Little Court of Horrors

In 2001, Minnesota enacted a law designed to reduce the length of time that kids who land in the system have to spend in legal limbo, buffeted by the periodic and wrenching upheaval of moving from one home to another without any assurance as to when, or if, they might return home. The new rules essentially require courts to hurry up and determine—within 6 months or 12, depending mainly on the child's age—whether children should be taken from a home permanently.

The phase-in of this new, more aggressive child protection timeline has coincided with the arrival of methamphetamine in rural and suburban Minnesota, which in turn has sparked an unprecedented increase in the number of child protection cases. Court officials say fully half the cases they see in Anoka now involve meth—and add that there are no effective treatment programs in Minnesota where caseworkers can send users. Even if everyone who needed treatment got it, Askew and the other judges assigned to Anoka's child protection cases know from hard experience that six months isn't enough time to assess whether an addicted parent is getting any sort of toehold on sobriety.

To date there has been no official evaluation of the effect of the new law, but statistics provided by state court analysts show that the number of cases where parental rights are terminated is rising. In Anoka, the number of cases has tripled since the new timeline was adopted; the number of children affected has risen even higher. In the vast majority of Anoka County cases involving meth, children now lose their parents for good.

Right before lunch, Askew discovers that a preteen placed in a so-called professional foster home ended up a truant because her guardians wouldn't drive her to her home school. Instead, sheriff's deputies had been driving her to the school in the lockup for juvenile delinquents. He asks the social worker to please try to work out something less punitive, but as the parties to the case file out, it's wholly unclear whether the judge has the power to change anything.

"We're doing social engineering with limited information and resources," he complains to no one in particular. "And we're doing it with parents who aren't functioning very well."

Part two:

The poster child

The case of Tess Madsen, age 10, is a one-stop summary of the reasons officials pushed a shorter timeline in child protection inquiries. (All the names of families brought before the court in this story have been changed to safeguard the privacy of the children in the proceedings.) She came to authorities' attention one night last February when a stranger found her, cold and wet, on a street corner in Ramsey. The man called police. Tess explained to the cops that her dad kicked her and her five brothers and sisters, ages 7 to 16, out of the house, at one point threatening to "send us away to live with the Sambos." Official reports describe Jim Madsen as unconcerned at his daughter's coming home later in a squad car. Safety is the cops' problem, he scoffed.

At the Madsen home two weeks later, investigators found no food. A teenager who should have been in school was doing housework. She insisted that nothing was wrong, that the other kids were defiant brats. As it turned out, she was facing abuse charges of her own.

The younger kids told investigators that their dad smokes pot for his eyesight and drinks beer to quell his temper, and that he punished them "for asking for pudding" by duct-taping them to chairs. That was just the one time though, they volunteered. Usually he beat them with a belt. Once, when the belt he used began to fray, their mother Kathi had bought him a new one.

Investigators also learned that the Madsens had been the subject of 14 prior child protection complaints in Hennepin County, where a few months earlier they lost their parental rights to a seventh child. Since Tess was found huddled on the roadside, the other six kids have been in Anoka County's custody for eight months, scattered across several foster homes. One has been hospitalized for threatening suicide; others have become the subjects of delinquency proceedings.

The Madsens are almost certainly headed for a trial to take away their kids—in court shorthand, a TPR (Termination of Parental Rights). The TPR may ensure the children's safety from their parents, but otherwise it guarantees very little. Unless a relative with a better track record steps forward, it's likely that no one will want to adopt all six siblings. Older kids are particularly hard to place, as are younger kids with the kind of psychological problems that are typical of situations like theirs. It's a good bet that some, if not all, of them will wind up in a series of foster homes.

In 1997, Congress passed the Adoption and Safe Families Act with families like this one in mind. The law was intended to reduce the number of cases that drag on for years as parents blow chance after chance and their children languish in foster care. The law requires states to consider terminating parental rights when children have been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months. It also created financial incentives for states and counties to find adoptive homes for those children: Each time an adoption is finalized, the federal government pays the state a fee pegged to the needs and characteristics of the child in question.