by Dennis Saffran

About the author: Dennis Saffran is the executive director of the Center for the Community Interest, a national organization that serves as a voice for the community on crime and quality-of-life issues.

On the day before Easter the mentally unstable mother of a five-year-old Bronx boy named Daytwon Bennett tied him to a chair and beat him to death with a broomstick. Starving when he died—he weighed just 30 pounds—Daytwon had suffered “multiple blunt impact injuries” over a long period, according to the autopsy report. Daytwon was not unknown to the child welfare authorities. They had removed him from his mother’s custody and placed him in foster care on four separate occasions in his short lifetime—only to uproot him and send him back to...