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62 | 3 Challenging the Overuse of Foster Care and Disrupting the Path to Delinquency and Prison Leslie Joan Harris Foster care is supposed to be a temporary safe haven for abused and neglected children, a place where they are cared for while their parents solve the problems that led to their mistreatment. For many children, foster care undoubtedly serves this function well. However, thousands of children live in foster care for extended periods of time, many leaving care only when they become adults. Recent studies show that for many of these children, foster care is not a safe, nurturing place. Instead, being in care exposes these children to substantial risks of later juvenile delinquency and adult criminal arrest and conviction, as well as mental health problems, difficulties in school, poor employment prospects, poverty, and homelessness. Other studies also show that many children are placed in foster care unnecessarily, in the sense that they could safely remain in their parents’ homes if appropriate services were provided to the parents. This evidence suggests that law and public policy should place greater emphasis on providing services to families and reducing the use of foster care. Ironically, reducing the use of foster care and focusing more on in-home services have been public policy goals in the United States for more than thirty years, and the roots of these policies go back more than a century. Despite this long consensus, the foster care system has been stubbornly resistant to change. This chapter examines the problem of the overuse of foster care and argues that conventional reform proposals are unlikely to succeed, as they have not succeeded for a century. Borrowing from the work of French social historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, I suggest that the current foster care system may persist because it is performing other, covert functions very well. In particular, the system allows society to assert that it is protecting children from harm while refusing to provide substantial material support to poor parents. The system conforms to the more generally applicable policy of min- Challenging the Overuse of Foster Care | 63 imizing direct economic assistance to poor adults while allowing us to believe that poor children do not really suffer from this policy. I argue that turning this analytical lens on the actual functioning of the foster care system and its harmful effects on many children could provide new ways to argue for legal and policy reforms to the child welfare system that could reduce the unnecessary use of foster care and the consequences of that overuse for delinquency. The chapter first reviews the recent research that demonstrates how harmful foster care is to many children. Next, I examine the history of child welfare interventions over the last century, showing that for many decades well-informed professionals have argued that the child protection system should leave children at home if possible, rather than removing them from their parents’ custody. Despite this advocacy, hundreds of thousands of children have been and continue to be removed from their parents’ homes and placed in foster care, and their parents have not received the services that might make removal unnecessary. Reform efforts have made small inroads on this reality. The third part of the chapter turns to Foucault’s study of prisons and particularly his analysis of why prisons have continued to be the dominant mode of punishment, little changed for centuries, even though they have long been criticized for being ineffective (not reducing crime) and even harmful (producing recidivism). Foucault argues that when an institution persists despite its apparent failure to achieve its social purpose, it is in fact serving some other, unarticulated goals very well. In the final section of this paper, I use this analytical structure to reexamine the overuse of foster care and suggest how the insights that the analysis produces might be used to support more effective reform efforts. I. Foster Care as a Precursor to Delinquency and Conviction of Adult Crime A great deal of social science research shows that children who spend significant amounts of time in foster care are at increased risk for being found delinquent in juvenile court and convicted of crimes as adults (Bender 2010). Almost 20 percent of the U.S. prison population under the age of thirty and 25 percent of those with prior convictions are former foster children (Doyle 2008). A recent large-scale study of foster children, conducted by the Chapin Hall research center at the University of Chicago, explores this connection...

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