From CEPR:
When child welfare workers determine that a child was abused or neglected, they must make a drastic decision to either have the child continue living in the home or place them in foster care. Despite the life-altering stakes, there is little evidence of the long-term consequences of the difficult trade-off between family preservation and child safety. On the one hand, keeping children in a harmful home environment could lead to worse adult outcomes. On the other, separating children from their families could lead to trauma and instability in their lives.
A surprisingly large percentage of children in the US experience foster care at some point during their childhood. As many as 5% of all children, and up to 9% of Black children and 11% of American Indian and Alaska Native children, are placed in foster care at some point by age 18 (Yi et al. 2020). Particularly in light of the dramatic increase in foster care placements attributed to the opioid epidemic (Cutler and Glaeser 2021, Dallman 2020, Evans et al. 2022, Hou 2022, Maclean et al. 2020, Mulligan 2021), it is critical to understand the effects of foster care.
In a recent paper (Baron and Gross 2022), we estimate the causal effect of foster care placement on adult crime. There is a well-documented correlation between foster care and crime. For example, close to one-fifth of the prison population in the US is comprised of former foster children (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2016) and about 70% of youth who exit foster care as legal adults are arrested at least once by age 26 (Courtney et al. 2011). Decades of research also show a positive association between foster care placement and criminality (Yang et al. 2017, 2021), and the media often cites a ‘foster care-to-prison pipeline’ (Amon 2021, Trivedi 2020). Yet these statistics do not capture whether foster care causes crime because children placed in foster care differ in many ways from those not placed. Continue reading >>>
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