Being poor and being a minority both increase the chances that children will end up in jail during their lifetime. Foster care also puts children at greater risk of incarceration. It’s a case of one risk leading to another, making it easy for children to slide into the juvenile justice system. The Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) calls it the “Cradle to Prison Pipeline.”

CDF is a national organization that advocates for equality for all children, and it is working to take apart that pipeline. We spoke with MaryLee Allen, CDF’s director of child welfare and mental health, to find out more.

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Q: What does CDF mean by “cradle to prison risk factors,” and why are kids in poverty at greater risk of jail?

A: Imagine you have a child born at low birthweight, who doesn’t have health insurance, isn’t getting help with special needs, and therefore starts school not ready to learn, then can’t read or do math at grade level. Opportunities to succeed in life are directly related to how you do in school and whether you’re able to graduate and go on from there.

Then, if children are abused and neglected, there are more risk factors, like mental health needs. A child may end up in foster care. If children aren’t getting the health care and other support they need to perform well in school, they may drop out of school, get on the street, and go from there to the juvenile justice system. It’s about opportunity and lack of opportunity. If you have opportunity to heal after you experience the first risk, you’re less likely to move on to the next one.

Q: How does being in foster care increase the risk of ending up in jail?

A: When children enter foster care they too often go from placement to placement, which is disruptive in so many ways. And they may not get the things from the system that they need to be well and successful.

For example, imagine that a young person runs away from a group home because he’s not getting services he needs. He might meet a couple of other folks out on the street and get arrested for shoplifting, because he’s trying to survive on the street. He gets to the juvenile justice system, and there’s no one there to advocate for him. He doesn’t even have someone to call to tell that he’s in the system. So he gets recorded by the child welfare system as a runaway, and he’s never heard from by that system again.

Sometimes the attorney who gets appointed to represent the child in the juvenile justice system might learn that he’s in foster care, but when she tries to contact the agency, she may get no response. There are many good foster care workers out there, but too often the child is not tracked down and ends up in the juvenile justice system with no advocate.

Q: How can aging out of foster care put someone at risk of entering the adult criminal justice system?

A: Although a number of young people leaving foster care will reconnect with family members, that transitional period of instability and possible homelessness can be an important challenge.

Plus, so many have not completed high school, and they often don’t have the stability to enroll in a GED program or to try to get a job—this all puts them at increased risk of getting into a situation where they end up in the criminal justice system.

Another huge challenge is if they’ve had special needs, when they age out they lose access to treatment and services they’ve been getting, like health care—especially mental health care. When the young people age out, they may lose important behavioral health and substance abuse treatment they were getting.

Q: What can be done to stop foster care from becoming a path to the criminal justice system?

A: First, we have to do more to help children remain safely with their families so that they don’t enter foster care in the first place. This means having the range of services and supports available to address their special needs outside of foster care.

Second is to ensure that children who must be placed in foster care are placed with relatives when possible and placed close to home, so they can get the help they need in their community and remain in their home school.

image by Axel Almendarez

While a child is in foster care, they need—again—prompt assessment of health and mental needs. Not to forget the needs of parents, too—frequently a parent’s needs aren’t paid attention to until the child is about to return home, and then we see substance abuse or other problems that haven’t been tended to at all.

Q: It seems like another problem is that kids in foster care feel excluded. What role can that play?

A: It’s often referred to as “normalcy”—making sure kids have chances to do all the things that their peers outside the system are involved in. Some kids aren’t allowed to participate in extracurricular activities because of concerns about liability. So you might not be able to do something as basic as stay after school for a club meeting.

And it’s not just about having access to activities. It’s about supporting the needs of these young people for connections to their family and to community. If you don’t go off campus to school, for example, your life becomes part of the institutional environment.

Those institutional settings can be very restrictive. Some RTFs are geared very positively to the needs of children who come in, but a young person sometimes gets referred to a setting that has no capacity to address their needs. And sometimes, nobody takes the time to assess the child and figure out what’s causing their behavior.

Q: What is CDF doing to help kids get on a better path?

A: The good thing about the pipeline is that it’s man-made. So we can dismantle it, and replace it with a cradle to success pipeline, or a cradle to college pipeline.

CDF is working on a number of things. One big issue we’re working on is educational stability for children in foster care, which means trying to prevent children from moving from school to school while they’re in care. Some research shows that each change in school results in a loss of six months of educational progress. We want to increase the obligations on school systems, so that when children go into foster care, the schools and the foster care system are both making sure the student remains in the same school.

The other important piece is the educational needs of children in detention facilities. That’s also where children easily fall backwards and don’t get help they need. We’re working on making sure kids get a full school day, that they get qualified teachers, that there’s a liaison appointed when they’re ready to return to the community to follow youth back to school and help them get settled.

Q: What should you do if you end up in the juvenile justice system?

A: Reach out to anyone who cares about you. It might be a sibling. It may be a teacher or school counselor you reach out to, a therapist, social worker, a coach, a parent of a friend—but reach out. Sadly, there will be some young people who say, “There’s nobody who cares about me.” But usually there’s at least someone at a school, often a teacher, who can be very helpful in this sort of setting.

And you should always contact your lawyer or a CASA volunteer so they can help you understand what’s going on and make decisions. Young people often point to the important role that their attorney played in listening to them and helping intervene on their behalf. It’s also important to contact your agency caseworker, not just the group home staff.

It’s critically important that young people be told of their rights—especially the right to talk to a lawyer—when they come into a detention facility or other institution. Because it’s often confrontational when a young person goes into a facility in the first place, it’s understandable they might not hear their rights in that moment, so they have to be told repeatedly.

You’re Not Alone

Here are some other support organizations for youth in care:

FosterClub

Foster Care Alumni of America

YouthPower!