OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Jan. 9, 2008: U.S. marshals knock at the door of a house in Southeast D.C. at about 9:30 a.m. A woman in a white T-shirt lets them in. She sits on the steps, and the marshals are hit with a stench. While minding the woman, they discover something upstairs even more overwhelming than the odor.
Four corpses. Young corpses. The woman’s daughters.
The mother, Banita Jacks, said they “died” in their sleep. They were “possessed” by demons. “I am not insane.”
Those comments are among the most compelling facts in the Jacks case, a stunning murder that practically left D.C. Superior Judge Frederick Weisberg few choices in 2009 but to convict her with several repetitions of “guilty.”
Nobody was peeking under her bed or the girls’ bed. Nobody peeked into the fridge to see if it was stocked with fruits and veggies. Lots of folks knocked, got no answer and simply walked away.
SEE ALSO: D.C. residents baffled by lack of attention over missing children
Chalk it up to liberal roads leading to Satan’s place.
The Jacks case left the public-at-large asking variations of the same question, “What in Hell went wrong?” — a question that government and social services advocates rarely answer truthfully. They’d rather try to legislate an issue away or rewrite policy than solve a real problem.
Consider the D.C. missing girls crisis. Mayor Muriel Bowser and her political cohorts say there is no “crisis,” yet on Friday her political cohorts (and some members of the media) saluted her for establishing a task force and other initiatives on missing children. Oy vey.
Today, nine years after the discovery of those decomposing corpses, the question is, “What is going right?”
The short government answer is not enough, according to a just-released report by D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson.
According to the report, there’s not enough personnel, there’s not enough funding and there’s not enough, well, tack on any noun you prefer.
Without doubt, the auditor’s report will help rejuvenate interest in policies now being bungled as “home visit.” The policies are a throwback to old-school health, education and welfare programs that urged and even mandated that case workers peer into families’ homes to check on everybody’s health, education and welfare. (These days, they can snatch blood samples and DNA along the way.)
Will the “home visits” solve Americans’ problems or create new problems?
Well, both. However, because the laws, the rules and the regs were one-size-fits-all, they also discouraged single parents from dating or remarrying, and they gave families a false since of security (with other policies like summer youth jobs, free-style abortion, public housing “projects” and affordable housing).
(Google the word Negro and the name Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the same time and read for yourself.)
Would a bolstered “home visit” program have saved Banita Jacks and her four girls? That is doubtful.
See, in the Jacks case, housing folks did not intervene, social services did not intervene, police did not intervene, school authorities did not intervene, neighbors did not intervene, family did not intervene. Even her public utilities were shut off.
They all knocked on the door for a “home visit.” Nobody answered, but each could say they had visited the home.
Seemingly, everyone suspected something wasn’t quite right after Jacks’ husband died of cancer in early 2007. One problem, a huge one, is that mayors, lawmakers, advocates, school authorities, social service/welfare agencies and law enforcers are designed to operate in their own silos. Nobody aggregates. (Hence, no missing girl crisis.)
That D.C. tentacles reached deeply into every aspect of the Jacks family is a testament to them becoming prisoners as reclusive as their mom and the blind ambition of government overreach.
That the District is considering making its “home visit” policy anew regarding infants, children and parents (who may live separately) is frightening enough. To label them all “at-risk” is a terrifying prospect.
To peep first and ask questions later would be not only an invasion of privacy but also racial and socio-economic profiling of the first order.
Sure, the sick and the shut-ins need to be checked on sometimes. But that’s not who the government wants to target.
The government and its health, education and welfare advocates played an awful, awful hoax on Banita Jacks’ girls and, frankly, their mom.
Don’t let the government leave its fingerprints all over your family like it did the Jacks girls.
Sometimes, when the government comes a knockin’
• Deborah Simmons can be contacted at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.
• Deborah Simmons can be reached at dsimmons@washingtontimes.com.
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