(WITHDRAWN) Maternal Incarceration and Contact with the Child Welfare System

Background: Rates of maternal incarceration have grown in recent years amidst increases in women’s incarceration. As the number of families experiencing maternal incarceration continues to rise, more research is needed to advance scholars’ and policymakers’ understanding of the consequences of maternal incarceration for parents and their children. One outcome of maternal incarceration that has been less studied is family contact with the child welfare system. Given that mothers are more often children’s primary caretakers prior to incarceration, researchers have posited that children are more likely to experience a change in living arrangements when mothers become incarcerated, making them more vulnerable to contact with the child welfare system. This paper builds on previous studies of the intersection between the criminal legal and child welfare systems by leveraging longitudinal survey data to estimate the risks of coming into contact with the child welfare system when maternal incarceration occurs.

Methods: I use data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing (FFCW) Study to answer the question: is the incidence of maternal incarceration associated with a higher risk of contact with the child welfare system? I utilize survey data from follow-up data collection when children were five, nine, and 15 years of age. I estimate fixed effects logistic regression models to estimate the odds of child welfare system contact when families experience maternal incarnation. While fixed effects models control for all time-invariant characteristics of mothers and families, I control for time-variant measures of mothers’ income-poverty ratio, age, marital status, education level, substance use, and children’s primary caregiver. Both maternal incarceration and family contact with the child welfare system are measured as occurring at the point of survey or in the intervening years between data collection.

Results: Fixed effects regression results indicate that when families experience maternal incarceration, the odds of coming into contact with the child welfare system increase by over 170%, net of the effects of other time-varying covariates (p<.001). Time-varying covariates were generally not significant with the exception of maternal age, where each additional year of age was associated with 5% lower odds of contact with the child welfare system (p<.001).

Conclusions and Implications: Findings of disparate risk of coming into contact with the child welfare system when maternal incarceration occurs suggest that the child welfare and criminal legal systems are linked and often operate jointly as a part of a larger carceral regime in the United States for incarcerated mothers and their children. These results also suggest that contact with the child welfare system may operate as a possible mechanism for more negative outcomes among children of incarcerated mothers. Overall, study findings highlight the need for more attention to the needs of incarcerated mothers and their children who are often penalized and separated by multiple systems within a larger carceral state.