This is a book about how a system designed to help children is instead helping to destroy them. For almost thirty years Patrick Murphy has represented abused and neglected children in court cases at every level of the state and federal judiciary, including the U.S. Supreme Court. He has labored in the trenches of the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. In Wasted, Mr. Murphy charges that the child welfare bureaucracy is stuck in hundred-year-old realities and the politics of the 1960s and 1970s. The concern of state agencies and the courts for family preservation, he argues, has now gone too far. Keeping families together by lavishing public resources on abusive parents who can't and won't change their behavior is harming their children. Too many of them are suffering continued abuse, degradation, neglect, injury, even death. The system is sending all the wrong messages, Mr. Murphy insists: struggling poor parents are ignored by the government while abusers get help; confidentiality protects state agencies that make mistakes; a resistance to trans-racial placement and adoption ensures that many African-American children will never find a permanent home. Meanwhile America's underclass continues to grow and ossify because we refuse to grapple with its racial implications. Wasted pulls no punches in describing the mess, but Mr. Murphy also offers a prescription for fixing what's broke. “A splendid book.” ―Msgr. John Egan, DePaul University “Honest and self-reflective...written with wit and great knowledge.” ―Boris M. Astrachan, M.D., Chairman Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago “Wasted is a first-rate read-poignant and instructive.” ―Edward I. Koch, Former Mayor, New York City “Insightful and passionate...a book about responsibility and of how shirking it leads to social catastrophe.” ―Ellis Cose, Author of Color-Blind and The Rage of a Privileged Class “A powerful indictment of the child welfare system...its message deserves a broad hearing among those who care about our society's children.” ―Elizabeth Bartholet Patrick T. Murphy is Public Guardian of Cook County, Illinois, an office unique in the United States. He has also written Our Kindly Parent-the State and among many honors has received the Juvenile Justice Award of the American Bar Association and Criminal Justice Award of the governor of Illinois.