Making war on the poor? An empirical analysis of the families who become involved with Illinois' welfare system, child protection system, and juvenile justice system

This dissertation tests whether families experienced increased hardship in the years following the recent overhaul of the Illinois child welfare system. Each reform, embodied in the Illinois Juvenile Justice Reform Act of 1998 and the state's analogs to the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, attempts to promote the welfare of children and their families. Further, each law is based upon the assumption that the most effective means to improve the well-being of participants is to facilitate their disengagement from the state. The principle that motivates this reform philosophy is that state services provide little help to families, and may instead harm them. Thus, programs that encourage separation from the state, such as welfare system's use of time-limits, are expected to improve families' well-being. However, critics of the child welfare laws argue that the reformed programs focus too narrowly on immediate behavioral change and, as a result, may hurt the very families they were designed to help. Using data from the Illinois Families Study ( n = 1,135), I empirically test this assertion. Specifically, I examine the extent to which the child welfare reforms have had a detrimental impact on poor families in Illinois. Since the families involved with all three child welfare systems likely experience greater burdens than individuals in any single system, I examine the cumulative and combinative impact of the reforms. In particular, I test the hypothesis that the more contact a family has with the child welfare arena, the more hardship they will endure. My results indicate that families with multiple child welfare contacts are significantly more likely than less involved families to experience hardship. Because the child welfare reforms are predicated on the belief that legal change can effect social change, I also use administrative data from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services Integrated Database to assess whether the Illinois child protection reforms were effective in reducing the number of children in foster care. I find that the Illinois foster care population declined significantly as a result of the reforms.