Criminalization Risks & Incarceration Rates of Black Girls Aging Out of Foster Care
- NBWJI
- Jul 15
- 3 min read
"Aging out” means youth reach the legal age of adulthood and transition out of the care of foster care.
When children are placed in foster care, it exposes them to conditions and risks that make them more susceptible to experiencing various poor outcomes as adults, including but not limited to physical and mental health issues, homelessness, unemployment, and coming into contact with law enforcement and risk of incarceration.
On any given day, more than 360,000 of our most vulnerable children are in foster care, and Black children are overrepresented among them. Black girls make up 23% of girls in foster care while only making up 13% of girls in the general population. This means that the negative impacts of being placed in foster care, including risk of incarceration, has an outsized impact on Black girls.
To get a clearer look at this, the National Black Women’s Justice Institute analyzed data from the National Youth in Transition Database, which tracks outcomes for youth who have aged out of foster care. This analysis, broken down by race & ethnicity and age, shows the cumulative rate that girls who have aged out of foster care reported having been incarcerated at least once up to age 21.
Black girls in foster care face risks of criminalization
Being in the foster care system exposes girls to conditions and risks that make them more susceptible to coming into contact with law enforcement.
Instability: Youth in foster care may experience many disruptions to their daily life, including changing foster care placements, changing schools, family separation, living with strangers, and leaving behind friends and caring adults. Without stability and social connections, the risk is greater that children in foster care may turn to survival strategies and trauma-coping behaviors, such as substance use, truancy, or running away from foster homes, which can lead to contact with law enforcement and the juvenile-legal system.
School discipline: Children in foster care experience school discipline at disproportionately higher rates than children not in foster care. Punitive school discipline—such as suspensions, expulsions, or referrals to law enforcement— weakens students’ connection with school and is associated with poor student achievement and a failure to complete school. These students are then at risk of coming into contact with the juvenile and criminal legal systems. Our previous analysis of school discipline shows that Black girls are overrepresented across all discipline sanctions, including referrals to law enforcement and arrests. This means Black girls in foster care are particularly vulnerable to school pushout and criminalization.
Unmet mental health needs: Many foster youth have mental health needs: they are 2 to 4 times more likely to experience mental health disorders at some point in their lifetime compared to youth in the general population. Yet there is often a lack of culturally competent mental health services tailored to address the specific needs of Black girls. When these needs go unmet, it can make it difficult to cope with parts of daily life. This can ultimately lead to poor performance in school, job loss, homelessness, and more. This can make people more vulnerable to victimization and contact with the criminal legal system.
Through our factsheet and analysis, we aim to better understand the factors that put Black girls in foster care at risk of criminalization. With this, we aim to support the development of evidence-informed, healing-centered solutions, interrupt the foster-care-to-prison pipeline, and ensure that Black girls and all foster youth receive the safety and support they deserve.