Single parents lose children to foster care because they can't post $500 bail

When a single parent is arrested and cannot post bail, their children may be placed into foster care if there is no family member available to take custody. More than 40% of children with incarcerated mothers are placed into foster care. An incarcerated parent can lose all legal parental rights in as little as 15 months under the Adoption and Safe Families Act, which requires states to file termination-of-parental-rights petitions for children who have been in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months. This means a parent who is detained pretrial for a misdemeanor, who is ultimately found not guilty, could permanently lose their children during the pretrial period. An estimated 4.9 million children in the US have lived with a parent who served time. Black children (12%) and American Indian/Alaska Native children (16%) are affected at two to three times the rate of white children (6%). Children placed in foster care due to parental incarceration face devastating downstream effects: over 50% will have an encounter with the juvenile legal system by age 17, and 25% will be involved with the criminal legal system within two years of leaving foster care. The bail system is creating a generational pipeline from pretrial detention to foster care to juvenile incarceration. This persists because family courts and criminal courts operate as completely separate systems with no coordination. No judge setting bail is required to ask whether the defendant is a primary caregiver, and no mechanism exists to factor childcare responsibilities into bail decisions.