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JOHN RABE: It's All Things Considered. I'm John Rabe. Good evening. One of the byproducts of the nation's crack epidemic is the toll on families, particularly the children of addicts. Because of the devastation surrounding crack, social service agencies are taking a tougher stance on reuniting troubled families. In Minnesota, that means addicted parents no longer have an endless supply of second chances to repair their lives while their children circulate through a series of foster homes.

Because of the so-called permanency law, the state has accelerated the time authorities can permanently remove children from their parents care. That's resulted in a sharp increase in the number of people losing their children permanently. In the last four years, the number of people losing their parental rights in Hennepin County has tripled. In Ramsey County, the number of people losing their parental rights has doubled. Minnesota Public Radio's Elizabeth Stawicki has the story of Janet, a woman who's fighting to keep her two children after losing custody of the other five.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Mornings are busy at the Hennepin County Juvenile courthouse in Minneapolis. Here, judges decide some of the most difficult of all child protection cases, whether to permanently remove children from their parents custody. One of those parents is Janet, a woman in her early seconds who waits for her attorney to arrive before going into court. She's trying to regain custody of her two children, a five-year-old boy and four-year-old girl.

She's given birth to seven children. All but these two have been taken away by the County. Janet's road to this court date has been one intertwined with childhood incest, a series of relationships with abusive men, prostitution, theft, and narcotics, most recently crack cocaine. For the last 10 years, Janet has put drugs and her partners before her children.

JANET: Get up, feed and bathe the kids, do some laundry, cook meals. Around dinnertime I'd start getting dressed to go out to prostitute myself. And I'd work at that for a couple of hours, and I'd come home and get high, and I'd go back out there, and I'd just be making trips back and forth to get high and to work. Come back, and they'd be upstairs sleeping while we were getting high.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Janet is a Caucasian woman with light brown eyes rimmed in heavy black liner. Her sandy hair offsets a strong full face. But when she talks about her past, she takes on the look of a vulnerable child. 12 years ago, Janet's first husband introduced her to hard drugs. The drugs were teas and blues, a combination of painkillers and decongestants, which when mixed and injected produces a high similar to the combination of heroin and cocaine.

JANET: I had just got married, pregnant, and my partner used, and I didn't know at first. I had to go to the bathroom, and he was in the bathroom and I walked in on him. And we had been married for six months, seven months maybe, and I never knew he was getting high. I never saw a syringe, never saw none of it. And asked him how he felt when he was getting high, and he said, well, it feels different every time. You have to experience it for yourself. And I did, and I was getting high from then on. It was like I couldn't-- it was my first and foremost thought.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Janet and her husband used drugs for several years until child protection intervened and removed their four children. Janet's mother reported them to Hennepin County authorities after Janet's brother found the children home alone. At the time, Janet was in jail on a prostitution arrest.

JANET: I ended up expecting my four-year-old to take care of my newborn so I could do my drugs and escape from everything else and connect with this man or so called connect or what I thought was connecting at that point. And all it was to run away from everything.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: As a condition to keep her children, the County ordered Janet to stay off drugs and stay away from her abusive husband. The County gave her more than three years of second chances. When Janet returned to her husband and drugs, the County terminated her parental rights and placed her children for adoption.

JANET: They gave me hundreds of chances and hundreds different ways to-- 100 different places to deal with my issues and to gain stability, and I just more or less told them, screw you.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Janet fears loneliness.

JANET: And I had kids and brought kids into the world so that I could love and be loved unconditionally, because I had lots to give and I wanted a lot.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Even, after Janet lost custody of her children and divorced her husband she continued seeing him until he beat her so badly, she filed assault charges. He was convicted and sent to Stillwater prison. Less than a year later, Janet thought her life was changing for the better. She had met another man and had given birth to her fifth child. But she and her new partner began experimenting with a new drug, crack cocaine. A drug she found fun and relaxing at first.

JANET: It gave me hard thoughts, so I thought it gave me strength and a sense of being whole or added sense of being whole, likable, and lovable, and I was accepted by people.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: But after six months on crack, Janet's life turned chaotic once again. She began chasing highs that fell lower and lower until she was smoking crack to stave off withdrawal and ensuing depression. Her partner also started to beat her, so she ran to a women's shelter. As part of her agreement for room and board, she had to kick drugs and leave her partner. She couldn't do either and eventually lost custody of her fifth child.

In the two years following the loss of that child, she gave birth to two more children, first a boy then a girl. Both were born cocaine positive. At the time the children were three and two, police raided Janet's home for drugs. Medical records show both children had cocaine in their bloodstreams. Records also show police found drug paraphernalia in the children's room.

JANET: It got bad enough that I was running a drug store out of my house, and was raided, and the children were removed from the home.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: But the County gave Janet another chance to hang on to her children, and she stayed off drugs for nearly a year. Then she resumed seeing the children's father and smoked crack. It's been about a month since Janet resumed her sobriety. As a condition of custody, the court has required her to file an order of protection against her partner. She must also undergo drug treatment while her children live with a foster family. The state now has considerably less patience with parents such as Janet.

She won't have an endless supply of chances with her last two children as she did with her first five. That's because several years ago, the legislature passed the so-called permanency law, a law that speeds up the process of one of the most intrusive governmental acts-- permanently severing contact between a parent and child. Hennepin County Chief juvenile Judge Charles Porter says the permanency law means parents now have months, not years, to get their lives together or they lose their children permanently.

