Comm 201 | deewilsoncon

Is There A Foster Care–to–Prison Pipeline?

(Originally published October 2026)

Claudia Rowe’s, Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care, tells the stories of six adults, ages eighteen to fifty-six in 2025 when the book was published. These are powerful stories based on extensive contact of Rowe and her subjects, much more of a relationship than an interview or two. They reflect an admirable intent to understand the developmental trajectories and life experiences of these foster care alumni that began with severe child maltreatment perpetrated by parents and stepparents and their removal from the home between ages five to thirteen. Rowe follows her subjects through the travail of foster care, residential care and (in three instances) failed adoptions, incarceration in jails, juvenile detention facilities, and/or adult prisons. Some of Rowe’s subjects also experienced failed reunifications and/or kinship placements.

Two of Rowe’s subjects were convicted of murder, one committed by a young woman when she was sixteen. All had been placed in multiple foster homes and/or residential facilities, suffered multiple rejections by foster parents or adoptive parents, been homeless and hungry for extended periods of time, learned to fight and lash out to survive on the street, in foster/residential care and detention facilities. Some had been physically and sexually abused while in care, including a man in his fifties who told Rowe he was beaten and raped at a notorious group home in Washington State more than four decades ago.

Without exception, Rowe’s subjects blame the failures of foster care systems for their difficult lives, though one young woman wondered what would have been different “If I’d had parents – good parents…. Or, if she’d been taken into foster care younger, as a baby, before the circumstances of her childhood pushed her to the point of stealing food from other kids in second grade and standing on a table, shrieking. Or if her adoptive parents had been better prepared by the state for the kind of kid they were getting.”

In Wards of the State, Rowe shares her subjects’ perspective in placing blame on the foster care system for providing years of such inadequate, incompetent and heartless care such that they lacked stable homes and humane treatment from caregivers, or even minimal commitment of caseworkers and other professionals to their safety and well-being.

Rowe highlights negative views that paint foster care with a broad brush:

“A professor from Loyola Law School in Los Angles described the child welfare system as a pipeline funneling kids directly into juvenile detention halls …”
Discussing the views of an advocate who had been in foster care: “He likened foster care to a toxic waste dump.”
A director of a Youth Law Center mulls over the question, ”Why were there so few excellent foster parents? Why was it so difficult to find and recruit these people?”
“Between 25 and 40 percent of young people in Washington’s youth prisons had been in foster care.”
Rowe quotes a Harvard professor regarding the effects of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. southern border: (separation) “was wreaking dramatic and long- term damage psychologically and to the physical structure of the brain.” She states “Foster care has been doing the same to kids for a hundred and fifty years.”

The most egregious flaw of Wards of the State is Rowe’s failure to consider if children and youth whose experiences in foster care were as unstable, inhumane and damaging as those of her subjects are representative of foster care as a whole. Rowe asserts that foster care has not improved in recent years and, “On the day Longworth walked away from his past, more than 400,000 US children were wards of the state, and half of them were headed for locked cells.” This extraordinary (and false) claim is based on a misunderstanding of Chapin Hall’s 2004 “Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth: Conditions of Youth Preparing to Leave State Care,” a study of 17-year-old youth in foster care aging out of care during their early adulthoods. Seventeen-year-old youth in foster care are not representative of the entire foster care population; rather they include a significant percentage of youth with failed permanent plans and youth with severe behavioral challenges and educational deficits. The Midwest Youth Study is a damning indictment of four Midwest foster care systems’ failure to prepare youth aging out-of-care for young adulthood. It is not a sound basis for generalizing about the future detention rates of hundreds of thousands of foster children and youth ages, 0-16, across the U.S.

“Psychosocial wellbeing and placement stability in foster care: Implications for policy and practice,” (2006) by Barber and Delfabbro, is a prospective longitudinal study of children entering foster care in South Australia between May 1998 and April 1999. It contains findings similar to stories in Wards of the State for some children while finding positive outcomes for others. This study of 235 children entering foster care found fifty conduct disordered children who experienced “serial evictions” and lived in “truly wretched conditions.” And: “It is no exaggeration to describe these children as effectively homeless in care.” The authors conclude that “family based foster care is unsuitable for disruptive children … and that child welfare urgently needs to find an alternative.”

