Between the federal reimbursement and the reduced foster care costs, high-quality family defense pays for itself. (Getty Images)
The federal government will reimburse county courts for part of the cost of providing lawyers to indigent children and parents when the state wants to investigate those families for alleged child abuse and, possibly, take away the children. Thanks to some excellent reporting by the Capital Chronicle we now know that one-in-five Indiana counties don’t even apply for the money.
To which many readers, conditioned by decades of horror stories about parents brutally beating torturing or murdering their children, may say: “So what?” Indeed, that may be why so many counties are not bothering to collect the money. Overloaded lawyers often have so little time and so many clients that families are almost literally defense-less. Perhaps these counties want to keep it that way.
The problem with this is the problem that has plagued America’s entire war against child abuse for decades: Every time we take a swing at “bad parents” the blow lands on their children.