CHARLES PORTER: It swung from a position where-- and I don't want to make light of this, but if the parent could still pronounce and spell the child's name, we didn't terminate.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Judges and social workers believe children are seriously damaged when they grow up in a series of unstable homes. Before the legislature passed the permanency law, children could spend up to 10 years in and out of what one judge termed foster care storage while their parents underwent drug treatment. By the time the system would declare the parents unfit, the child would be too old to have a chance at adoption. Hennepin County Judge Isabel Gomez served in juvenile court for more than three years. Gomez says she saw the damage done to children who were yanked in and out of as many as 15 foster homes.

ISABEL GOMEZ: They began out of the necessity of surviving in a healthy way to attach to the people around them, to foster parents or whoever else has been persistent in their lives. And this is happening, and this child is growing and developing totally apart from the mother's issues.

So theoretically, you could have a situation where in the kinds of time frames we were operating in, say, five years, which was not unusual, a mother might indeed get better, might indeed have resolved her difficulties with chemicals, might have overcome her depression, might be really ready to be a good parent. But then, we're looking at a person who was two and now is seven, does not know this woman, is insecure about this woman, and has developed away from her. It is not an easy thing to yoke together these two people.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: The permanency law has fueled a dramatic rise in parental terminations in Hennepin County. In the past four years, the number of parents losing permanent custody of their children has tripled. David Sanders who heads the county's child protection and Family Services Agency says crack cocaine use has added a new dimension to child abuse and neglect.

DAVID SANDERS: 10 or 15 years ago, we would have seen children having their basic needs met. So they would have had sufficient housing, sufficient food. Now, we see circumstances where there is either no housing at all or the housing is clearly inadequate or it's condemned housing or whatever, and the children don't have-- there's absolutely no food in the house. Whereas 10 years ago, it may have been inadequate food. So we really see a difference in the basic needs that children have right now compared to 10 years ago. And I think a lot of it, again, is crack usage.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Sanders says the County gets less bang for the buck in treating families where parents are addicted to crack cocaine. More resources go to a family for a longer period of time, and there's less chance the parents will get off the drug and stay off. In Minnesota, those most likely to lose custody of their children are parents like Janet who are poor with severe drug problems. She and others like her now have less time to recover and fewer allowances for relapse.

Hennepin County officials estimate between 90% to 95% of parents involved in child protection have drug problems. A high percentage of those are addicted to crack. Dan Cain of the Eden Program says, while it is possible to stay off crack cocaine, he acknowledges crack is seductive. It gives users temporary pleasure. But long term, it destroys nerve endings that deaden pleasure centers in the brain.

DAN CAIN: We define addiction as a love affair with a drug. People who use cocaine very often will have a sense of craving that-- I mean, if you compare it to a love affair it's an infatuation of an adolescent who's hanging on to a horrible relationship because they're afraid that they'll never get another one.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: For people who want to get off drugs, there are few residential treatment centers in Minnesota, which will admit parents with children. That often means parents must choose between getting help for their addictions and remaining with their children. Minneapolis based Turning Point is one of a handful of treatment centers that allows mothers undergoing treatment to live with up to two children.

One of its residents is Marie, a nurse, who is addicted to crack and has a six-month-old girl. Marie is optimistic she can kick her crack habit, but she wonders whether she and other women like her are set up to fail. She's doing well in treatment, but she worries about what happens when she leaves Turning Point.

MARIE: There's a lot of times we can't afford to live in a better neighborhood. So what happens? We're back in the same neighborhood. We're seeing some of the same old faces, and then we start associating with those faces again.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Turning Point's founder Peter Hayden strongly objects to speeding up the process of terminating parental rights. He says, just because a court terminates a parent's rights doesn't mean the bond between parent and child disappears.

PETER HAYDEN: Do they think we're a bunch of animals? Do they think poor people or animals and don't have a maternal and a paternal base with their parents? You think you're just going to come in and say, your parents weren't this or we can't do this and we're going to put you over here? It's not going to work. It's not a humanistic quality. I still want to-- I don't know who my father is, but I want to know who he is.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Hayden says the permanency law accomplishes little. He thinks taking a child away from its parents is a short term fix.

PETER HAYDEN: You can't do it because fathers and mothers today are 13, 14, 15 years old. They're going to be around.

SPEAKER 1: Two are there. Four there, four there-- ten.

JANET: Yeah. Man, I am proud of you

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Several days a week, the court allows Janet to spend time with her youngest son and daughter. On a summer afternoon in a makeshift playroom in the women's shelter basement, Janet sits crouched at a child's table. She divides her attention between her son who is practicing math and her daughter who sits cross-legged at Janet's feet drawing. Both children have large brown eyes and dark skin. The little boy is raw energy. The little girl is bashful.

SPEAKER 2: Mommy, what do you think that is?

JANET: It's two eyes that are crying.

SPEAKER 2: Sad.

JANET: Oh, OK. I thought you were talking about the-- yeah, it is sad, isn't it? He's sad. What is he sad about?

SPEAKER 2: Because he wants his mommy.

JANET: Because he wants his mommy? Yeah. Are you sad when you were at Lori's house waiting for mommy?

SPEAKER 2: Yeah.

JANET: You cry for mommy?

SPEAKER 2: Yeah.

JANET: It's hard, isn't it?

SPEAKER 2: Didn't I tell you that?

JANET: You told me you did last night.

ELIZABETH STAWICKI: Although Hennepin County Child protection officials say the permanency law has resulted in more parents losing permanent custody of their children, it's unclear who these parents are. Hennepin County does not track their race, income level, whether they use drugs, what kind of drugs they're using, or where in the County they live. Hennepin County Child protection's budget is more than $70 million a year that does not include drug treatment costs.