“We Are Not Disorderly Kids”: Young Adult, Family, & Social Work Perspectives on Disrupting the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline

Background: Children and youth involved in child welfare face disproportionately high risk of juvenile legal system contact compared to their non-involved peers. This is largely due to a structurally inequitable process that funnels youth from child welfare into the legal and carceral systems. Disruption of this process requires an in-depth understanding, informed by those with lived experience, of the various ways, patterns, and points in families’ lives in which child welfare and juvenile legal systems intersect and overlap. It also necessitates the development of concrete alternatives to the failures of the child welfare and juvenile legal systems that lead to youth incarceration. As a first step towards disruption, the goal of this study was to examine the points of overlap and intersection between child welfare and juvenile legal systems in Washington state and offer potential alternatives from the perspective of parents and young adults who have experienced child welfare involvement and social workers who are currently engaged with these systems through their practice.

Methods: Informed by Ecological Systems Theory and Community Based Participatory Research principles, this investigation utilized a multi-phase, community-engaged, participatory approach. Methods included focus groups with young adults (n = 7), parents and caregivers (n = 13), and social workers (n = 4), meaning-making and member-checking sessions, and survey methodology (n = 14). Data were analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis and descriptive statistics.

Results: Findings revealed multiple intersecting pathways through which youth are funneled from the child welfare system into the juvenile legal system in Washington State. Furthermore, community partners and focus group participants generated thoughtful and actionable recommendations for transformative change. Lived experts and community partners recommend both short and long-term recommendations for systems change. Overall, findings from the focus groups, meaning-making and member-checking sessions, and follow up survey demonstrate strong support for an immediate rollout of trauma-informed training as a harm reduction strategy, paired with long-term formal policy and program initiatives to build a new emergency response model rooted in community leadership, lived experience, and culturally responsive support.

Conclusions and Implications: Findings from this investigation highlight strong support for urgent transformative change of the child welfare system as participants collectively describe the current system as one that perpetuates trauma, disproportionately harms marginalized communities, and lacks adequate preventative support. The strong alignment of perspectives and consistency across all participant groups highlights a critical insight: the primary barrier to progress is not a lack of consensus regarding the need for transformative change, but rather the absence of policy action to operationalize and sustain such change. This convergence of viewpoints signals that individuals across varying lived experiences and professional roles are already aligned in vision, and what is urgently needed is the commitment and policy leadership to translate this shared vision into concrete and transformative systems change. Future efforts to realize these goals should involve collaboration with policy experts to develop actionable policy agendas that advance transformative change.