By CHRIS POWELL
Much of the social disintegration riddling Connecticut ends up on the doorstep of the state Department of Children Families, on which is thrust responsibility for the children of irresponsible parents. The department sometimes makes mistakes, but while nearly all its mistakes are secondary to the mistakes of people who failed to take care of their children, the department typically is blamed for theirs as well.
Bridgeport’s prospects brighten amid stunning decline in murders
‘Gender-affirming care’ euphemizes sex changes
Illegal immigrant’s supporters celebrate lack of due process
State legislators and journalists are good at casting blame but not always fairly.
This has been demonstrated by the recent case of Jacqueline “Mimi” Torres-Garcia, the 11-year-old alleged to have been abused, starved, and murdered by her own family members in 2024, her body then stuffed in a storage bin and not found for a year. The evidence is that the people responsible for the child’s death deceived child protection agents.
But as was inadvertently indicated by a recent report from the Connecticut Mirror, the bigger problem of child neglect and abuse in the state has nothing to do with DCF.
The Mirror examined the department’s efforts to increase “kinship care” for children who are removed from their parents. DCF figures that such children will do better and be less traumatized if they stay with other family members or close friends, and the Mirror cited as an example a woman in Danbury who instantly agreed to take in the five young children of her sister though she hardly knew them.
Apart from the woman’s generosity and heroism, the Mirror report may have been most interesting for what it omitted. The word “father” didn’t appear even once.
Maybe the father of the five kids cited in the report is dead. Maybe he was part of the abuse or neglect they suffered. Maybe there are multiple fathers to the kids, and none is helping.
In any case about a third of Connecticut’s children are growing up without a father in their home or closely involved in their lives. The figure is far higher in the state’s impoverished cities. Fatherlessness correlates heavily with children’s educational failure, physical and mental illness, and crime, and how the causes of fatherlessness relate to government welfare policy is far more worthy of legislative and journalistic investigation than the occasional possible failures of DCF.
* * *
The recent suggestion by this column that Connecticut should revive the “town farms” it had in olden times has been dismissed with disdain. It is said: How backward, retrograde, and cruel.
Not at all. For Connecticut’s town farms were just early attempts at what now is called “supportive housing,” simple lodging for troubled people: the chronically mentally ill, the disabled, drug-addicted, broke, shiftless, or demoralized — society’s walking wounded. Town farms sheltered, clothed, and fed them under supervision in exchange for their labor on the farm or around the farmhouse. The town farm aimed to earn enough money to support itself and keep its residents from starving, freezing, or being a public nuisance. A few even recovered enough to take care of themselves.
What is backward, retrograde, and cruel is Connecticut’s current treatment of such people, as the state might have noticed during the recent terrible cold spell. The governor repeatedly declared a “cold weather protocol” to open or alert shelters and “warming centers” so the state’s homeless population, estimated at nearly 4,000 people, might be able at least to come indoors somewhere. But most of the estimated 3,000 shelter beds around the state are said to be always full and people are frequently turned away.
Permanent barracks-type housing — with showers and toilets, visits by medical staff, and the therapy of mandatory work to help support the facility — is not available for most of Connecticut’s homeless. When the “cold weather protocol” is discontinued, many return to sleep in cars, on the couches of friends and relatives, or in outdoor encampments, which bring them no closer to the chance of a normal life.
Now that’s retrograde and cruel, and it’s today, not long ago.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
Chris Powell column 