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Home > Case Support > Incarcerated Parents Project > IPP Resources > What’s the Research Saying > LITERATURE > Family Policing & TPR (Termination of Parental Rights) 
Family Policing & TPR (Termination of Parental Rights) 

*Please note: This page is still in progress. More links will be posted soon.*

(in alphabetical order)

 

WDA IPP Reports:

This policy report argues for parent attorneys to proactively pursue Chapter RCW 13.36 guardianship as a more equitable and accessible long-term permanency option for child of incarcerated parents in response to or in lieu of legal (and permanent) termination of the child-parent relationship. 

This practice memorandum addresses the benefits for incarcerated parents in the child welfare system to litigate or receive a good cause finding on whether the child welfare agency should be ordered to file a petition to terminate the child-parent relationship. It also addresses why  the finding supports the child welfare agency in meeting the federal law regarding permanency planning. 

 

Articles, Briefs, Reports, & Practice Guides:

This research measures impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect. The researchers used removal tendencies of child protection investigators as an instrument and focused on young children investigated before age 6. Findings include among other things that removal significantly increases test scores and reduces grade repetition for girls and there are no detectable impacts for boys.

This paper challenges that three-party framework as it applies to the dependency system, the social services, and legal system that authorizes and provides for state intervention in the family based on allegations of child abuse and neglect. This paper focuses, among other topics, on private providers, who are vital historical and contemporary stakeholders in the dependency system, and argues for both an expanded framework for public family law and an expanded legal role for stakeholders in the dependency system.

This Children’s Bureau bulletin for child welfare professionals provides an overview of the scope of the issue; highlights practices to facilitate parent-child visits during incarceration, include parents in case planning, and work toward reunification; and points to resources to help caseworkers in their practice with these children and families.

This article draws on in-depth interviews with eighty-three low-income mothers to consider whether and how concerns about Child Protective Services (CPS), a widespread presence in poor communities with the power to remove children from their parents, inform poor mothers’ institutional engagement. 

This brief presents a conceptual model that describes how judicial decision-making and hearing quality relate to case process and case outcomes for children and families. This model is meant to help researchers, practitioners, and court decision-makers better understand the child welfare court process to inform future research and practice improvements.

This publication describes the best interests of the child standard across state systems. Courts make a variety of decisions that affect children, including placement and custody determinations, safety and permanency planning, and proceedings for termination of parental rights. Whenever a court makes such a determination, it must weigh whether its decision will be in the “best interests” of the child.

This report examines interdisciplinary lawyering and makes several findings, including that interdisciplinary lawyers for parents hasten permanency for children in foster care, that interdisciplinary parental representation does not impact child maltreatment rates, interdisciplinary parental representation may save millions of government dollars, that children who entered foster care spent 118 fewer days on average in foster care, and children achieved reunification and guardianship more quickly.

This report discusses the underpinnings of government actions that cause forced or involuntary family separation in the United States along with the intended and unintended consequences from those actions on children.

This study shows that police file more reports of child abuse and neglect in counties with high arrest rates, and that policing helps explain high rates of maltreatment investigations of American Indian–Alaska Native children and families. The spatial and social distribution of policing affects which children and families experience unnecessary child protection interventions and which children who are victims of maltreatment go unnoticed.

Current research shows consistent and frequent visitation between parents and their children in out-of-home care can reduce trauma for children. Partners for Our Children (POC), in close collaboration with (WA State) Children’s Administration, aims to address this by developing a first-of-its-kind parent support program designed to improve the quality of parent-child visits.

This information memorandum provides information on research, best practices, resources and recommendations for providing children and youth in out-of-home care safe, meaningful and high frequency family time that strengthens the family, expedites reunification and improves parent and child well-being outcomes.

Research shows there is a strong connection between family time and safe reunification. Quality family time is a key indicator of earlier, and safer, reunifications. This article highlights practices that can improve the experience and outcomes for the child and family.

This fact sheet seeks to answer questions about the placement of separated children in the custody of ORR in 2017, which resulted in confusion about the federal government’s role and jurisdiction and has raised many questions about the potential relevance of state child welfare laws, including questions about the risk of termination of parental rights (TPR) and adoption for separated children and parents. and clarifies that separated children in ORR custody have not gone through any of the required state procedural and jurisdictional processes for being in a state child welfare system. As a result, the parents of separated children should not be at risk of losing their parental rights under child welfare law and their children should not be eligible for adoption. 

