From the System to the Slammer
What is the Foster Care-to-Prison Pipeline and How Can We End It?
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When my brother Doug was 12 years old, I recall a social worker of mine lamenting the future ahead of him. With sorrow in her voice, she spoke of the outcomes that typically await children like my brother, who struggle in school and live in group homes. She told me she’d seen it a thousand times. First they’d get involved in the juvenile justice system, then fail out of high school, and ultimately move on to the adult justice system, with years of poverty, addiction, and homelessness in between.
My brother internalized the message. Even at that age, he’d tell me that I was the family’s only hope. He spoke as if his future was determined, and there was nothing he or anyone could do to prevent what was coming. At the time, I was frustrated. Why, I asked, was nothing being done to prevent any of this? Social workers and judges and foster parents were all saying the exact same thing about my brother (and the thousands of children like him), yet were acting as if they were powerless to stop it.
Sadly, my social worker turned out to be prescient with her prediction, as my brother would go on to experience those exact outcomes. He’d end up spending time in every type of correctional facility there was, shuffling in and out of group homes, juvenile hall, and ultimately, prison. As a matter of fact, he “aged out” of the system while in juvie, which itself was a twisted symbol of the system’s capacity to damn those who enter it.
But, years later, as I was on the eve of emancipating, I began to hear a different message. No longer were my social workers speaking of my brother with pity but were now condemning him for what he had become. He was being invoked as a cautionary tale, as an example of what not to be. He made his decisions, they’d say, and was now living with the consequences. They appeared either incapable or unwilling to reconcile their current denunciations with their earlier assessment on how he’d turn out.
Tragically, my brother’s journey is not uncommon. Each year, thousands of foster children find themselves on this trajectory, which has come to be called the “foster care-to-prison pipeline.” There have been several studies that explore this phenomenon, and nearly all of them have yielded some rather bleak statistics:
Approximately 25% of youth in foster care will be involved in the criminal justice system within two years of leaving foster care.
According to the Department of Justice, close to one-fifth of the prison population in 2016 consisted of former foster youth.
Roughly 70% of former foster youth will be arrested at least once before they turn 26 years old, according to one longitudinal study.
Another study found that between the ages of 17 and 24, 46% of former foster youth will be arrested at least once, with arrests “evenly distributed across drug, nonviolent, and violent crimes.”
As damning as these numbers are — and they are indeed damning — they only tell part of the story, for they are only concerned with the tail-end of the pipeline. Let’s work our way back a bit and explore what’s going on in the middle of the pipe, where so many children get siphoned into the juvenile justice system. While national data on this population seems to be lacking, state and local-level data suggests that there is a sizable population of what are called cross-over or dually-involved youth, meaning children that have been involved in both the foster care system and the juvenile justice system. In short, kids like my brother.
For example, a 2021 study found that 64.1% of children with juvenile justice records in Los Angeles between 2014 and 2016 had been involved with the child welfare system at some point, and of these kids, approximately 94% were involved first with the child welfare system before entering the juvenile justice system.
Another study looked at three different areas — Cook County, Illinois, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and New York City — and found that there were exceptionally high rates of dual-system involvement, ranging from “44.8 to 70.3%.” In Illinois as a whole, “approximately 700 youth per year become simultaneously involved in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.”
I could go on and on, but the evidence suggests that a ton of children across the United States bounce back and forth between the two system, or are in them both at the same time. Now that we have a grasp of the scope of the issue, let’s look at the youth themselves. What characteristics describe them, and what are the factors that might predict dual-system involvement?
According to a 2022 report from Casey Family Programs, here are a few facts about dually-involved youth:
40% are female, which is “disproportionately high compared with the general juvenile justice population.”
56% are Black, which is also “disproportionately high compared with their peers from other racial groups.
LGBTQ+ youth are overrepresented in the cross-over youth population.
83% of cross-over youth have challenges with mental health or struggle with substance abuse.
In addition to the above, there are a few factors that more strongly predict, or at least are associated with, the likelihood that a foster child becomes involved in the justice system. The age in which a child enters the system, for example, is correlated with the propensity to become dually-involved, with older children at time of entry demonstrating an increased likelihood of getting entangled with the law.
