The Foster care to Prison Pipeline
I unexpectedly crossed paths with an adolescent whom I had worked with in the Massachusetts foster care system. Little did I know how this chance encounter would help unveil my eyes to the foster care to prison pipeline, a system through which eighty percent of the adult prison population begins as a child in foster care. "I'm a Blood now," Isaiah said sitting before me, the once youthful boy now a young adult. This unlikely reunion between myself and Isaiah, a child whom I had worked with as a mentor years prior came as a shock to me. Seeing how the system had effected him and not for the better, opened my eyes to the struggles faced by many children in the United States foster care system. Since I had last seen Isaiah, the Department of Children and Families (DCF) placed him in a residential facility for foster children for his deemed "unmanageable adolescent behaviors." DCF terminated his mother's parental rights some weeks prior, hence her name ...