Disgusting: State paid sex offenders as baby sitters - BlackListedNews.com

So, only one case, and it was a man babysitting his sister's kids with her consent.

This is so repulsive, it made my stomach upset. What kind of idiots are hired by the bureaucrats?

Well I believe I would take this guy babysitting my kids over Eric Cantor R-Virginia as a babysitter.

Americans have developed this weird double standard about ex-cons. On one hand you have people like Michael Vick who commits a most vicious crime, serves years in jail and then is offered a 6 year 100 million dollar deal to play professional football for the Philadelphia Eagles. Lindsay LoHan who commits crime after crime and ends up doing house arrest and being given every second reprieve in the world. Karl Rove who has been connected with all sorts of scandalous conduct is a major conduit for the Ultra Right Evangelical fanatics and paid big bucks just to fart.

Then we have Mr. & Mrs. Average Joe and Jane Dough who may have (1) misdemeanor conviction on a lifetime record that is otherwise clean and pristine and cannot even get a job as a slave at a car manufacturing plant or a job at Walmart. Heaven forbid a teaching degree and the very people who forbid these people the right and opportunity to return to a normal part of civility are probably the same ones who praise Lindsay Lohan, Worship the Karl Roves and Pay Michael Vick's salary.

I continue to reiterate that America is not for the average American and it is so paranoid as a nation that it commits some of the gravest social injustices known to man. The Republican Party and The Tea Party are but a symptom of the overall ridiculous foibles that America has developed.

I employ ex-convicts and have had (2) bad experiences in 20 years.....just (2). I will take them, train them and pay them well above minimum wage after 90 days and keep them for as long as they wish to stay as long as they are productive and play the game straight.

I would hire more if business were better and I would hire more ex-cons before I would ever hire someone like Newt Gingrich, who he himself a presidential slothful has had his own problems with his personal credibility and dubious activities but conservatives love him!

The money comes from a $750 million-a-year program that subsidizes child care for more than 150,000 impoverished Illinois families.

One felon was paid 5000.00 after being hired to babysit his neices/nephews out of a 750 million dollar program!!! And he was hired by his sister!!

Obviously, this program needs to be shut down! The other 149,999 families must be protected from this evil program!!

This wouldn't be a problem if all child molesters got castrated.

WTF has this country come to w/ all this (pardon the bad pun) *nannying*?

Cornelius Osborne may not seem like baby-sitting material.

He was convicted of raping two women. A succession of felonies, from robbery to failing to register as a sex offender, repeatedly sent him to prison, state records show.

But over more than two years, the state paid Osborne nearly $5,000 to baby-sit two children, before his latest conviction — for dealing drugs — put him back behind bars.

So he re-offended at the same & only crime he listed on his *application to be a babysitter*, which was found perfectly acceptable when he was approved. Oy. Are we noticing the sm fortune he was pd, BTW? $5K in over 2 yrs. Either babysitters are still getting $1/hr, or he didn't do it all that much & is being used to sensationalize the story.

The state Department of Human Services poorly vetted baby sitters for years

Babysitters have to be vetted? When I was 12 I started babysitting for $1 an hr & managed to never harm anyone's kids despite being one myself, now adults are seen to be unable to be competent at it? Nowadays anyone leaving an infant or even 2-3-4 schl-age kids w/ a 12 yo would be hauled up on child neglect & abandonment charges & don't tell me they wouldn't. Which is why day care is now such a huge, expensive industry (why I don't know, they certainly only pay their employees min wage or less) & one of the biggest sources of fraud in the DSS programs list w/ their rip-off rates that are much higher for *vouchered* kids than those whose parents can pay. Lots of *licensed* places hire ppl under the table, so that's no guarantee of anything as far as staff. DSS themselves place untrained cash assistance recipients in day care centers sometimes for their *workfare* requirement.

"You're talking about not only the state sanctioning, but the state creating, an economic incentive for someone with a criminal record to be in a room with a kid," Murphy said.

I'd hardly call what this guy got pd *economic incentive* if he turned back to selling drugs! Convicted felons are ineligible for cash assistance, so they have to work somewhere, don't they? Kids are in rms w/ *criminals* often & no one knows it. Some even in their own homes. Don't know a thing about what happens w/ felons but it seems to me there's 2 choices here, either keep them 4ever at state expense or get them a *real* job that pays enough so recidivism looks like too much effort for them.

"This is a program that is absolutely essential if we are going to, with a straight face, tell families that if they work and if they continue to develop themselves, we can help them make a difference for their families," she said.

