Minors in Foster Care, Custody Put at 500,000 : Children: An ‘alarming’ rise in numbers is linked to abuse, homelessness and drugs. Many such youths live in California.

The decade of the 1980s has seen “alarming” increases in the numbers of the nation’s children who are placed in foster homes or in other settings outside their families, and the figures are projected to grow even more dramatically in the next five years, according to a congressional report released Monday.

Nearly 500,000 children are estimated to be currently in out-of-home placement, a figure expected to reach more than 840,000 by 1995 if current trends continue, according to a study released by the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families. Recent census figures put the number of children under 18 in the nation at about 63 million.

The out-of-home numbers include children placed in foster care, in the juvenile justice system and in mental health facilities.

“It’s a sobering and depressing fact at this holiday season, when home and family are so valued, that hundreds of thousands of American children have only a cell, a hospital bed or a temporary shelter to call ‘home,’ ” Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), chairman of the committee, said.

The report, based on a 10-state survey, said that the number of children in foster care has risen by an estimated 23% between 1985 and 1988, in contrast to a 9% decline between 1980 and 1985.

In 1988, one in five of the children in foster care lived in California, which represents an increase of 44% from 1985, the report said.

The report attributed the growing out-of-home placements to child abuse, new conditions resulting from crack cocaine, alcohol abuse and abuse of other drugs, and homelessness. In addition, Miller blamed a large part of the problem on the budget cuts in social service programs imposed by the Ronald Reagan Administration.

In California, Miller said, officials of the Deukmejian Administration “mirrored exactly what President Reagan was doing” by cutting state funding for preventive services. As a result, he said, “less money was available for services to help these families, so we ended up locking up children or taking them away.”

Jim Brown, chief of adoptions for the California Department of Social Services, called Miller’s statements “totally false.”

“Not having seen the report, I can’t comment with any degree of real thoroughness, but California has put a lot of money into prevention,” Brown said. The state, he said, “has about $26 million tied up in child abuse programs,” which, he said, represents an increase over prior years. Most of these programs, he said, were initiated under Deukmejian.

He added: “There may be some areas where California can be criticized, but this is one area where we shouldn’t be.”

Brown attributed the large number of children in foster homes in California to “one of the most thorough child abuse reporting laws in the country.” Also, he said, California was “suffering under the onslaught of the drug abuse problem beyond anything you could possibly imagine.”

Miller said that, “as a national policy, we should be taking taxpayers’ money and investing in the prevention of the breakup of these families.”

Such preventive services, he said, would be far less costly than foster homes and other facilities, which he described as often “as bad or as dangerous as the care (the children) were originally removed from.”

Miller said there was “overwhelming evidence” that early intervention can make a difference.

“We can work with abusive parents and change those patterns,” he said. “In many instances, parents recognize they are out of control. They ask for help, and it’s not forthcoming. There is no help, and the situation gets worse and worse, and finally life-threatening.

“We can, in many instances, prevent a recurrence of that kind of behavior,” he added.

In a dissenting report, 12 Republican members of the committee, including Rep. Ron Packard of Carlsbad, charged that “the conclusions . . . appear to be driven by one state, California,” and said that the national figures would not be so grim if California were excluded from consideration.