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 "Monica" beautifully tattooed across his forearm.

Consequently, it was at a geographically secluded, all male juvenile residential facility-- in its dimly lite, under-resourced cafeteria where Isaiah declared his allegiance to a new kind of family-- the notorious Bloods street gang. Still, he yearned for kin and a sense of belonging, "I won't stop until I'm reunited with my mother," he exclaimed, tears rushing from his eyes.

His only chance at reunification came two years later at the age of eighteen, when DCF no longer considers themselves to be the legal guardian of someone whose life had once been entrusted to them by the courts. But Isaiah never reunited with his mother on his 18th birthday.  Instead he was arrested and held as a pre-trial detainee in a county jail for over a year.  When he rejected a plea bargain and the prosecution failed to present any hard evidence to convict him, he was acquitted on all charges and "released." But after serving a year behind bars during his formative years, a time period that you and I likely spent in college sculpting our lives and future, can one ever truly be released or freed from this experience?

Now an adult with a criminal record and time spent in the coined "concrete jungle," this once optimistic and charismatic soul is less optimistic today. The chains across his neck (a different kind than the ones that bound his wrists and ankles in prison) signify his rank and leadership status within the street organization. The phrase, "Family Over Everything" a common virtue among gang members joins his ever expanding collection of body art. But a story of childhood neglect, systemic failure and institutional misconduct escape his hazel eyes.

The American child welfare system is broken.  It is failing children like Isaiah everyday cause long term suffering and psychological wounds with intergenerational consequences. According to national statistics, sixty-six percent of children in the child welfare system will be homeless, go to jail or die within one year of leaving the foster care system at the age of eighteen.