Document Everything

The parents of the child you care for will have troubled lives. That is a given, because you wouldn't have to care for the child otherwise. Identifying exactly how troubled is really quite impossible without spending every moment with them, which is completely impractical. Still, it is critical to have as much of a record as you can manage detailing how things are going.

We've come up with a novel way of tracking how the parents of our kids-in-care are doing. Whenever either my wife's sister or her husband have a court date, I put it onto a calendar. Whenever they make a phone call, that also goes onto the calendar along with a description of the call. When one of them is arrested or released due to either bail or overcrowding, that goes on just like everything else.

Any medium will do. You can use a pad of paper, an email program with calendaring, or any of the many web calendaring tools like those at Google or Yahoo. The method isn't nearly as important as the content. My personal preference at the moment is Google, because it allows me to easily share the calendar with other family members who share our interest.

In our case, the troubles are not just social, but legal as well. What if I want to count how many days they were in jail last year? Break out the calendar. How many times did they call in January? Look it up. What if I can't remember the ID number for that Identity Theft case? Look that up too.

That leads to another area of information that is really useful. Some jails have online access to bookings, releases and occupancy. Check your county lockup to see if they do. If they have one, that web interface can give you a lot of information so you know what's going on in their life. Many courts also publish calendars online, and you can sometimes even look up warrant information. My wife and I have collected a great set of links for the Salt Lake City area. Here's a sampling:

Salt Lake County Jail
Utah District Court Calendars
Davis County Sheriff
Salt Lake County District Attorney Active Cases

A lot of cities do not have electronic interfaces to their court calendars, warrants, or citations. That means it will take plain old phone calling to look things up with those smaller jurisdictions. Most jurisdictions are perfectly willing to share information if you can document that you have a reason to be interested, or if you already have case numbers.

The more information you have on what they're doing, where they're living, when they call, where they are working and everything else, the better armed you will be to either support their claim of being recovered and reformed, or to support protecting their children from them, depending on the path they take.