06/13/2023
Y'all, it's really, really bad out here.
"[T]he lifetime cost of child abuse is over $285,000 per case and that child abuse costs the state between $3.33 and $4.97 billion per year. This includes the cost of child mortality and premature adult mortality, decreased wages and workforce productivity in adulthood among survivors, increased medical costs both in childhood and adulthood, increased demands for special education, residential care costs of dependency and juvenile delinquency, and the cost of criminality in adulthood."
"There were 163,465 reports of abuse to Child Protective Services in 2022, and 70,718 cases or assessments were opened based on those initial reports. The CPS budget allows for 832 case managers, but state law allows only 20 open cases per case manager at a time."