DCF Dirty Tricks

DCF Dirty Tricks

Originally published in the January 1, 2018 printed edition of The Boston Broadside

by Gregory A. Hession, J.D.

The Massachusetts Dept. of Children & Families (DCF) uses predictable tactics against parents, as though they were in an unwritten rule book. These are all in a “DCF Dirty Tricks” section on my web site: massoutrage.com. The twenty dirty tricks there are proven to be true, and this column will reprint condensed versions of many of them over the next several issues.

DCF Dirty Trick Number Thirteen: DCF earns up to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year per child taken, and keeps a lot of bureaucrats in work.

Follow the Money – There’s Gold in Them Thar Kids

If DCF has taken your children into state captivity, you are probably tormented, thinking, “Why? Why?” and anguishing day after sleepless night over why this has all happened. As with many things in life, when there seems to be no rational basis for what has happened, there really is a reliable and often hidden one – follow the money.

In this case, the DCF can make a lot of money by “leasing” out your child to a foster home for a year, providing a lot of expensive services during the lease, and then “selling” (adopting out) the child at the end of the lease.

While a child is in its custody, the DCF can leverage lots of state and federal cash from numerous medical, educational and therapy programs. If DCF can get you to incriminate yourself, or manipulate your child into making disclosures about abuse or neglect, it can then get a court to terminate your parental rights, and then adopt the child out, for more big bucks.

The More They Take, the More They Make

Federal law now establishes adoption quotas for each state, with bonuses for each child adopted out, and even more money for every child adopted which exceeds that state’s quota.

“Special needs” children earn far more for the state, because they can leverage reimbursements from more services and programs, both during the lease period and at the final sale (adoption). A researcher in one state found that a severely needy child can earn its masters up to $250,000 a year in government money.

We are still awaiting the figures for the commonwealth, but the state budget for DCF alone is approaching a billion dollars, not including many times that amount for lots of outside contractors and federal reimbursements.

If DCF Can Keep the Children Long Enough,
They Must Be Adopted

Keeping the children for a year or more is important, because the law requires them to achieve “permanency” for them after fifteen months. DCF will drag out the case as long as possible to manipulate this outcome, and then sell them because they themselves have kept them too long. You should see, as I have, the DCF agents having warm fuzzies over this, while the parents bitterly weep.

The law requires DCF to make reasonable efforts to keep the children in their home, but the Juvenile Courts rubber stamp the determination that they have done this. Once a judge signs the paper that DCF has made reasonable efforts, then it frees the agency to get federal reimbursement for the child. Such an endorsement is almost never withheld, even when DCF does virtually nothing to assist a parent.

Do They Actually Sell Children?

We have evidence to believe, but cannot definitively prove, that individual DCF agents take bribes from adoptive parents to buy babies from DCF. Because state laws have made adoption so difficult, expensive, and controlled by state-granted monopolies, adoption is horrendously expensive.

A few grand sent quietly to the DCF agent saves tens of thousands, and gets the process moving a lot better in court. The social worker merely has to lie or shade the truth about the parent’s fitness, and maybe share the loot with others who assist in the effort inside the agency.  And the parents never see their child again.   ♦