Issac Bailey | DSS is under duress because South Carolina values slogans, low taxes and spending cuts more than children

He walked with his hands behind his back, crossed at the wrists, and with a shuffling gait familiar to those who’ve seen prisoners handcuffed and shackled.

He was a 16-year-old boy, and he was neither shackled nor handcuffed, at least not physically.

I couldn’t help but wonder if his brief introduction to the S.C. Department of Juvenile Justice system had already permanently been imprinted on him.

He was a teenager I met through my work with the Horry County guardian ad litem program.

I can’t discuss the details of his case, but the image of him walking back into the most secure location of a detention center that resembled a prison for hardened criminals came back to me when I heard about the federal class-action lawsuit filed against Gov. Nikki Haley and the Department of Social Services.

South Carolina’s Appleseed Legal Justice Center, S.C. attorney Matthew Richardson and the national advocacy organization, Children’s Rights, allege that a lack of health care and basic services are hurting kids in the state’s social welfare system. They also say children who enter the system through DJJ are sometimes kept in detention facilities because DSS has nowhere else to house them, and that such institutions are over-used.

“Despite nearly three decades of repeated notice of dangers to children in DSS custody and multiple opportunities to improve the foster care system, Defendants have continued to ignore those dangers and operate DSS in a manner contrary to law and reasonable professional judgment in deliberate indifference to known harms and imminent risk of known harms to Plaintiff Children, so as to shock the conscience.”

It’s hard to look at the history of the system the state has in place to protect its under-stress children and fractured families and come to a different conclusion.

The system has failed the children most in need of significant intervention. And for the longest time, social workers, those on the front line of what is essentially a front in the war on poverty, have been blamed, even though many of them desperately try to do a good job in almost impossible circumstances — circumstances created in the governor’s mansion and State House.

The problems have long been more systematic than over-worked social workers and always begin at the top. In South Carolina, being able to brag about low tax rates and spending cuts and the like have often won out over doing what it takes to fix a system just about everyone involved knows needs significant repair.

A legislative audit last year found that DSS decided against asking for extra money and ignored problems — which meant unnecessarily putting more kids in harm’s way, or leaving them there.

Honestly, though, as damning as that claim is, can you blame them?

In this state, we too often don’t begin by deciding what needs to be done and then decide on the best way to achieve the objective. We first declare that whatever we do must be done on the cheap, then create the plan, then wonder why there are so many systematic failures in critical state-run agencies.

The head of DSS appointed by Haley has been dismissed and there have been moves to hire more social workers and provide more training.

That won’t be enough. Nothing will until there’s a fundamental rethinking of how we think about providing assistance to the most needy among us.

We claim to love children and brag about the state’s pro-life status as often as we can and will every time another prospective 2016 presidential candidate flocks to our shores.

But that won’t help that 16-year-old boy I saw walk down that hall or any of the other thousands of kids who need an effective plan, not another empty slogan, to change the trajectory of their lives.

Throwing money at the problem is not the answer — but neither is continuing to starve a critical part of the safety net.

This story was originally published January 17, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Issac Bailey | DSS is under duress because South Carolina values slogans, low taxes and spending cuts more than children."