Rape, Drugs and Disorder Shake California Group Home and Provoke Reform Efforts - ProPublica

Rape, Drugs and Disorder Shake California Group Home and Provoke Reform Efforts - ProPublica: The breakdown at FamiliesFirst has helped spur California to rethink how it cares for its most troubled children, a question that for decades has confounded not just the state but the country. A panel of experts, officials, care providers, and families has generated a raft of reforms it hopes will soon become law. Over the years, the places that used to be repositories for such children — state psychiatric hospitals and juvenile detention centers — have been shuttered or scaled back, usually in the wake of their own scandals. Group homes, too, have increasingly been deemed a failed model, yet year after year vulnerable and volatile California children remain housed in them for lack of a better option.