Vera Institute of Justice

Overview

Children in foster care who are arrested for delinquent acts are more likely than other children to be sent to juvenile detention to await their trials, even when they are charged with the same type of crime as their nonfoster peers. The results can be damaging for the children and expensive for taxpayers. For the first time anywhere, this report quantifies the foster care bias in detention decisions and shows that a relatively simple intervention can eliminate it for juveniles facing low-level offenses and with no prior records. The report also identifies obstacles to eliminating these disparities in more serious cases.