Racial Discrimination in Child Protection / E. Jason Baron, Joseph J. Doyle Jr., Natalia Emanuel, Peter Hull, Joseph P. Ryan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Baron, E. Jason.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Doyle, Joseph J, Jr.

Emanuel, Natalia.

Hull, Peter.

Ryan, Joseph P.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w31490.

NBER working paper series no. w31490

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2023.

Summary:

Ten percent of Black children in the U.S. spend time in foster care--twice the rate of white children. We estimate unwarranted disparities in foster care placement decisions, adjusting for differences in the potential for future maltreatment by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of cases to investigators. Using a sample of nearly 220,000 maltreatment investigations, we find that Black children are 1.7 percentage points (50%) more likely to be placed into foster care following an investigation than white children conditional on subsequent maltreatment potential. This disparity is entirely driven by white investigators and by cases where maltreatment potential is present, in which Black children are twice as likely to be placed as white children (12% vs. 6%). These results suggest white children may be harmed by "under-placement" in high-risk situations via the leniency that white investigators afford to white parents. Leveraging the additional quasi-random assignment of hotline call screeners, we find that both screeners and investigators are responsible for unwarranted disparities in placement, with investigators amplifying the disparity for cases with subsequent maltreatment potential and mitigating it for lower-risk cases. This finding highlights the importance of "systems-based" analyses of inequity in high-stakes decisions, where discrimination can compound across multiple decision-makers.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2023.