As more and more children are taken from their parents in Clark County, there has been talk of expanding Child Haven, the county's "shelter" for abused and neglected children. But Child Haven is not a haven, because shelters are not good places for children.

Other states and localities keep children safe without forcing every child to be institutionalized as a first stop. They don't institutionalize babies at all. And, most important, they don't take away, proportionately, nearly as many children as Nevada does -- they've found better ways to keep children safe.

Decades of studies are nearly unanimous: Institutionalization does enormous harm to children, and the younger the child, the greater the harm. That's why the federal government rates child welfare systems, in part, on their ability to keep children younger than 12 out of these places.

Yet Child Haven is warehousing infants -- even stacking them up like cordwood in the gym. Many are likely to emerge traumatized for life. And the evidence is right under the noses of the people who work there.

Consider what one staffer at Child Haven told a local television station. He said he loves coming to work at Child Haven because babies and toddlers "grab my leg. They call me Mr. Lou. They tell me they love me."

But when a young boy grabs the legs of anyone who will pay him a little attention and tells him "I love you," he's not getting better, he's getting worse. He is losing his ability to truly love at all, because every time he tries to love someone, that person goes away when the shift changes, or the volunteer who was there last week isn't there this week.

It's even worse than the well-known problem of children bouncing from foster home to foster home. We are setting some of these children up to become adults unable to love or trust anyone.

Working with children is rewarding, but no matter how good it feels for adults, congregate care is a disaster for the children.

That Child Haven is adult-centered rather than child-centered is shown by one simple fact: The children for whom it is hardest to find homes are teenagers. And they also are the population least harmed by institutionalization and most in need of support and services in this county. But it's a lot easier to throw one's arms around a cute little tyke than to try to help a teenager who has grown up in foster care. Child Haven does not do enough to help these older children in need for whom, in some cases, there really might be no alternative but the streets.

Most states wouldn't even think of automatically shoveling every baby removed from his parents into an institution. But Nevada has been in denial about the harm of these places for a long time.

Three years ago, Nevada authorities told the federal government Child Haven is "more homelike than institution-like, making the numbers far less alarming than they appear on the surface."

Every institution says it's "homelike." They always point to pretty cottages and well-manicured lawns. But buildings don't make a family, people do. No one would claim that Paris Las Vegas is the same thing as Paris, France. So why would children be fooled into thinking that Child Haven offers a family?

The people at Child Haven will tell you there is simply no alternative because of the shortage of foster parents. But one of the main reasons for the "shortage" is that Nevada is taking away far too many children in the first place. Nevada takes away children at a rate more than double the national average. It takes children at more than three to five times the rates of states that have become national models for keeping children safe.

The latest all-purpose excuse for taking away huge numbers of children, methamphetamine, doesn't wash. One of those states that has become a national model, Alabama, also has a serious meth problem. And Nevada even takes children at a rate 20 percent higher than Oregon, probably the most meth-plagued state in the country.

Contrary to the common stereotype, most parents who lose their children to foster care are neither brutally abusive nor hopelessly addicted.

Far more common are cases in which a family's poverty has been confused with "neglect." That's why states like Alabama and Illinois, which rebuilt their systems to emphasize safe, proven programs to keep families together, take far fewer children than Nevada, even as independent, court-appointed monitors find that child safety has improved.

Where drug abuse is the problem, the solution is to first try drug treatment, not for the sake of the parents, but for their children. A landmark Florida study found that even children born with cocaine in their systems developed better when left with birth mothers able to care for them than when placed in substitute care. For the foster children, the separation from their mothers was more toxic than the cocaine.

If the community really wanted to put children first, they'd convert Child Haven into a drug treatment campus where parents can live with their children. But neither drug treatment nor any other alternative is likely to take hold as long as this community is spending huge amounts of money to warehouse babies. That's the paradox of child welfare: The worse the option is for children, the more it costs -- so the bad drives out the good.

And it would be hard to find a worse option for children than Child Haven.

Annette Appell is Associate Dean for Clinical Programs at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. Richard Wexler is NCCPR's executive director.