LOS ANGELES COUNTY: FIXING THE SYSTEM

IN THE SORDID UNDERWORLD OF SUNny Los Angeles County, where 40,000 children have been removed from their violent, neglectful or drug-addicted families, the pink-stucco True Way Baptist Church may well be a station on the road to salvation. Just ask Delores Mayes, 28, whose children were seized and placed in foster homes when her crack habit got out of hand. Faced with losing them for good, Mayes entered a detox program for six months but had nowhere to take them when she emerged. That is when the church, under contract to the county, stepped in: its outreach workers found her housing and furniture. She reconciled with the children's father, a former crack addict himself, who secured two steady jobs, as a fish-market clerk and a custodian.

But the church's efforts did not stop there. For months afterward, its social workers visited the family at least twice a week, eyeballing the kids for signs of neglect, offering counsel on parenting and managing the home and keeping the faith. "They helped me believe in myself," Mayes says, "to realize that anything was possible." John Jones, the children's father, had learned to smoke crack at the age of 16 from his own father and had spent years in jail after stealing to support his habit. Painfully withdrawn, he says, "I've been doing a little talking now." And planning: "I always wanted to own my own fish market, and now I want to live up to that dream." The couple is set to wed. Once off crack, Jones explains with a sidelong glance at Mayes, "I finally saw what a beautiful woman she is." "Don't mind if I blush," says Mayes, breaking out in a broad grin and bouncing her pig-tailed one-year-old on her lap.

The Mayes-Jones success story is no manna from heaven. It is the fruit of a long, gritty battle to reform the Los Angeles department of child services. Only five years ago, the county was fighting a lawsuit by public-interest groups over a bureaucracy so lax that many abused children were not even visited once a month, the state's legal minimum. "Kids were dying because they were not adequately supervised," says Carole Shauffer, director of the San Francisco-based Youth Law Center. "Foster parents had to make do with 'drive-by visits': they would bring the kids to the curb, because caseworkers didn't have time to get out of the car."

As of 1989, the county had paid $18 million in settlements to children who were abused while in its custody. In the case of Jesus, a nine-year-old who weighed only 28 lbs. and could hardly speak after his angel dust-addicted parents committed suicide, county workers failed to visit him in his foster home for four months. During that time, he was beaten, sodomized, burned on his genitals and nearly drowned by his foster parents. He became a spastic paraplegic. By 1990 the state was threatening to take over Los Angeles County's child-welfare-services system.