Michigan and the parents charged with parental kidnapping. Another child was found in Arizona and another in Chicago, after being gone from Michigan for five years.

Locking Up Teens

But teenagers who run away from foster care placements are presenting a tougher challenge.

Prompted by the murder of 15-year-old Heather Kish, a suburban Detroit runaway whose body was found three weeks after her name was posted on the FIA’s website, officers with the child rescue task force decided to find as many of the missing foster kids from Wayne County as they could.

Using techniques that included surveillance, distributing fliers and squeezing informants, the task force soon found two runaway girls, ages 13 and 15, who were working as prostitutes in Detroit. Because they were neglect wards of Wayne County Juvenile Court, the police turned them over to the FIA, which placed them in the Davenport Shelter run by Spectrum Human Services.

Spectrum is a nonprofit contractor that serves about 1,200 children and adults with mental, physical, emotional and behavioral problems. Within hours, both girls had walked away, leaving the police angry, the FIA embarrassed and the court frustrated.

The court’s co-chief judge, Mary Beth Kelly, then issued an order allowing police to place the runaway foster children in the maximum security Wayne County Juvenile Detention Facility. All detained children are supposed to have a hearing the following day before Judge Hathaway, but that hasn’t always happened.

Hathaway has allowed continued detention of some juveniles. The judge warned kids he released into a relative’s home or shelter that if they run away again, they will be held in contempt of court and placed in detention for 30 days.

The court’s actions may violate federal and state laws that generally prohibit putting kids who are either neglect wards of the court or status offenders into locked facilities. But no one in Michigan has publicly protested the actions.

Amy Pellman, legal director for the Los Angeles-based Alliance for Children’s Rights, said detaining runaway foster children is unconstitutional.

“First of all, it’s a violation of their civil rights,” Pellman said. “Secondly, it’s punitive rather than rehabilitative. ... They need to be in a safe, loving environment and not in juvenile hall.”