Current research shows consistent and frequent visitation between parents and their children in out-of-home care can reduce trauma for children. Partners for Our Children (POC), in close collaboration with (WA State) Children’s Administration, aims to address this by developing a first-of-its-kind parent support program designed to improve the quality of parent-child visits.

The purpose of this guide is to help parents involved in the criminal justice system work with the child welfare system to stay in touch with their children and stay involved in decisions about their children’s well-being. The guide also includes important information on steps required by the child welfare system for reunification, or having children return home to their family after foster care.

This publication describes the procedure and legal framework for terminating parent-child relationships in the United States.  The authors noted in the introduction:  Termination of parental rights ends the legal parent-child relationship. Once the relationship has been terminated, the child is legally free to be placed for adoption with the objective of securing a more stable, permanent family environment that can meet the child’s long-term parenting needs.

  • Incarceration and CPS Involvement  by Lawrence M. Berger, Maria Cancian, Laura Cuesta, and Jennifer L. Noyes, Fast Focus No. 24-2016, Institute for Research on Poverty (2016)

This brief describes our work using a unique longitudinal data system of linked administrative data from Wisconsin to describe overlap between parental incarceration and
child CPS involvement, and between adolescent CPS involvement and subsequent incarceration in young adulthood.

Competing narratives about incarcerated parents and their children are provided by the Adoption and Safe Families Act (“ASFA”) and the Children of Incarcerated Parents Bill of Rights (“Bill of Rights”). Both the “child-at-risk” narrative of ASFA and the “good mother” narrative of the Bill of Rights are stereotyped and oversimplified and contribute, in opposite ways, to misperceptions about incarcerated parents and their children by suggesting a uniformity of situations and appropriate responses that does not actually exist. The time-driven approach of ASFA—and many state termination of parental rights statutes—is overly rigid, while the Bill of Rights overlooks important differences among families, as well as tensions and trade-offs among policy choices. In actuality, the situations of the parents and children involved vary widely and defy easy analysis and solutions. In this article, the author argues for an individualized, qualitative approach that is nuanced and based on actual information about incarcerated parents and their children, rather than a quantitative, categorical approach based on generalized and simplistic assumptions. The author further suggests that only by recognizing and grappling with the complexities of parental incarceration can we develop sound legal and social policy to meet the needs of these families.

This report consists of an analysis of the strategies and associated outcomes related to efforts to improve the visitation system for children in out-of-home care and was prepared in accordance with the budget proviso in Substitute Senate Bill 5883, §202 (14) (2017).

This brief highlights opportunities to promote early relational health with policy change and investments, including with existing programs, pandemic funding, and pending legislation in Congress.

This page links to a webpage of resources focused on topics such as family separation, system reform, trauma, removals, training materials, and policy reform.

Recognizing that for most families, the reasons for a parent’s incarceration do not negate the child’s need or love for their parent, or their parent’s love or commitment to their child, Casey Family Program drafted this strategy brief outlining considerations (and, in some jurisdictions, requirements) for determining whether and what type of family time is in the child’s best interests, common barriers and strategies to support family time, and other ways (aside from formal visits) that parents can be encouraged and supported in communicating care for their children and remaining involved in their lives.

Studies show that 2–6 percent of all children will at some point be placed in foster homes and other forms of out-of-home care. These children face an increased risk of dying prematurely, using heavy drugs, attempting suicide, and being diagnosed with a range of physical and mental illnesses. However, we have limited knowledge regarding the impact of court-ordered out-of-home placement on these risks. The analysis in this study exploits cases in which children’s placement status can be seen as random, a so-called natural experiment. Specifically, the method utilizes the fact that different judges differ in their inclination to make a certain decision, while chance determines which judge is assigned a particular court case. 

The purpose of this document is to provide Washington State judicial officers and legal professionals with developmentally appropriate guidance for determining visitation (hereafter called Family Time) in dependency cases involving young children, birth to 5 years old.

 

Social Research:

The researchers use data from the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), a nationally representative sample of non-institutionalized children ages 0-17 in the United States, to estimate the association between foster care placement and exposure to an array of adverse childhood experiences. Findings include that children placed in foster care or adopted from foster care, compared to their counterparts, were more likely to experience parental divorce or separation, parental death, parental incarceration, parental abuse, violence exposure, household member mental illness, and household member substance abuse and were also more likely to experience  adverse childhood experiences than children across different thresholds of socioeconomic disadvantage and across different family structures.

