Illinois Scandal: Government Program Paid Convicted Child Molesters & Felons to Babysit Children of Poor Families
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on August 29, 2011
It's been discovered that an Illinois government program has paid convicted child molesters and violent felons thousands of dollars to babysit children of poor families
Recently, it was discovered that a state-funded residential foster care program in Kansas, designed to help teach troubled teens how to live safe, productive lives mixed 16-year old-girls who are in foster care in the same apartment building with registered sex offenders in their 20s.
Now a new, more heinous discovery has been made in Illinois: a Department of Human Services program, designed to provide babysitters for poor families, has horrifically dropped the ball on background checks. Known sex offenders, child rapists, and other dangerous criminals have been employed to babysit children in the state-federal babysitting program.
And be paid with taxpayer money.
Unbelievable.
The $750 million-a-year government program subsidizes child care for more than 150,000 poor families in Illinois.
While Illinois now doesn’t have any more money to bury the indigent dead in the state, it has been paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for convicted felons to be in charge of children.
From Houston Chronicle, Newspaper: Sex offenders paid to baby-sit in Ill.:
CHICAGO (AP) — Child molesters, rapists and other violent felons have been allowed to take part in a state-federal babysitting program and got access to children even after reforms were made, a Chicago Tribune investigation found.
In Sunday’s editions, the Tribune reported (http://trib.in/pHKTv3 ) problems with the Child Care Assistance Program — a $750 million-a-year program that subsidizes child care for more than 150,000 poor families in the state.
The paper didn’t uncover instances of children being harmed, but it said privacy laws prevented an in-depth study.
The program, intended to provide impoverished families with much needed child care, has come under scrutiny before, with lawmakers passing a law in 2009 that forced the state’s Department of Human Services to do a better job of vetting potential participants. The aim was to prevent convicted rapists — like a man who earned $5,000 baby-sitting two children over a two-year period — from taking part.
From Chicago Tribune, Sex offenders paid to baby-sit:
Cornelius Osborne may not seem like baby-sitting material.
He was convicted of raping two women. A succession of felonies, from robbery to failing to register as a sex offender, repeatedly sent him to prison, state records show.
But over more than two years, the state paid Osborne nearly $5,000 to baby-sit two children, before his latest conviction — for dealing drugs — put him back behind bars.
Osborne, of Chicago, wasn’t the only sex offender paid by taxpayers to baby-sit, according to a Tribune investigation that found cases of convicted rapists, molesters and other violent felons given access to children over the past decade. The money comes from a $750 million-a-year program that subsidizes child care for more than 150,000 impoverished Illinois families.
The state Department of Human Services poorly vetted baby sitters for years — and when a 2009 law forced better checks, it took nearly 18 months to start them, the newspaper’s investigation of the Child Care Assistance Program found.
Also, despite the reforms, the Tribune found that even now the state lacks safeguards to weed out baby sitters who watch children while living in the homes of sex offenders and other felons deemed too dangerous. Based on those findings, the state is vowing further reforms.
It’s nearly impossible to determine just how many of the illegal baby-sitting arrangements the state has allowed. The newspaper found no cases where children were harmed, although privacy laws shield data needed to do an in-depth study.
Still, the Tribune’s findings are frustrating to Sen. Matt Murphy, R-Palatine, who pushed for the reforms mandating better checks to weed out illegal arrangements.
“You’re talking about not only the state sanctioning, but the state creating, an economic incentive for someone with a criminal record to be in a room with a kid,” Murphy said. “That’s frankly not a situation that I find acceptable.”
From American Thinker, Anti-poverty program in Illinois used sex offenders to baby sit kids:
A scandal has engulfed an anti-poverty program in Illinois. Sunday’s Chicago Tribune features a long and engrossing article about how a 14-year-old state-Federal program started out with the best of intentions. Costing $750-million-a-year, it was supposed to provide poor parents with subsidized baby sitters to help them work their way out of poverty.
Unfortunately, the program’s nonprofit administrator, Illinois Action for Children, failed to vet potential baby sitters with, well, the same care that most middle-class moms take when looking for sitters. The program used more than a few rapists, sex offenders, and violent felons, the Tribune reported. About half of the subsidized sitters worked in the Chicago area.
[...]
This is hardly the first time, of course, that an anti-poverty program has become mired in scandal — a problem that underscores the inability of big government to assume the responsibilities that responsible adults ought to do themselves.
It would be interesting to know if President Obama, as a community organizer and later an Illinois senator, had his hands in this program. The Tribune is silent on that issue.
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