Private service doesn't always mean the best service

Some ideologues like to promote phrases like “free enterprise” and “big government,” the former being good and the latter being bad. Yet they often fail to define these terms with any specificity. And they often fail to note the possible consequences of living out these ideals. Increasingly, state governments are turning to the private sector to handle services previously performed by the state. The argument is that government spending is wasteful and inefficient. But often what gets lost is accountability as these for-profit companies make profit, not service, their main goal.
Brian Joseph investigates one such service in his article “The Brief Life and Private Death of Alexandria Hill” (Mother Jones, March/April). 

Alexandria Hill, or Alex, 2 years old, died on July 29, 2013, in Rockdale, Texas, while under the care of Sherill Small, her foster mother. Last November, Small was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to life without parole.
Not on trial was the private foster-care agency that okayed Small for being a caretaker, or “mentor,” for Alex. Joseph’s article looks at such agencies and asks how accountable they are.
The agency involved in Small’s case was the Lone Star branch of the Mentor Network, a $1.2 billion company that specializes in finding caretakers for a range of populations. Private foster care, Joseph writes, is “a fragmented industry of mostly local and regional providers that collect hundreds of millions in tax dollars annually while receiving little scrutiny from government authorities.” 

Finding foster care has always been difficult, and with high caseloads and tight budgets, many state and local child welfare agencies are turning to private agencies. This means that in many places, “the government can seize your children, but then outsource the duty of keeping them safe—and duck responsibility when something goes wrong,” writes Joseph.
As part of an 18-month investigation, Joseph asked every state whether it knew how many children in its foster system had been placed in privately screened homes. Only eight could, and not one had a statistically valid dataset comparing costs, or rates of abuse or neglect, in privately versus publicly vetted homes.
Christina Riehl, senior staff attorney for the Children’s Advocacy Institute at the University of San Diego School of Law, says: “There are so many places where the government puts money to fix a problem without adequately checking to see if the money is actually fixing the problem.”
Joseph talked to former workers at Mentor who said they faced great pressure to OK caretakers. How much money the company makes is tied to the number of foster parents on their roster. As a result, says Roland Zullo, a researcher at the University of Michigan, “the lives of these children become commodities.” 

Alex’s death is not the only such case. Joseph notes many other cases where foster parents were not adequately vetted and harm came to children. And in most cases, the agency was not held accountable.
In one case, a child sustained permanent brain damage from nearly drowning during a private foster-care placement, but California only fined the agency $500.
When Joseph asked a spokesman for the California Department of Social Services why the state didn’t penalize the agency more, he said, “There’s not a huge group of people trying to be foster parents right now, and that’s a challenge—finding enough homes.”
Finding homes for neglected children is a huge challenge, and there are many wonderful foster parents. But giving a blank check to private agencies and failing to monitor their success is not in the best interest of children. “Free enterprise” isn’t always best.