Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Foster Care Privatization: How An Increasingly Popular Public Policy Leads To Increased Levels Of Abuse And Neglect, Mandi Eatough

Sigma: Journal of Political and International Studies

Foster care in the U.S. is largely influenced by federal and state legislation. Since 1996, legislation establishing privatized foster care has become increasingly popular (Lee 2008). As levels of privatization increase nationwide, it is important to understand the impact this has on the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of children around the country. The movement toward privatizing foster care is generally attributed to the improvement in economic efficiency of case management by contracted child placement agencies (Hansen and Hansen 2006). However, the economic benefit afforded to states by privatizing foster care has been considered independently from the quality of …