I come to praise DCF, not to bury it. A magnet for criticism in the best of times, the state Department of Children and Families has drawn torrents of outrage over the past two weeks for its decision to transfer a 16-year-old transgender youth to an adult prison. Lost in that flood of well-intentioned indignation is an important, but a largely unasked, and perhaps unanswerable, question: How does a parent with 4,000 children balance the good of each individual child with the good of them all?
Before I turn to that question, a few facts: On Feb. 4, the DCF petitioned the juvenile court for permission to transfer the girl in question (“Jane Doe” due to her age), either to York Correctional Institution in Niantic, or to Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire. Both are run by the Department of Corrections, not by DCF; neither is a suitable long-term home for Jane Doe. York is a prison for adult women and Manson is a facility for juvenile delinquent boys.
