Kansas kids need stability and adequate mental healthcare, not detention

Kansas understands when we lock kids up, we lock them out. That’s why, in 2016, Kansas passed sweeping reforms that invest in evidence-based programs to keep kids in their communities and out of detention.

While juvenile justice reforms are resulting in better outcomes for Kansas kids and families, the foster care system remains in crisis. As work to improve the child welfare system continues, we must focus on what’s best for our state’s kids. And that’s not pitting one system against another.

According to a recent KCUR article, foster care contractors and some parents say juvenile justice reforms contributed to the foster care crisis by “[removing] options for dealing with foster children who have high needs and violent behaviors.” One contractor’s employee noted “the juvenile justice system no longer serves as a safety net.”

The juvenile justice system is not and should never be considered a safety net.

Prior to juvenile justice reform, Kansas over-relied on incarceration and placing kids with high behavioral health needs in Kansas Department of Corrections custody when it didn’t know what else to do with them. Prior to the reforms, these were the options available to the system and could not be further from a safety net. Reform brought an end to these harmful, ineffective practices.

For months, state agencies, contractors, and other stakeholders have been studying the interactions between child welfare and juvenile justice and still have not found data to support the claim that juvenile justice reforms directly impacted the foster care system’s crisis.

Issues with Kansas’s child welfare system predate juvenile justice reform with the number of kids in care beginning to rise dramatically in January 2012. Academic research has also found a causal link between Kansas’s cuts to family supports and the drastic increase in children in care. Foster youth often experience dangerous placement instability and inadequate access to mental health resources, further traumatizing them.

The impacts of this broken system are felt by children in care as well as social workers. But undoing the progress of juvenile justice reform will only hurt more kids and families.

Jonathan Stahl, an Olathe foster parent featured in the article, notes “the solution isn’t hanging the threat of jail over the children’s heads…Stahl thinks providing children with adequate mental health care and a loving, stable home is the best solution, one that most children in the foster care system aren’t getting right now.”

We’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again and again: The conversation we must have about our failing foster care system is one that should value every child in care, reinvest in Kansas families, refuse to scapegoat children with trauma and high needs, and focus on the systemic issues holding back progress.