Because around 40% of children experience maltreatment (Finkelhor et al. 2013), with harmful outcomes and high social costs and because child protection decisions are complex, potentially biased, and/or prone to errors due to underfunding and overload, the study’s researchers designed a randomized controlled trial to show algorithmic tools sped up decision-making but didn’t significantly change child outcomes. The study’s results are suggestive that risk aversions played a role: high-risk cases flagged by the tool were more likely screened in, while low-risk cases weren’t more likely screened out. Without those aversions, time savings from the tool could enable caseworkers to spend more time directly with families.

The study aims to compare youth in foster care as a result of parental death or youth in foster care as a result of parental incarceration with youth in care because of child maltreatment in terms of the length of time to achieve permanency. Holding all other variables constant, entering care as a result of parental death more than doubled the average time to exit, and these youth were significantly less likely to exit to permanency when compared to children entering care for other maltreatment reasons. Entering care as a result of parental incarceration led to a 24% longer time to exit compared to children entering care for other maltreatment reasons.

This study captures individual-level differences in socioeconomic status and associated risk factors is critical to understanding sources of racial/ethnic differences in CPS reporting, including when there is unwarranted variation or disparate treatment. Our findings suggest an elevated likelihood of maltreatment reporting among privately insured Black infants not explained by differences in observed risk or neighborhood, but no such differences were documented for Black or Hispanic infants on public insurance.

This Article summarizes a presentation to child mental health scientists, child development experts, neuroscientists, and child health practitioners at a 2017 conference entitled “The Developing Brain: New Directions in Science, Policy, and Law.” The authors presented an evidence-based approach to strengthening families, referred to as the “4Rs and 2Ss Family Strengthening Program,” as an option for protecting children and enhancing their overall development.

This study attempted to estimate the cumulative prevalence of confirmed child maltreatment and foster care placement for US children and changes in prevalence between 2011 and 2016. The researchers confirmed child maltreatment and foster care placement continued to be experienced at high rates in the United States in 2012 through 2016, with especially high risks for American Indian/Alaska Native children, but that while rates of foster care have increased, rates of confirmed maltreatment have remained stable.

This research report makes several findings including that there is dramatic variation across states in the risk of experiencing termination of parental rights and there is racial/ethnic inequality in this risk. Overall, the researchers suggest that parental rights termination, which involves the permanent loss of access to children for parents, is far more common than often thought.

Using national child welfare data, the researchers created a longitudinal data set to examine a subset of foster children (7%) who entered care due to parental incarceration. Spanning FY 2005–2017, the dataset allowed them to compare children who entered care due to parental incarceration to children entering for other reasons. Some findings include that the researchers found children of incarcerated parents were younger (median age of 4 vs. 6), more often White (47% vs. 42%), and less often Black (15% vs. 20%) when compared to other foster children. 

While previous studies have focused on the effects of parental deportation on young children, this study uniquely contributes to the literature by exploring how adolescents experience and cope with a forced family separation. Findings include that, after parental deportation, youth experienced symptoms of trauma; that fear of additional family separation; behavioral changes; and that academic disruptions. 

The researchers examined data and demography of children referred to and investigated by CPS agencies. Finding among other things that available data provide no evidence that Black children were overreported relative to observed risks and harms reflected in non-CPS data and that reducing reporting rates among Black children will require addressing broader conditions associated with maltreatment. 

Acknowledging that trauma experienced by children who come to the attention of a child protection agency may have experienced prolonged stress, which can have lifelong consequences for the child’s physical and mental health, the authors center protecting children from these effects as a critical factor in a government’s agency’s decision about whether to remove a child or support the family in keeping him or her safely at home.

This article examines the intersection of experiences of childhood mistreatment and later incarceration. The authors note that violence inflicted on people as children usually receives attention only when they commit truly gruesome acts not necessarily when they are convicted of dealing drugs, committing robbery, or even engaging in domestic violence, and that structural racism, poverty, and sexism shape both (1) inequities in incarceration and maltreatment, and (2) responses to them.

The researchers of this study analyzed 15 sociodemographic factors commonly associated with child maltreatment and child welfare system contact in 44 countries.  The researchers noted several trends including that: data are much more available on late-stage system contact (e.g., foster care caseloads) than for early-stage system contact (e.g., investigations); that while early-stage contact tended to be on the rise in most countries, late-stage contact was stable or declining; and that they found little evidence for universal drivers of foster care caseloads across the Global North.