It has a story of fraud.
During the dark ages of Michigan, particularly Wayne County, billing for a child in foster care and juvenile justice was the norm, as the court orders were "rubber-stamped" by a judge.
Children were put in the foster care system with fraudulent court reports generated by one of the five child placing agencies of the County.
It must be noted that these child placing agencies had no bidding process, review, contractual disbarment or license revocation process, as everything was "self-reported".
Anyway, the process of contemporaneously billing foster care and juvenile justice for a child, which only had a fictitious case in juvenile court, was coined as the "Will Smith-Bill Smith" syndrome.
This when Wayne County would take a child in foster care (normally improperly placed) "Will Smith" and cut and past the Social Security and personal information for billing for cost reimbursement in juvenile justice, but change the name to "Bill Smith".
When audits were run, no one noticed the difference in names.
What made matters worse was the majority of these kids were to spend the rest of their youth in foster care with a strong likelihood of ending up in juvenile justice as a result of running away from horrific conditions in foster care, covering up, quite nicely, fraudulent billing.
Some foster children were even prosecuted and billing under juvenile justice as young as 2 years of age, without ever seeing the light of day of a court room.
Collectively, people made millions off this dual-jacket scheme, even funneling to elected officials' campaigns to allow the to look the other way.
The U.S. DOJ and HHS OIG has not done a damn thing about it.
‘Dual-status’ kids endure another kind of double jeopardy
She was born to an incarcerated mother. She was repeatedly abused by relatives with whom she spent much of her early life.
By the time she turned 10, she had been sexually abused by an older brother, a pimp, who forced her into prostitution.
She didn’t last long at foster homes and ended up living in group homes in the Northern California area. She ran away from placements dozens of times and continued prostituting herself.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Alicia — whose real name is being withheld to conceal her identity — repeatedly landed in juvenile detention on solicitation or related charges.
But for most of her young life, the people responsible for helping her — in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems — hardly spoke to one another, much less coordinated services, because of the longstanding gulf between the two systems.
Alicia, now 18 and expected to be in jail through mid-January on prostitution and robbery charges, could be a poster child for kids known as “dual-status youth” — those involved in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.
Their cases typically present enormous challenges: Many of the children are chronic runaways who have suffered from severe physical or emotional abuse, neglect and abandonment. And they typically come from troubled homes often beset by domestic violence, substance abuse and mental illness.
It’s hard to say how many children become entangled in both the juvenile justice and child welfare systems, partly because of the historical bureaucratic divides between the two systems.
Juvenile courts in the United States handled an estimated 1.2 million cases in which the youth was charged with a delinquency offense during 2011, according to the Pittsburgh-based, nonprofit National Center for Juvenile Justice, which collects and reports on juvenile court activity for the federalOffice of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. And the federalChildren’s Bureau reported 3.8 million children in 2012 were the subjects of at least one report of abuse and neglect; for 686,000 children the maltreatment was substantiated.
Conservatively, tens of thousands of children a year are simultaneously involved in both the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. (Depending on the locale, these children are known by such terms as crossover, dual-jacketed, dual-involvement, dual-status supervision or dual-jurisdiction youths.)
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