Reconsidering Reentry: Impact of Multiple System Involvement on Child Welfare Reentries

Background and Purpose:  Concerns about reentry rates of children in foster care have been a continuous subject of discussion at all levels of child welfare practice and research for over three decades.  Traditionally, reentries have been conceptualized as the re-placement of children back into the child welfare system after they returned home from out-of-home care.  These reentries represent an additional trauma faced by children and families which might have been avoided during the initial out-of-home episode.  However, this conceptualization of reentry fails to consider the possibility that a child might not return to the child welfare system but instead move into a different child-serving system, such as juvenile justice.  This possibility is considered by the current research study.    

Method: All analyses are based on administrative records for children who exited state supervised out-of-home care in the child welfare system to reunification between July 1, 2008 and June 30, 2012.  The sample was limited to those children between the ages of 7 and 16 years at exit (n=2,259), thereby excluding children who were too young to enter the juvenile justice system.  Data elements include demographics (i.e., gender, race, dates of birth), placement information (i.e., type and dates of placements), and other information regarding children’s child welfare histories (e.g., whether child behavior was a factor at removal), along with children’s juvenile justice histories (i.e., juvenile justice experience prior to and following removal).  Children were followed for eighteen months post-reunification to find any instances of reentry into the child welfare system or movement into the juvenile justice system.  Analyses examine reentries into the child welfare system alone (n=404; 17.9%) or into either the child welfare system or the juvenile justice system (n=547; 24.2%). 

Results:  The data analytics suggested that there were ten significant predictors of reentry in the analyses and these predictors were significant for both child welfare reentries alone and when movement into the juvenile justice system was also considered as a reentry.  The strongest predictors for the child welfare only analysis included: having siblings in care (OR=3.01); ever placed in residential care (OR=1.91) and having a court ordered return home against agency recommendation (OR=1.88).  The strongest predictors for the child welfare/juvenile justice analysis included: having prior juvenile justice complaint (OR=4.14); having siblings in care (OR=3.01); and having a court ordered return home against agency recommendation (OR=1.88). 

Conclusion and Implications:  Extending the concept of reentry beyond only the child welfare system to include movement into the juvenile justice system increases the reentry rate from 17.9% to 24.2%.  While there were similar risk (and protective) factors found for both groups, the overall strength of the covariates varied depending on how reentry was defined.  Since both groups share similar risks, and because the child welfare system may continue to serve these children and their families even after they have become involved with another system, the overall concept of reentry needs to be reexamined and expanded to account for children who move into other child-serving systems.