The Relationship Between Maternal Incarceration and Foster Care Placement

We use administrative data to examine the temporal relationship between maternal incarceration and foster care placement among incarcerated mothers and their children in Cook County, Illinois. We also compare the discharge outcomes of foster children whose mothers were incarcerated to the discharge outcomes of all foster children in Illinois. We found that more than three quarters of the children who entered foster care did so prior to the mother’s first observed incarceration and that children whose mothers had been incarcerated were more likely to be adopted and less likely to be reunified than foster children generally. The implications of these findings for both the child welfare and criminal justice systems are discussed..