On Friday afternoon, in a room in the state Legislative Office Building, a single, small number seemed to stand out and tell its own story. The number was 83, and it referred to the number of children who are in state custody for only one reason: their families have no home.
Read moreOnce sex offenders in Connecticut are released from prison, they are unlikely to be sent back for another sex crime, according to a new report.
Five years after 746 sex offenders were released in Connecticut in 2005, less than 4 percent were re-arrested and charged with a new sex crime, according to the report by the Office of Policy and Management.
Read moreThe unusually mild winter might have flummoxed forecasters, frustrated ski buffs and worried those concerned about climate change, but so far, it's been a critical break for poor families relying on a reduced pot of government assistance to pay for heat.
More than 70,000 Connecticut households took advantage of a new tax credit for the working poor during just the first month of state income tax filings, according to the Department of Revenue Services.
The claims filed under the new state Earned Income Tax Credit were hailed both by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's administration and a leading private, nonprofit anti-poverty group as evidence of the new program's necessity as well as its success.
The health and human services portions of Malloy's proposed budget adjustments include money to support an effort to move people out of nursing homes, add three childhood vaccines to the state's program and offer the first funding boost in five years to private human services providers.
The administration also intends to move ahead with plans to seek permission from the federal government to add enrollment restrictions and scale back benefits in a Medicaid program for low-income adults without minor children, a move that has drawn criticism from advocates and some key lawmakers.
Read moreGov. Dannel P. Malloy unveiled a revised, $20.73 billion budget plan for the next fiscal year, adding nearly $330 million in spending over the preliminary budget, largely to fund additional education aid for towns and to bolster the state employees' pension fund.
After recent retirements, the state Department of Social Services is relying on retirees hired back through a vendor for information technology work -- so much so that the commissioner has warned that a potential ethics opinion discouraging the practice could lead to "a threat to public health, safety and welfare."
Child Advocate Jeanne Milstein related an anecdote from her office: Two girls, 2- and 3-year-old siblings, were removed from an abusive environment. The state breathed a sigh of relief, and moved on. Neither child nor their mother received further support or counseling for the effects of the trauma.
The girls then began acting out in school.
"Then we just start to not treat them for their trauma," she said, "but start to hold them accountable for their behavior. And then they become adolescents, and we start to blame them."
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"It appears that DSS is taking a step backwards from the way Medicaid has been interpreted," state Child Advocate Jeanne Milstein said. "These kids are supposed to get whatever medical services are available that will allow them to reach their highest levels of functioning."
Read moreGov. Dannel P. Malloy will make a 10-year, $330 million commitment to affordable housing in the budget he is proposing next week, with much of the money devoted to the rehabilitation of long-neglected, state-financed public housing.
Advocates for low-income residents want the state to create a new health program for poor adults who don't get Medicaid coverage, and they say lawmakers must commit to doing so this year to make it work as part of federal health reform.
"We should take this opportunity and we need to take it now," said Jane McNichol, executive director of the Legal Assistance Resource Center of Connecticut.
Read moreBudget cuts by the Malloy administration will stall some plans to turn around the Department of Children and Families, an agency under federal court oversight for failing too many abused and neglected children. That is the message the agency delivered to community providers.
Read moreAs the state closes its group homes and restricts admissions to public residential programs, it is financially squeezing the very nonprofit providers who are expected to take up the slack. Nonprofit reimbursements have been flat for four years and aren't scheduled to increase next fiscal year.
Read more"We probably lost 80 percent of our customers in the last few years," said Marcia Chacon, co-owner, with her husband Wilfredo Matute, of My Country Store on Main Street. "Everybody was scared to come to East Haven."
Read more"The more money you spend on gambling, the more revenue you make, the likelihood is greater you are going to have more problems," said Marvin Steinberg, who steps down this week as head of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling. He called the relationship between an increase in gambling and an increase in gambling problems inescapable.
Read moreSpurred by a new study showing the high costs of treating the mentally ill in prison, the Malloy administration is searching for ways to treat nonviolent offenders outside the prison system.
It costs Connecticut nearly double to both incarcerate and treat an offender with serious mental illnesses, compared with the price of treatment alone, according to a new academic study that analyzed social service and correction trends in 2006 and 2007.
Despite the down economy, the need for home care workers is booming. But experts worry about finding enough people to take jobs that often come with low pay, no benefits, and a history of being devalued.
Read moreGov. Dannel P. Malloy said Tuesday that four state employees have been fired, four have elected to retire and 90 others face disciplinary hearings that could cost them their jobs as a result of the Storm Irene disaster-relief investigation.
The governor said the state's investigation found that at least 686 of the approximately 800 state employees who obtained federal disaster relief through the state Department of Social Services were entitled to the aid.
DSS Commissioner Roderick Bremby likes to illustrate the balance of human and technological solutions with a story: If he told people to take down a tree and handed them a pocket knife, they'd have trouble. He could send in 10 more people with pocket knives. Or he could get them a chainsaw. The problem is, what happens before the chainsaws are available?
Read moreWith an announcement timed to make the Sunday newspapers, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy intends to propose a series of changes Saturday in the state's restrictive alcohol laws, including a repeal of minimum pricing and the ban on Sunday sales.
Administration officials say Malloy will explain his proposal in Enfield, one of the border towns where package-store owners have broken with the rest of what is a mom-and-pop industry and asked to compete with longer hours of operation and flexible pricing.
"This is an investment worthy of being made."
Gov. Malloy to charter school students who had been bused to the Capitol Tuesday evening to thank him for proposing an increase in funds for charters.
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