Wasted: The Plight of America's Unwanted Children

by Patrick T. Murphy

This is a book about how a system designed to help children is instead helping to destroy them. For almost thirty years Patrick Murphy has represented abused and neglected children in court cases at every level of the state and federal judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court. He has labored in the trenches of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. In Wasted, Mr. Murphy charges that the child welfare bureaucracy is stuck in hundred-year-old realities and the politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The concern of state agencies and the courts for family preservation, he argues, has now gone too far. Keeping families together by lavishing public resources on abusive parents who can't and won't change their behavior is harming their children. Too many of them are suffering continued abuse, degradation, neglect, injury, even death. The system is sending all the wrong messages, Mr. Murphy insists: struggling poor parents are ignored by the government while abusers get help; confidentiality protects state agencies that make mistakes; a resistance to trans-racial placement and adoption ensures that many African-American children will never find a permanent home. Meanwhile America's underclass continues to grow and ossify because we refuse to grapple with its racial implications. Wasted pulls no punches in describing the mess, but Mr. Murphy also offers a prescription for fixing what's broke.

192 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1997

Reviews

[Andrew Vachss · Rating 5 out of 5]

The hard truth, from a frontline veteran of the war to protect children. Must reading for anyone who seeks the reality, not the rhetoric, of the "childcare" system in America.

[M · Rating 2 out of 5]

A trip to read something over 20 yrs old. Both racist and enlightening.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Murphy is a Cook County family court judge whose courtroom I've sat in a couple of times. Both times I felt like he tried to bigfoot me. The first time he knew I was writing a story which was going to be embarrassing to him, and he asked me to say hello to one of my senior colleagues. The second time he questioned me from the bench in front of both sides in a case I was covering, albeit in a friendly way.

Anyway, I asked the colleague about Murphy after that second encounter and the colleague lent me this book. Turns out Murphy is a big deal nationally in child protection. "Wasted" is part autobiography, part screed against some of the more idiotic aspects of juvenile justice and protection. He beats up the left for never holding screw-up kids or screw-up parents accountable, and he beats up the right for not giving a crap about black kids in the city. He's been in the trenches since the 60s so he's earned the right to rant.

I normally don't pick out "won't somebody please think of the children" type books. But it's hard to come to any other conclusion than that Murphy has genuinely devoted his life to helping kids and that his apparent attempts to bigfoot me, who has never done anything to help anyone, are fair enough.