Dan Burton: “Mr. Chairman, I understand that there is controversy over whether we go to 12 months or 18 months. When I was a boy, I…”

“Mr. Chairman, I understand that there is controversy over whether we go to 12 months or 18 months. When I was a boy, I was in a welfare agency home, a foster, and a setting of the type we are discussing today; and I can tell my colleagues I met a lot of young people that had been in that system for years and it had a very debilitating impact on their lives. I know some of them ended up in jail. Those are things that we need to take into consideration. The longer a child is in the foster care system, the more likely he or she is going to be a burden on society. Some of the statistics the gentleman from Kansas [Mr. Tiahrt] did not mention in his statement, but he told me of a foster child who had been in over 100 foster homes. Now we can imagine what that does to the child's psyche. It has got to have a very devastating impact. Each year 15,000 children graduate from foster care with no permanent home. Fifteen thousand. What does that do to those kids? The ACLU reports, and I do not quote them very often, but the ACLU reports that among these graduates, 40 percent, 40 percent become dependent on AFDC, 46 percent dropped out of school, 51 percent were unemployed, and 60 percent of the women had out-of-wedlock births within 2 years from graduating from foster care.”