Child welfare system reforms shouldn’t leave incarcerated mothers behind 

In a House divided, Republicans and Democrats have found surprising common ground: Reforming the nation's sprawling child welfare system. 

The Protecting America’s Children by Strengthening Families Act, which passed the House on a bipartisan vote last month, is the first attempt in 16 years to reform the system through which 200,000 children are removed from their homes every year.  

The bill is a huge step in the right direction. It’s also nowhere near enough. 

The bill’s biggest change is to allow child welfare funds to be used to provide short-term support for housing, transportation, food and other essentials for families struggling with poverty. The goal is to help parents meet their children’s basic needs, rather than remove their children because they can’t provide for them. 

That’s critically important. But one extremely vulnerable group is unlikely to benefit: incarcerated mothers and their babies. 

We have decades of experience working with incarcerated mothers, one of us as a researcher and advocate and the other as a formerly incarcerated mother and the program director of the nonprofit Motherhood Beyond Bars. 

In 2020, we launched Birth Beyond Bars, the first study to follow both children exposed prenatally to incarceration and their caregivers during the critical first three years of life.  

When fathers go to prison, mothers usually continue to care for their children. But when mothers are incarcerated, children are five times more likely to enter foster care. Even when mothers find a family member to care for their children, the child welfare system is often quick to remove them.

Sometimes this happens with casual cruelty: One incarcerated woman we met had arranged for an aunt to care for her baby girl. Shortly after the baby was born, however, authorities whisked her off to foster care — without notifying either the mother or the aunt, leaving them frantic with worry.

It is not surprising, then, that our study found intense distrust of child welfare authorities among this population.  

Many caregivers struggle to meet the needs of children born to incarcerated mothers. They worry about the health of these babies, especially those who experienced harsh prison and jail conditions in utero alongside their mothers. The caregivers also have their own challenges: In our study, over one-third lived in poverty. Many lived with chronic health problems. Most were grandparents. 

Yet here they were, caring for a newborn — an intense job demanding sleepless nights and round-the-clock care. 

In theory, the provisions in the new bipartisan bill could help caregivers meet those babies’ needs. Yet we found that caregivers in our study were reluctant to involve child welfare services in any way, even to seek help, for fear of losing custody.  

Often, these caregivers were even afraid to talk to our research teams. We had to make sure they knew that we wouldn’t report them for issues such as lack of food in the household, the water being shut off or eviction — all problems that could fit the legal definition of neglect. If we didn’t reassure families, they would never tell us their struggles, and we couldn’t help them.  

The solution is to expand the broader social safety net. We urge the many members of Congress who care about this issue to strengthen programs that help families before the child welfare system gets involved.

Lawmakers should expand social support systems such as WIC (a nutrition program for pregnant women and young children), SNAP (food benefits for low-income families), and TANF (financial assistance for needy families). It’s also essential to make the application for these benefits simpler.

State governments have an important role to play, too. Twenty-one states' child welfare policies don’t differentiate between neglect due to poverty and deliberate neglect. This leaves parents and caregivers worried that if they disclose food insecurity or problems paying rent, their children might be taken away. These laws should change to encourage families to seek help when they need it. 

Only by targeting support before child welfare gets involved can we truly strengthen families and protect children, especially children of incarcerated mothers.  

Bethany Kotlar is the founder of the nonprofit Motherhood Beyond Bars and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Vanessa Garrett is the program director of Motherhood Beyond Bars.