Poster #102 - The Adoption and Safe Families Act and the Termination of Parental Rights of Incarcerated Mothers

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Extant scholarship has illustrated that mass incarceration has deleterious consequences to family cohesion and stability. Incarceration strips individuals of their right to parent and disrupts family bonds, leading to distress in both children and parents. Specifically, female incarceration poses additional threats to children, as it increases their risks of entering the child welfare system potentially severing family ties. The 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act mandates the initiation of proceedings to terminate parental rights if a child is in foster care for 15 of the last 22 months. However, over 80% of US incarcerated women are mothers and were the primary caretakers and sole providers of dependent children prior to their incarceration. Thus, incarcerated mothers may be at significant risk of permanently losing their children. As mass incarceration persists in the US, failure to examine the intersection of child welfare and carceral policies will lead to inadequate changes, reform, and resource allocation. Using data from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (2023), this study describes the placement of children of incarcerated women. We also examine the relationship between race and termination of parental rights across state child welfare systems. Preliminary findings suggest substantial heterogeneity in child placement across race and state. Non-white children were less likely to have their mother’s parental rights terminated than their White peers. In addition, state rates of female incarceration and current child placement were significant predictors of mother’s parental rights being terminated, while parental incarceration did not significantly predict termination. Our findings indicate that the relationship between incarceration and terminal of parental rights merits further study. Though incarceration was not an individual predictor of termination of parental rights, the association between state incarceration rates and likelihood of experiencing termination, indicate that the two systems may intersect in significant ways for families.

Author

• Tia M Dickerson, Columbia University
  Presenting Author