I don't even see how that's cost-effective, b/c it costs 2-3x as much for a child to be in FT day care while Mom works some min wage job & still qualifies for peripheral assistance than it would to go back to the old rule of letting Mom stay home & *babysit* her own kids until they're schl-aged. But they can pacify ppl by citing stats that show less ppl *on welfare* while not explaining how it costs more to make ppl work.

All it took for Osborne was a 2004 application mailed with the help of his sister, whose two children he would be paid to watch in her Englewood apartment.

He was babysitting his sister's kids. I guess she might know if he was going to be a danger to them or not.

The program has long barred those convicted of sex crimes and the most violent felonies. But Osborne wasn't spotted because of how the form was filled out. It asked him if he had been convicted of any crimes and, if so, which ones. His response showed "drug trafficking" — a crime that at the time didn't disqualify him.

And yet pot is illegal. Go figure. *Drug trafficking* sounds like a pretty serious offense to me! I bet no one even reads the applications if that one slipped by.

Osborne joined the ranks of more than 70,000 child care providers paid by the program — 60,000 of them unlicensed.

Babysitters now need to have a license or it's a bad thing? No, they just need common sense.

The issue increasingly became a topic in Cook County courtrooms, where defendants with long rap sheets mentioned their baby-sitting jobs during proceedings.

"That profoundly concerned me," said longtime Circuit Judge Nicholas Ford.

The fact that you get what you're willing to pay for didn't concern him? Private babysitters are incredibly cheap compared to day care centers. It's why DSS prefers them when possible.

he learned nobody ran full background checks on unlicensed baby sitters.

So Grazian called Sen. Murphy, who pushed a law to require background checks.

Background checks for babysitters. *Your tax dollars* at work, but still cheaper for DSS than conventional licensed day care providers. All this mess could've been avoided had they just stuck to that alone, if they were really so worried about the children they were forcing to go hang out w/ strangers all day while Mom took the bus to McDonald's & back. They weren't. They wanted it done on the cheap.

83 baby sitters lived at addresses where sex offenders were registered, according to the auditors' report.

I suppose subsidized housing never came up in this? Same address doesn't necessarily mean same apt. Even *sex offender* doesn't necessarily mean child molestor or rapist w/ how that's snowballed to incl *sexting* teens etc.

The audit didn't name the offenders, but one may have been Tremayne Huey, who was convicted in 2004 under an alias for having sex with an underage girl

OK, age call on this one, which info it doesn't give. This is why teenagers having sex or kids sending ea other pix of their naughty bits (or taking a leak or being silly & mooning or streaking & getting an *indecent exposure* conviction) should not be on sex offender registries w/ rapists & pedophiles.

The Department of Children and Family Services blamed the delay on legal hurdles and manpower shortages in an era when government is expected to do more with less.

I think those might be considered *shovel ready jobs*, then, huh? Vacancies begging to be filled, yet no one is hired to fill them. That just oozes concern for the children to me pffft. They don't want to hire ppl & likely don't need to do so. DSS plays that *we're so overloaded w/ cases* nonsense every time their actions are questioned & have done so for decades. Not a new thing.

Along the way, Davis was convicted in 2008 of felony marijuana possession — a crime that program administrators said should have prevented him from being reapproved as a child-care provider under state rules.

But the guy we started out w/ who was babysitting his sister's kids wrote down he had been convicted of *drug trafficking* & that was acceptable? They can't be rdg these applications.

Advocates say more thorough checks are being done on longtime baby sitters — and those who live with them — as their cases come up for renewal, about every three to six months.

Well, that explains why they don't have time to do anything, if they're making babysitters recertify 2-4x/yr! That's insane. And why should *who lives w/ them* matter? They're not the babysitters.

By law, a baby sitter can't watch children in a home with any residents who wouldn't pass the background checks.

Unlicensed baby sitters who use their homes are now required to list who lives with them on forms mailed to the state.

Got it. Then I guess DSS spends more $ to either place children in day care, or provide transportation $ to the babysitter to come to the kids' home. Bearing in mind that ppl who work in *licensed* facilities may also be liars or criminals or married to someone who couldn't pass a background check, too.

The Tribune compared baby sitter addresses with prison data on parolee addresses and found 126 baby sitters received checks this summer at Chicago-area addresses where parolees were living.

126 out of 70K. Yup, that's a really widespread issue that newspaper dug up for a headline! And we arrive full circle at the conundrum of just what are ppl supposed to do for a living when released from prison, or if DSS is willing to fire a gainfully employed babysitter & put her back on the *welfare rolls* b/c her husband got out of prison.

This is nuts. Extend TANF *lifetime limits* & let mothers stay home w/ their own kids until they're old enough to go to schl, which is what the *mothers' pensions* of the 1930s were intended to do. It's way cheaper than child care vouchers, problem solved.