Squeezed by high caseloads and tight budgets, child welfare agencies across the country increasingly are turning to private, non-profit organizations and for-profit companies to recruit, screen, train and monitor foster parents.
This little-known but common policy has resulted in child deaths across the country in part because private agencies have a financial incentive to ignore the sketchy backgrounds of foster parents or festering problems in their homes.
“The Brief Life and Private Death of Alexandria Hill” is the product of an 18-month investigation by Mother Jones, in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California Graduate School of Journalism, which examines the human consequences of foster care privatization.
In tragic detail, Brian Joseph describes several cases of child abuse and neglect at the hands of foster parents vetted and monitored by private agencies. One case involves Alexandria Hill, a 2 year old who was murdered by a foster mother screened by one of the nation’s largest private foster agencies, a $1.2 billion, publicly traded corporation. His investigation found disturbing holes in the agency’s screening and monitoring of Alexandria’s foster mother.