However, regarding the remainder of the sample: “The overwhelming majority of respondents (foster children) liked living with their foster families and felt well cared for. “ And: “The data suggests that the experience of family based foster care promotes the psychosocial well-being of the majority of children who enter it.”

It is not difficult to identify foster children at highest risk of negative outcomes: they are children and youth who cannot be stabilized in care, either quickly or after initial placement disruptions. Rubin, et al (2007) found that about one-fifth of foster children in their sample from the National Study of Child and Adolescent Well-Being,” (NSCAW) were “unstable”, meaning that they had not been in a foster home or residential care facility for nine continuous months during the 18-month study period. Placement stability was positively related to all permanent planning outcomes, i.e., reunification, adoption, or guardianship.

Rubin, et al, found that most children with behavior problems at intake as indicated by elevated Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) scores continued to have poor CBCL scores at the 36 month follow up regardless of whether they were placed early or late in stable homes, though 40% of children with poor CBCL scores at baseline had good CBCL scores at the 36 month follow up. In contrast, children with positive CBCL scores at intake who found early stability had better CBCL scores at the 36 month follow up than reunified children.

School age children who enter foster care with challenging behavior problems are at elevated risk of growing up in foster care without a stable and supportive caregiver. Many of these children end up in residential care and then detention, while losing contact with parents or other family members. As Wards of the State makes painfully clear, children and youth lacking supportive caregivers who stick with them through thick and thin often become increasingly disruptive and anti-social. For these young people, anger and rage are defenses against despair and feelings of worthlessness. Rowe is right that U.S. foster care systems have often miserably failed these youth and young adults.

Is there a foster care to prison pipeline?

Joseph Doyle is an M.I.T. economist who has published often cited studies of the effects of foster care on developmental outcomes for adolescents and young adults based on the study of “marginal” foster placements of children in Illinois nearly three decades ago. Doyle compared children, five and older, placed in foster care by CPS investigators with high placement rates to children not placed by investigators with low placement rates. Doyle’s study found that placement in foster care tripled arrest, conviction and imprisonment rates compared to children who remained with their families. Doyle’s study has been cited frequently by advocates and scholars (including Rowe) as evidence of the harmful developmental effects of foster care, including the foster care-to-prison pipeline.

In 2022, two researchers, Jason Baron and Max Gross, published, “Is There a Foster Care-to-Prison Pipeline: Evidence From Quasi-Randomly Assigned Investigators,” a study of nearly 120,000 CPS investigations in Michigan between 2008-2016, to determine whether there had been changes in foster care that would lead to different outcomes in another state.

Baron and Gross use much the same methodology as Doyle, i.e., the use of rotational assignment of CPS investigations that they (and Doyle) believe mirrors random assignment. However, as Gross explained in an email, it is not foster children who were being randomized but rather CPS investigators assigned “marginal” cases, i.e., cases where their placement decisions might disagree. Baron and Gross excluded investigations of alleged sexual abuse and investigations of children with an investigation during the prior year because these investigations were more likely to be assigned to experienced or specialized investigators. Children placed in foster care by “stringent” CPS investigators with high placement rates were compared to criminal justice outcomes for children not placed in foster care by “lenient” investigators. Baron and Gross assert that these children, i.e., “compliers,” are a relevant population for policy debate “because they are exactly the children for whom investigators wield discretion over placement.” Compliers in foster care were in marginal placements, i.e., investigators might have disagreed regarding the placement decision.

Baron and Gross state: “We find that foster care placement substantially reduces the chances of later-in-life criminal involvement for children at the margin. Children placed in foster care are 25 percentage points less likely to be arrested by age 19 relative to a control complier mean of 37%, a decrease of 68%. We find even larger reductions in the likelihood of being convicted (28 percentage points or 81%) and incarcerated (21percentage points or 80%).”

This study (and Doyle’s) indicate the importance of understanding a study’s research design in the interpretation of its findings. Baron and Gross state that the placement rate for their sample of CPS investigations was 2%, and that children placed in foster care were 50% more likely to be arrested by age 19 than children who remained in the home. They disregard this comparison as “naïve” because it does not consider “systematic ways” these two groups of children differed, e.g., in the severity of child maltreatment they had experienced. Baron’s and Gross’ analysis is of differences between compliers, i.e., children in marginal placements. One of the goals of their approach to randomization is to eliminate from their analysis severely maltreated children similar to those featured in Wards of the State, based on the assumption that “stringent” and “lenient” investigators would have made the same decisions in those cases. As a result, Baron and Gross’s study and Rowe’s book concern different foster care populations. Neither should be viewed as representative of foster care as a whole.