Placement instability is another contributing factor, and the numbers are galling: 90% of youth with 5 or more placements will enter the justice system. As someone who moved more than five times, I count myself extraordinarily lucky for having dodged this outcome. Also, as with many things in the child protection system, group homes tend to lead to worst outcomes, as youth placed in these settings were 2.5 times likelier to have involvement in the justice system than foster youth placed with families.
I can continue with this avalanche of statistics, but I think my brother’s story can do a better job of illustrating this point, particularly since his journey is reflected in many of the statistics above.
He entered the system at age 12 (my other older brothers entered the system in their mid-teens, and they too have extensive criminal justice system involvement). He was placed in a group home early on, which I think shaped his trajectory more than anything else he experienced, with the exception of his entry into foster care itself.
I mentioned this in so many previous posts, but just to remind folks: group homes have historically been seen as repositories for unwanted children. Now I know this might not be the aim of group homes, at least in the previous few decades, as they were often described as placements that serve youth with “complex needs.” But these homes were well-understood by everyone in the system — social workers, foster parents, judges, and foster children themselves — as the place you went when no family would take you in. I know this to be true because I was told this explicitly, hundreds of times during my decade in foster care.
Now, back to my brother. He gets placed in a group home and knows that the reason he’s there is that no family was willing to bring them into their home. He must feel, at that point, like he’s “damaged goods.” Again, he’s 12 years old. He’s placed in a house with a bunch of other teens who have been told, either explicitly or implicitly, the same thing, and many of them have already spent years bouncing between group homes. In addition to all the trauma these kids accumulated over the years, they were also likely to be angry that the vaunted child protection system led them not to a loving home but rather to a warehouse for the unwanted. So they act out.
My brothers tell me horror stories from these homes. They describe "blanket parties," where, in the middle of the night, other teens in the home throw a blanket over you while you sleep, pinning your arms and legs down, and then proceed to punch and kick you. In a casual tone, they recount stories of witnessing shocking acts of violence, enduring blatant abuse from staff, and contending with Orwellian systems of surveillance. I’ll write about these placements in greater detail one of these days, but let’s just say that it doesn’t take much of a logical leap for folks to recognize that children in these settings are set up to fail.
It is no surprise that these kids get in trouble with the law, and once they do, they enter a path-dependent trajectory within the criminal legal system that is exceedingly difficult to escape. Juvie is much like the adult criminal justice system in that it is described as criminogenic, meaning that it often perpetuates criminal behavior rather than rehabilitates kids, making it even harder to break free from the cycle of incarceration.
How, then, do we end the foster care-to-prison pipeline? One approach — and one, admittedly, I argue is the solution to a lot of these issues — is to reduce reliance on foster care as a whole by providing robust prevention services and material resources to at-risk families. In short, we need to prevent kids from ever entering the pipeline. Evidence for the possible efficacy of this approach emanates from an unlikely source: an article that undermines the notion that the foster care-to-prison pipeline even exists.
In 2022, a pair of researchers found that placement into foster care “substantially reduced the chances of adult arrests, convictions, and incarceration for children at the margin.” Let me repeat this for emphasis: they argue being placed in foster care actually reduces the likelihood that a kid would be involved in the criminal justice system.
Now I won’t dive too deep into this paper or quibble with its analysis, given that I am unqualified to do so. I will just say that more studies are needed to determine whether these findings are applicable across different parts of the country and during different time periods (the paper deals with some of these questions, and I recommend you read it). But what I do find fascinating is that the authors concluded the following:
“We find that a likely explanation for the reduction in crime is that birth parents make improvements while their children are in foster care. Children in our setting exit foster care within one to two years and most reunify with their birth parents…This pattern could be explained by the fact that birth parents work closely with social workers after removal and receive fully funded services to address challenges in their lives. As a result, one might suspect that the improvements in children’s outcomes are driven by adult services and not placement. ”
In short, the authors speculate that foster care itself isn’t causing these improved outcomes but rather the services provided to parents while their child is in foster care. As such, they argue that greater efforts must be made to ensure vulnerable children can be supported and protected in their own homes. I agree wholeheartedly. It makes sense: if we can provide resources and services to parents before they have their child removed, we can reduce these horrific outcomes and avoid the trauma of child removal.
