In 2024 Michigan jurors convicted the parents of Ethan Crumbley of involuntary manslaughter, determining that they could have done more to prevent their teenage son from killing four of his fellow students. At the parents’ sentencing, the judge said that “these convictions confirm repeated acts, or lack of acts, that could have halted an oncoming runaway train.” If we can hold parents liable for their children’s violence, shouldn’t we hold governments accountable if children who have spent years in foster care commit such acts?
This is the question Claudia Rowe seeks to answer in “Wards of the State,” which offers moving profiles of former foster youth whose acts have landed them in prison. Ms. Rowe, a journalist, suggests that our child-welfare system is at least in part, even mostly, to blame for their crimes.
There is no doubt that those who spend time in foster care are less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to use drugs, to be homeless or to commit crimes. One of Ms. Rowe’s subjects, Art Longworth, served 37 years for aggravated murder committed after years of being beaten by his parents and abused in group homes. As a teenager, he was rarely in school and often on the run. Of former foster youth who are incarcerated, he tells Ms. Rowe: “It wasn’t their badness that put them here. It was a systemic thing.”
But was it? At the beginning of “Wards of the State,” Ms. Rowe asks a question that many journalists and academics avoid: “Did foster care actually cause these outcomes?” If children have been abused or neglected for years and are then placed by the state with another family or in a residential institution, how do we know what caused them to be angry or disturbed or violent? Was it foster care or what came before it?
Ms. Rowe hangs her argument on a 2008 study in which Joseph Doyle, an MIT economist, compared maltreatment cases overseen by strict investigators—who were more likely to remove children—with those overseen by more lenient investigators. The children who weren’t removed from their homes served as a sort of control group. Mr. Doyle found that those placed in foster care were three times more likely to end up in prison. As one law professor described it, child welfare is “a pipeline funneling kids directly into juvenile detention halls.”
In 2022, though, researchers ran a similar study looking at 120,000 child-welfare investigations of children ages 6 to 16. Jason Baron, of Duke University, and Max Gross, of Mathematica, found that time in foster care reduced the likelihood of criminal involvement by 25 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of conviction by 28 percentage points. These declines were accompanied by a 14-percentage-point reduction in violent crime. Foster care, the authors found, was more effective than almost any early-intervention effort currently employed to prevent youth violence.
Why did this second study produce such different results? The answer points to another problem with Ms. Rowe’s analysis. “Surely,” she writes, “foster care had changed since Longworth’s tour through the system in the late-1970s.” But no, she concludes: Foster children in jail today have simply “joined the long line of kids trudging from one system into the other.”
In fact, the system has changed. There were almost 500,000 American children in foster care in 2007, compared to fewer than 370,000 in 2022. This results not from reducing child abuse or neglect—in fact, the number of child-maltreatment fatalities has been growing recently—but from leaving more kids in abusive and neglectful homes for longer periods of time. Doing so has resulted in a population of children in foster care that has experienced more years of trauma at home, which leads to more behavioral problems.
The fact that Ms. Rowe does not discuss the more recent study suggests either carelessness or, more likely, that her policy suggestions come from a very narrow swath of activists. For instance, she repeats the narrative that “the focus of child welfare” should be on the “small subset of kids who are being outright abused” rather than those who are only “hungry, cold, or homeless.” She cites statistics showing that most children in foster care are removed from their families because of neglect. But “neglect” is rarely a matter simply of poverty: Most of the parents of these children are dealing with chronic substance abuse or severe mental illness and are unable or unwilling to care for their children.
If the question that should guide public-welfare policy is “compared to what?” then we must ask what Ms. Rowe suggests instead of foster care. There are moments of clarity in “Wards of the State.” “If I’d had parents—good parents,” Maryanne, who committed murder at 16, muses when thinking about how things could have turned out differently. To which Ms. Rowe adds, “or if she’d been taken into foster care younger, as a baby.” Instead, her father kept her out of school for years; neighbors called police about the screaming they heard and “passed food to her through a bedroom window because Maryanne was locked inside, alone and hungry.”
Ms. Rowe offers glimpses of good foster parents and even good residential facilities—the youth detention place where Maryanne was sent actually rehabilitated her. The truth is, though, that few foster parents can handle children who need around-the-clock supervision, and we have shut down many residential facilities—some of which were good and might have been able to help—because a small subset of them were bad. There is no doubt that the child-welfare system is failing children every day, but at least one reason for that comes from our desperate attempts to keep them out of it.