Baron and Gross found that for compliers, “foster care reduces birth parents’ contact with the criminal justice system.” They found that 83% of compliers in foster care were reunified with birth parents vs. 50% of all Michigan foster children. A sizable percentage of reunifications occurred within one year and the vast majority within two years. More than half (52%) of compliers had one or two placements. Baron and Gross assert: “…, the experience of compliers suggest that foster care reduces crime in a setting where most are initially placed in a family home, have stable placements, are in foster care for a relatively short period of time, and ultimately reunify with their birth parents.”

Baron and Gross found that foster care had substantial benefits for White, Black and Hispanic children. They state: “The estimates (of benefits) are similar in magnitude for White and Black children, … However, in percent terms, the effects are significantly larger for White children.” They found that, for compliers, “foster care improves well-being” across a range of educational outcomes.

Baron and Gross view the benefits of foster care as the result of “birth parents (making) positive changes in their own lives while their children are temporarily in foster care.” They found that “gains in children’s safety and academic outcomes improved only after most children reunified with their birth parents.” They opine that parents’ reduced criminal justice contact is “indicative of any number of changes in birth parents’ lives … that could positively impact children’s subsequent life outcomes.”

In one of their most controversial positions, Baron and Gross “argue that there is little empirical or institutional reason to expect that prevention services without removal would have meaningful impacts on children’s outcomes.” They reference the low uptake rates (5-10%) of Safe Care, a prevention program used with neglecting families in Michigan, and even lower completion rates (1-2%) for program participants. They argue that child removal and legal structure are often necessary to motivate parents to engage in preventative services.

Baron and Gross speculate that there were substantial changes in foster care during recent decades that explain why their study’s findings conflict with Doyle’s Illinois study. They point to the reduction in foster care rates as an example of such a change. However, it is just as likely that longstanding differences between the Illinois and Michigan foster care systems led to different outcomes.

Foster care is an abstraction. State child welfare systems have idiosyncratic features that may lead to quite different outcomes. It should not be assumed that findings from a study in one state apply to foster care systems as a whole, a caution that applies to Doyle’s Illinois studies and Baron’s and Gross’ Michigan studies.

Nevertheless, there is an important lesson supported by a large body of research that stands out in Wards of the State and in the Baron and Gross study: foster children and youth who cannot be stabilized in care are often developmentally harmed by foster care and are at risk of being physically harmed as well; whereas, children placed with supportive caregivers in stable homes during the first year of placement often benefit developmentally from temporary stays in foster care.

Behaviorally troubled children and youth are at elevated risk of unplanned placement moves that leave them without supportive caregivers who have a long-term commitment to their well-being, and this is particularly true for disruptive youth vulnerable to “meltdowns.” Child welfare systems that lack a cadre of professional foster parents for 5-10% of their foster care population will often not be able to create therapeutic foster placements for children with disruptive behavior, even when volunteer foster parents are part of a therapeutic foster care program managed by a private agency.©

References

Barber, J. & Delfabbro, P., ”Placement Stability and Psychosocial Well-Being of Children in Foster Care,” (2006), Chapter 9 in Promoting Resilience in Foster Care , edited by Flynn, R., Dudding, P. & Barber, J., University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa, Canada.

Baron, E.J., & Gross, M., “Is There a Foster Care -To- Prison Pipeline?” (2022), National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Doyle, J., “Child protection and adult crime: Using investigator assignment to estimate causal effects of foster care” (2008), Journal of Political Economy, 117 (2 ), 257-280.

Rubin, D., O’Reilly, A., Hafner, L., Luan, X. & Localio, A., “Placement Stability and Early Behavioral Outcomes “ (2007), Chapter 10 in Child Protection: Using Outcomes to Improve Policy and Practice, ed. by Haskins, R., Wulczyn, F. & Webb, M.B., Brookings institution Press, Washington, D.C.

See past Sounding Board commentaries

©Dee Wilson

deewilson13@aol.com