If we can’t stem the tide into the pipeline — whether it exists or not — there are a number of things we can do to help children. We can work on developing specific protective factors for children in care, which are “defined as any traits, skills, strengths, resources, or coping strategies that help youth and families who are considered to be at high risk for negative outcomes more effectively deal with adversity and mitigate or eliminate risk.” These factors — such as “individual talents or creativity, community resources, educational supports, and spiritual/religious encouragement” — can help reduce the risk of justice system involvement, according to one study.
Fortunately, states are legally required to reduce their reliance on congregate care, so I look forward to seeing a future where children aren’t warehoused in homes that harm them. But work still needs to be done to recruit foster families that can provide the love and guidance needed to prevent the adverse outcomes described in this newsletter. By recruiting and training more families and by reducing the number of kids in foster care, we can ensure that the kids who must enter the system are provided the care they need to lead a fruitful life.
Ultimately, we need to start weaving different stories. Instead of the doom-and-gloom narrative favored by folks I spoke about at the outset of this newsletter, we need to reorient our perspectives. We need to talk less about what might happen to a kid in the future and instead talk about what we are allowing to happen to that kid in the present, because the two are intimately related. It is downright dystopian that we can predict, with painstaking accuracy, a 12-year-old’s future yet do nothing to stop that future from occurring. My brother made mistakes, but all these mistakes emanate from decisions that he did not make, such as being put into foster care and tossed into a group home.
If we are to write doom-and-gloom stories, let them be about the system itself, and hopefully through these stories we can muster the collective will to change it.
Thank you for reading and I’ll see you in a few weeks!
Current Read(s):
I frequently read about how we can improve the world for young folks, but this week, I read a bit about how we can improve the world for old folks. Specifically, I’m reading The Age of Dignity by Ai-Jen Poo. America is aging, and Poo cites a statistic that by 2030, one in five Americans will be over the age of 65. As of right now, our country is ill-equipped to handle this, and Poo highlights ways we can forge a more caring country, all while boosting the economy and improving opportunities for the folks who desperately need it. Highly recommend you give it a read!
What’s going on in the world of child welfare?:
Foster Children Fight to Stop States From Taking Federal Benefits (New York Times) — As I wrote about a few months back, foster youth across the country are having their benefits stolen from them by state governments. Fortunately, there seems to be a growing movement to finally end this practice.
Colorado Is Paying to House 100 Former Foster Kids Who Left the System Without A Family (Colorado Sun) — Approximately 100 former foster youth in Colorado will be receiving vouchers worth at least $10,000 a year, enough to cover approximately 70% the cost of rent.
Ohio Announces $2 Million for Pilot Program to Help Foster Kids (Spectrum News) — Ohio is investing money to help place children with “significant behavioral health challenges with foster families who are equipped to support children with complex needs in their homes.”
Minnesota Ensures One More Year of Free College for Former Foster Youth (Minnesota Public Radio) — A very popular program in Minnesota that pays college tuition for former foster youth lives to see another year after new legislation signed that gave it a cash infusion. We love to see it!
A Working Group That Emerged from Tragedy Sets Out to Reform Child Welfare Services (Civil Beat) — In child welfare, a sad pattern is often observed: a tragedy occurs, policymakers have a knee-jerk reaction in response, and disastrous policies emerge as a result. There’s hope in Hawaii that this pattern can be broken, as a working group consisting of social workers, former foster youth, and foster parents are advancing ideas that would transform the state’s system.
Why Are Latinas So Overrepresented In The Foster Care System (Refinery29) — Research suggests that immigrant families are often disproportionately impacted by the child welfare system, which may contribute to the fact that Latinas are overrepresented in foster care.
The Sorry Story of Children in Care in England (The Economist) — I promise a newsletter on the UK’s system is coming soon, but this article explores the various ways in which the child welfare system in England is collapsing due to a potent combination of underinvestment and privatization.
Oregon Settles Child-Welfare Civil Lawsuit; Expert Will Be Appointed to Oversee the Troubled System (Oregon Public Broadcasting) — As I touched on in previous newsletters, Oregon’s child protection system was subject to litigation as the system was accused of failing the children in its care. A settlement has been reached, and an expert will now come in to reform the system.
Fairmont State University Begins Enrollment for First-Of-Its-Kind, Teen Foster Care Program (WDTV) — I will be monitoring this program very closely as it is something I thought about way back when I was in the system: what if we help foster kids rack up college credit while they’re in care? This might help increase college graduation rates amongst foster youth.